Armory Week: A Fair Conversation with Sean Kelly

NEW YORK—Chelsea-based Brit Sean Kelly is one of the best-known characters on the New York art scene. Over the past few years he has been a real Armory Show stalwart. So, now that the fair is well under way, I sat down with him in his booth—surrounded by pieces by Marina Abramovic, Rebecca Horn, Antony Gormley and Gavin Turk—and asked him for his impressions of this year’s fair so far.

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Sean, how has this Armory Show been for your gallery so far?

It’s been excellent. It’s been really outstanding. I think that the new venue has worked very well. I think it’s far superior to having it on the two piers. I think that the organizers have done a really good job of getting themselves into a new facility in very short order and making it work. From our point of view as exhibitors it’s been fairly seamless.

And do you think the coinciding of the Armory and Art Show is working?

At the moment, über-contemporary is where everybody’s energy is, and what we’re hearing is that this fair has attracted such an enormous audience that it’s quiet uptown. I’m not sure that that’s a good thing. But maybe [the Art Show dealers] would tell you that they do all their business in the first two hours and it really doesn’t matter. I don’t know. But certainly, if I was sitting in an art fair and not getting the kind of audience that this fair is getting and that fair deserves, I’d be frustrated, because there’s nothing worse than sitting in an art fair bored. It’s tiresome.

You haven’t had a chance to get bored here, though.

At 2 p.m. on Saturday, we were told that there was a two-and-a-half-hour wait to get in, and I think that’s an amazing success story. It’s a success story for the art world and for contemporary art, and it’s a success story for New York, and it’s certainly a success story for The Armory Show. Everybody asks, “But is it people just looking?” and the answer is, “No, they’re buying.” We’ve sold things today. It’s Sunday. It’s usually characterized as “stroller day,” but it’s not; we’re doing business.

You’re a big fair enthusiast anyway, aren’t you?

Actually, I’m not. My partner, Cecile [Panzieri], is a fair enthusiast, and when we started working together eight years ago, I’d never done an art fair before, and one of her conditions was that she wanted to do art fairs, because she’d done them for years. And she was absolutely correct. They’ve been very successful for us.

But on the other hand, I have to tell you I’m a great fan of this fair. I’ve been a very big proponent of this fair, because I think that New York needs a fair, and I think it’s been successful. We do an awful lot of business that we wouldn’t do if we just sat in the gallery. It’s been great for us. But I’m also a huge fan of Basel. If Sam Keller did a fair on the moon, I’d be the first person to sign up for it, because our experience of what Basel does is just extraordinary.

Your gallery always shows very serious, process-oriented work. It must be difficult to present artists like Marina Abramovic and Rebecca Horn to a fair like this.

To make a context for that kind of work in this kind of environment is particularly challenging. Without blowing one’s own horn, I think that we work very hard at our booths, and we try very much to make the booths look as though they’re curated. I think that if we’re successful, then we’re successful in that regard. There are other booths that are outstanding, and they really look great. I always enjoy walking into one of Matthew Marks’s booths because you know that there’s a curatorial mind at work. I want our booths to look like that.

I don’t want to come to an art fair and just look like I’m trying to sell art, because that’s not what we do. To me, most of the work that I do is done before I get to the fair, because it’s about getting the right piece from the artists and making the booth work as a homogenous entity. I think that that communicates to collectors.