The importance of fairs to the bottom line is at the center of an ongoing controversy within the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). This year 115 of the 170 member galleries applied to the Art Show, held annually in February, but the Park Avenue Armory, its longtime venue in Manhattan, can hold only 70. The ADAA’s policy states that any member gallery not included in the fair for two years in a row must be in the following one, but some feel this doesn’t go far enough. With a membership organization, “the best fair” would be one that allows everyone to participate every year, says Lawrence DiCarlo, whose New York gallery, Fischbach, was rejected for the 2008 fair but had participated in previous editions. Members recently voted against compulsory rotation by a narrow margin. The ADAA has been considering other strategies (see “Show and Tell”). “We are trying our best to serve our membership and we are investigating every possible way to do that,” says the ADAA’s president, Roland Augustine, of the New York gallery Luhring Augustine.

One result of the increasingly heated and high-stakes struggle for fair inclusion is increased scrutiny of—and pressure on—selection committees. While these committees consider many factors—the one for Basel makes the rounds of the fair every morning to take photographs of booths—much of the decision process is somewhat arbitrary and subjective. Dealers in the main section of Basel are chosen for their programs. A current Basel selector, David Juda, the director of London’s Annely Juda Fine Art, says he looks for “quality and uniqueness” and acknowledges that such judgments are “subjective.” For her part, the New York Latin American art dealer Mary-Anne Martin, a member of the current ABMB selection committee, notes that many deserving galleries do not get in because there is just not enough room. “It’s like getting into Harvard,” Martin says.

All this makes the committees’ closed-door decisions tougher. The process has turned cutthroat and, say some, cliquey. “I sat on the Art Chicago selection committee for years, and felt like a good citizen,” says the veteran London and New York dealer Bernard Jacobson. But now, he says, being a committee member “is a different game. It’s more like letting your friends into a club.”

Those who complain about art-fair politics, however, may be referring to the relatively unchanging makeup of these committees. Members may not have the life terms of Supreme Court justices, but they tend to stay on for long periods—something fair organizers say is needed to ensure quality and stability. Art Basel has no set maximum on committee tenure; selectors usually remain for a “recommended term of 5 to 10 years,” says the former Basel artistic director, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz. Frieze has no strict cutoff points either. It aims to refresh its seven-member team by adding one new face each year. Still, co-director Amanda Sharp explains, “we do not bring someone in and say, ‘You have a five-year term.’ We say, ‘You have a minimum of a two-year term.’ ” The Armory Show is exceptional in having a relatively high turnover. For the show’s first two editions, its dealer-founders, Colin de Land, Pat Hearn, Matthew Marks and Paul Morris, made the admissions decisions, but since the 2001 introduction of a five-member selection committee (expanded to six members in 2002), two- or three-year stints have been the norm.

Adding to the perception of clubbiness, the process for choosing people to serve on the committees tends to be just as subjective as the selection of exhibitors. At the Armory, for example, when a selector retires, he or she may be asked for a list of possible successors, as are the remaining committee members, who vote on the combined roster.

Clubbiness isn’t always the issue, though. Reflecting on his recent rejection, James Cohan points to the absence of Americans on the Art Basel committee. Although galleries from the U.S. have a strong presence at Basel, it is historically a European fair. The Zurich dealer Victor Gisler, who has been on the committee for 10 years, recalls that around the time he joined, it was pushing to integrate more U.S. galleries while reassuring nervous European dealers who represented American artists and were concerned about the competition. Indeed, the number of international galleries in the fair has increased substantially in recent years.