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.”

Brown has developed a reputation as a P. T. Barnum for the fair-going set. At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2006, he brashly installed a single work in his large corner booth. Nach Jugendstiel kam Roccoko, 2006, by Urs Fischer, was composed of a crumpled cigarette pack dangling from a line of fishing wire attached to an inconspicuous mechanized apparatus high above the floor; the pack seemed to dance around the space. Brown’s stand was a magnet, drawing so many gawkers on the fair’s opening night that it nearly out-VIP’d the VIP lounge. Simon de Pury, who heads the auction house Phillips de Pury & Co., dubbed it the “most radical stand I’ve ever seen at an art fair.”

“It was a kind of cocky thing to do, but in the end it used its context to create—unexpectedly—some quite beautiful poetry,” Brown says of Fischer’s work. “The art fairs have become more public events. Now they are hybrids of a trade fair, an exhibition and a biennial. I think you are wasting an opportunity if you just put up some things from your stockroom.”

As it turns out, installing the dancing pack paid off in traditional ways, too. The New York–based collector Adam Lindemann bought one of the edition of three, calling the work a “masterpiece” and a “conceptual tour de force.” François Pinault, the owner of Christie’s, also purchased one and installed it in the Palazzo Grassi, his private museum in Venice.

But Brown has competition at the top of this game. For example, at Basel in 2005, the Berlin gallery Neugerriemschneider installed a doozy of a piece by the conceptual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija: He bricked up the entrance to an empty booth, and the dealers stayed home in Germany. The gallery’s co-director Tim Neuger says that Tiravanija’s work wasn’t created for Basel. An earlier version had been shown at Neugerriemschneider and then at the Tate as bricked-up doorways. “Many people try to fish for compliments and make a spectacle,” he says. “This wasn’t about that. It was an artist making a statement. That was the most liberating booth we ever did. We didn’t sell one work. We wanted to prove that it’s great to be at fairs, but you don’t need to do it to survive.”

For several years now, the New York dealer Jeffrey Deitch—who remains the premier impresario of all things downtown and bohemian even as he goes on making major secondary-market deals—has been taking full advantage of the platform that art fairs provide. Once a year, Art Basel Miami Beach becomes a sort of second branch of his SoHo gallery, Deitch Projects, which represents artists including Chris Johanson and Vanessa Beecroft and regularly stages events. His booth may be rather tame, but Deitch mounts productions all over town—from performances by acts like the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black at the Delano Hotel to museumquality exhibitions in the Design District. And he multiplies the spectacle factor by bringing along a massive entourage—one year it numbered 65 people, including the cast of a performance piece at the Delano.

Deitch may be easing off his Design District projects a bit this December. “Now that there are 21 satellite fairs, and dealers who didn’t get into the fairs are renting spaces, the whole situation has just become saturated,” he says with a sigh. But he acknowledges a fundamental shift: “The role of the art fair has changed from a very specialized market for serious collectors and dealers to a kind of commercial version of an art biennial.” Even someone as established as Deitch can’t ignore the exposure. While an exhibition at his gallery might attract 1,000 visitors during a good month, his displays at Art Basel Miami Beach, in a booth located enviably close to the entrance, effortlessly attract 30,000, including all the industry’s top names.

Some collectors don’t take showy booths too seriously, however. “I think the Rob Pruitt flea market was very interesting and a lot of fun, and the performances and other things that are out of the ordinary are breaks from the monotony,” says Michael Hort, a New York–based collector of contemporary and emerging artists. “But I don’t know that they do much for the galleries. The Chapmans’ project at White Cube’s booth was clever, but the line was about two hours long, so most people I know just looked at it, smiled and moved on.”

Not all dealers are eager to shoulder the pressure to show off, either, especially in sections of the fairs that focus on younger artists and galleries. New galleries are often invited to fairs because they are radical, and they are then encouraged to do projects that are attention getting—but not necessarily lucrative. Brian Butler, who was director of the L.A. gallery 1301 PE when it participated in Art Basel Miami Beach in 2005, is proud to have displayed Social Pudding in the fair’s Art Nova section. The work, by Superflex and Rirkrit Tiravanija, involved selling instant dessert kits at 99 cents apiece, and it attracted many hungry spectators. But Butler doesn’t want to be forced to bring a high-concept crowd-pleaser every time. “This is what Amanda [Sharp] and I come to blows over,” says Butler. “There is all this camouflage—the lectures, the artists projects. But it’s a commercial event.”

Even for established galleries, putting on a show can be a major undertaking. At last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, Hauser & Wirth devoted a full third of its booth to a sprawling installation by the controversial Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. Called Training Ground for Training Ground for Democracy, it was a smaller version of the massive artwork that was halted in midproduction at Mass MoCA after the museum filed suit over the ever-expanding budget. At the fair, the piece, which comprised thousands of odds and ends— from a child’s bike to American flags to folding chairs, to orange-juice jugs, potato-chip bags, balloons and bullhorns—spilled out into the aisles and rose to a second floor of the gallery’s booth that was accessible via a rickety ladder. The work was expensive to mount, but it sold for €250,000 ($367,000) to the German collector Friedrich “Mick” Flick, and it’s now on view at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum.

The sale illustrates the underlying logic of eye-catching displays. Hauser & Wirth’s director, Florian Berkhold, says that even though going all out on a dramatic installation can be financially risky, “it helps long term to do something great, spectacular and profound with an artist on a booth. It draws the attention of professionals, collectors, and journalists, because it sticks out.” The gallery upped the ante again a few months later when it showed a Martin Creed miniretrospective at New York’s Armory Show that included a piece in which a pianist dutifully trudged through monotonous scales day after day.

Fair selection committees are watching these developments with great interest—they fit the members’ self-conception as organizers of something more than just trade shows. “What our selection committees value in a stand is not how much it sold but how good the stand looked,” says Art Basel’s co-director Marc Spiegler. “A highly commercial approach to creating a stand is, long term, damaging to a gallery’s business—at least in terms of its relationship to Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach.”

Art fairs are about doing business, but they’re also run—and staffed—by restless creative types who don’t want to fall asleep on the job. No matter what happens to the art market, the top fairs aren’t going away; the question now is how best to approach them. Having become thoroughly “bored with the whole trade-fair thing,” as he puts it, Casey Kaplan is forever thinking of new ways to spin his booth. “People are so used to fairs, I guess my colleagues and I are trying to take advantage of that, or to circumvent it and make it more interesting.

"Razzle-Dazzle! "originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2008 Table of Contents.