Razzle-Dazzle!

Linda Nyland, Courtesy Frieze Art Fair

Jake and Dinos Chapman sign pound notes in the White Cube booth at Frieze 2007.

Jake and Dinos Chapman Tony Oursler Maurizio Cattelan Jenny Holzer Rirkrit Tiravanija Martin Creed Rob Pruitt Urs Fischer

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It’s commonplace for money to change hands at art fairs, but a year ago at London’s Frieze, in a spectacle no visitor could have missed, artists were busy battling to see who could riff most cleverly on the idea of art transactions. The mood was somewhere between vaudeville and high art: In one corner, the British prankster brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, parked at the booth of the London gallery White Cube, scribbled cartoon figures on pound notes handed to them by a long line of collectors. Across the aisle, the puckish American Rob Pruitt scrawled a sign for the booth of his dealer, Gavin Brown: “Rob Pruitt will draw on your money too.”

Booths that attract crowds through sheer showmanship are becoming a more frequent sight at art fairs. With new collectors entering the market and seasoned ones continuing to stroll the aisles, booths no longer function simply as galleries’ portable storefronts. For many dealers it’s now more important to make a strong, identity-defining statement than it is to make a profit. Collectors aren’t the only audience they want to impress, either. Artists themselves increasingly attend fairs, and a good show might persuade them to join a dealer’s roster. Further, because the selection committees at the top fairs often favor booths that demonstrate curatorial daring, the pressure is mounting for galleries to make a splash instead of a sale.

Buzz and publicity are certainly benefits of these displays, but some of the best practitioners of this new art form claim those are not their primary goals. The New York dealer Casey Kaplan has asked a friend, the London-based reporter and broadcaster Tim Blanks, to conduct interviews in a specially walled-off lounge in his booth at this month’s Frieze (October 16–19). Blanks will use a digital voice recorder to quiz fairgoers about their experience, and the interviews will eventually be published in a book. “This definitely isn’t a PR move for me,” says Kaplan. “It’s a way of keeping me engaged and interested in doing fairs.” But he concedes that as a practical matter, dealers have to do everything they can to “draw more attention to ourselves in this sea of endless stands.”

In many ways, the five-year-old Frieze—named after the edgy art magazine—has been a pioneer in booth bravado. “Galleries have so few opportunities to communicate market identity. There are your invites, your advertisements, your Web site—and fairs,” says Frieze’s co-director Amanda Sharp. She is interested in seeing dealers “thinking hard about what degree of risk they can take—and striking a balance between the curatorial and the commercial.” The catalyst for this trend at Frieze may have been the unforgettable Tino Sehgal performance piece in which children posed as art dealers. The work debuted in 2003 at the booth of the Wrong Gallery, the noncommercial enterprise founded by the curators Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnik and the artist Maurizio Cattelan. “We set out to do everything you don’t do at fairs,” says Gioni. “Galleries usually have objects and projects. We decided to have people.”

Easy for a nonprofit showman to say. But even commercial galleries are embracing unconventional approaches to the sometimes stifling convention-center booth. Case in point: In addition to his jokey imitation of the Chapmans, Pruitt curated a “fl ea market” in Brown’s booth last year. It was stocked with trinkets by artists—Jenny Holzer pencils , TV remote controls by Tony Oursler—that were arranged on cheap folding tables, many of them priced at just a few pounds. Brown offered no blue-chip wares an approach that flies in the face of the traditional art-fair ethos: Dealers bring high-priced pieces to sell, thereby covering the high cost of the booth and, if they’re lucky, pulling a profit. In contrast, Brown describes Pruitt’s installation as a “loss leader.”

On the most obvious level, Brown was investing in his gallery’s reputation—building a brand (a word he and most dealers find horrifying) that would presumably bring in collectors down the road. But there was more to it than that. Six months after Frieze, Brown participated in a panel discussion at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, sponsored by the Art Dealers Association of American, during which he said, “To me, museums are becoming increasingly irrelevant. And art fairs, extraordinarily enough, are becoming relevant. I think they are stuck in a trade-fair template, but they could become the most interesting exhibitions of our times.”