Photo by David Willems

Katelijne de Backer, the Armory Show's Executive Director.

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Belgian by birth, de Backer studied sociology at the Free University of Brussels and worked as a producer for MTV Europe for nine years before joining the Armory Show as its assistant director in 1999, the year the show began. Within a year she was promoted to director, and under her direction the fair has grown exponentially: In 1999 it attracted 8,000 visitors; last year that figure was 52,000 (with $85 million in sales). With the aid of this year’s selection committee – gallerists Ciléne Andréhn (Stockholm), Olivier Antoine (Paris), Matthias Arndt (Berlin), Marc Foxx (Los Angeles), Anton Kern (New York), and Stuart Shave (London) – de Backer has whittled down the 600 galleries and nonprofits who applied to participate in the fair to 160 from 21 different countries. Obviously the lead-up to the fair is an extremely busy time for de Backer, but ARTINFO managed to sit down with her for a cup of coffee (black). We started by asking her about the current economic climate.

Katelijne, there’s been a lot of turmoil in the world financial markets lately. How is that going to affect business at the Armory Show?

I don’t know. If there’s going to be an effect, I think it will be a nice adjustment to the craziness that the art market has been experiencing over the past few years. I started working for the fair in 2000, and every year since people have said that the bubble is about to burst. Maybe this will take some of the air out of the bubble, rather than have it burst.

Everything in the art world, and not only prices, seems to get bigger all the time. This is the tenth Armory Show. I presume it’s also the biggest?

No, it isn’t. For the past four years we’ve kept it to about 150 galleries. This year there are actually 160. In 2004, we had 189, which we felt was too many. The booths had to be smaller, and the whole thing was just too cluttered.

Is it an advantage or a disadvantage to have your fair in New York City?

An advantage. We actually use New York to make our fair successful. We have our little fair but we have the center of the art world all around us: the best institutions, the best galleries, collectors and artists live here. Chelsea itself is like another big fair. Over the years I’ve come to feel that our job is to connect the dots: to create a network with museums and collectors and galleries so that people who come to New York to visit the Armory Show have the best opportunities that they can.

I don’t want to make comparisons with Miami, but I’m going to anyway: Miami is not like New York. In Miami the fair arrives, and the whole city changes, and then the fair goes away and it’s back to normal.

So you don’t agree with the criticism that all of the big fairs are the same?

No. I visit many fairs, and I admit you do see the core collectors – it’s almost as though they travel together on a little plane – but then you have the locals, which makes each fair completely different. At the Armory Show, for example, you see so many art students and art teachers who live here and want to get the benefit of being in New York City.

The galleries tell me that they actually bring different sorts of art to the different fairs, because the audiences are so different. New York has a more intellectual audience, real art people.

How do you see the relationship between art fairs and other arts institutions like the museums and biennials?

I think that commerce and museums work really well together. Artists are very touchy about people seeing art as commerce, but the biennials and the fairs feed into each other. You can go to the Whitney Biennial, see what they’ve selected, see what is happening in the art world – and then you can come to the fair and actually buy it.

I do feel that, for good or bad, we allow people to see what is going on in the art world even better than the museums do. This Whitney Biennial in particular is a very striking show, but it’s also very limited. They have 81 artists, whereas we have 2,000. The Biennial is making a very specific statement, whereas the Armory Show gives a much more rounded view.

You don’t accept the criticism that the Armory Show is just one big marketplace?

No. There is a bigger reason for doing this fair: to show art. Dealers are going to sell the work of artists that they represent to collectors and museums. But we also provide an opportunity for the general public – who is not a buying public – to see what is happening in art. We are using the dealers and the collectors and the money changing hands to make art more important. Last year we had lines of people from the entrance on the pier to 62nd Street and when they were told it was going to be a two-hour wait, they said “OK, we’ll wait.” These weren’t the people who were going to buy any art; these were people who were interested in art. In the past, art was a very elitist thing, where the serious collector bought art and it wasn’t ever seen outside of the art world. Now it’s much more open, and I think that art fairs are the reason for that.

Also, although the Armory Show runs on commerce, the galleries don’t necessarily expect everything that they show to sell. A lot of the commerce actually happens after the fair closes, and a lot of galleries take advantage of that to show really provocative work. It’s almost like couture fashion: they’re not necessarily presenting what they think collectors are going to pick, they’re presenting what they want their gallery to stand for.