For Noah Pearsall Lang of Electric Works, coming to fairs is less about the profit and prestige, and more about the unexpected. “It’s all about the things you don’t know about beforehand,” he said. He cited a proposal from a person affiliated with the North Korean government who wanted to organize a show of his country’s art in the U.S., the sort of union Lang had never expected to see when he signed up for the fair.

Bridge London is the first outing for plenty of the galleries present, and many others were exhibiting internationally for the first time. But even fair veterans shared in the generally enthusiastic mood. Jurgen Kalthoff, who participated in Scope London last year, said of that fair: “It was terrible, no one came.” He said he could already tell that there were more people at Bridge.

As Ryan Schulz of NavtaSchulz of Chicago, a veteran of Bridge fairs in Chicago and Miami, said, “The thing I like about Bridge is that they introduce a lot of good galleries to the international market. People do their rooms well. They’re good, clean, and consistent.”

If collector traffic didn’t appear to be especially high on opening day, the galleries didn’t seem fazed, perhaps because for many, profit was not the primary motive. More often than not, it seemed that galleries were there to make connections and introduce their artists, many of whom had never shown outside of their galleries’ home countries. Kim Hoffman of Chicago-based Allegoric put it best: “The first fair is for the artists and to get out there. We’re not looking to make a bundle. We just want to break even.”

And hopefully they will. As I was leaving, at 4 pm, when the public opening had just begun, the crowds, who perhaps had been at other satellite fairs earlier in the day, finally began to arrive.