In the beginning of 2011 the vitality, global reach, and tech-savviness of the contemporary art market will be tested like never before with the introduction of the VIP Art Fair, an innovative salesroom that will feature some of the world's top blue-chip galleries — and which will exist exclusively online. Founded by New York dealer James Cohan together with internet entrepreneur Jonas Almgren, founder and CEO of Web site One Art World, in collaboration with Jane Cohan and Alessandra Almgren, the fair will take place for only one week, with sales opening at 8 a.m. EST on Saturday, January 22, 2011, and concluding at 7:59 a.m. EST on Sunday, January 30.

Buyers will have access to art on offer from the following galleries: Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, White Cube, Sadie Coles HQ,  Galerie Max Hetzler, Xavier Hufkens, Fraenkel, Anna Schwartz, Koyanagi, Kukje, and, of course, James Cohan, among others.

ARTINFO senior correspondent Sarah Douglas is the first to speak to Cohan at length about the details of VIP Art Fair.

How did this idea come about in collaboration with Jonas Almgren?

It had a two-and-a-half-year gestation period. Jonas, an internet entrepreneur, and his wife Alessandra moved to New York from Silicon Valley six years ago, after a decade in Silicon Valley. They started collecting contemporary art — they now own a whole range, including works by my artists Fred Tomaselli and Bill Viola. And my wife Jane and I met them through their collecting. Then we realized we were neighbors in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and we began spending time together socially, with our families, and began discussing the idea of Web sites and the Internet. I’d always had this vague idea of what would it be like to have a more active Web site for my gallery. We have private rooms on the Web site now, but they are kind of inert. It’s just been about setting up a group of images and sending them out, there is no interactive or time-based component. But there was another big issue that concerned me, and that was: the Internet is this vast space, and how do you identify the leading contemporary art galleries in the world? There are a few vehicles that have tried to aggregate the leading galleries but they are not necessarily very successful. If you type “leading contemporary art galleries,” into Google, what you come up with is not as interesting as it could be. We thought it would be interesting to try to create a filter in this world and give people a vehicle from anywhere in the world to have access to the leading contemporary galleries.

The virtual booths in the fair are priced from $5,000 to $20,000 How did you come up with these figures?

We started with the price of the larger booths — $20,000 is roughly 20 percent of what the total cost of a brick-and-mortar fair would be. Because there dealers have not only booth cost, but also travel, hotel, and so forth.

Why 20 percent?

Because that was a reasonable number and it accounts for the intensive ad campaign we are attempting. We look at it this way: it’s 20 percent of a standard art fair, or four ads in a magazine. After all, in a sense all art fairs are some combination of sales, marketing, and advertising.

Like a portable storefront for a gallery?

Yes.

So how will this fair work?

There will be galleries in three different divisions. “Premier” galleries are established ones, “Emerging” galleries are ones that show emerging artists, and “Focus” booths are for presentations of just one artist. You will go on the Web site, log on, and either get a VIP pass from one of the galleries or, if you are just a layperson, you can go on the site and browse. If you go on without a VIP pass, you do not have interactivity with the dealers. You can go into the galleries’ walls and click and see a lot, but you don’t have interactivity and access to VIP lounge.

Is there a limited number of VIP cards?

No. Each dealer will send them to all of their active clients.

What’s the VIP lounge like?

There is a variety of areas. One area will be statistics as to the number of people at the fair at any given time. Another will show the top-ten clicked-on works of art, over the past hour or past day. Another area will be where we premier two films each day. One will be on a studio visit with an artist and the other a tour of a private collection

Have any collectors signed on to have their houses filmed for this? Names?

We are working on that now, no names yet, but exciting things in the works. Then there will be a newsfeed and other newsy items. In the VIP lounge you will also have access to a variety of tours that people will have posted. In the process of traveling through the fair you can make a list of your favorites and from that you can create a tour. Then you can post that tour in the VIP lounge.

Right. So this is sort of like iTunes. Making a playlist.

One thing I would like to do, though, is distinguish this from just selling art online. It’s about creating a platform for leading contemporary galleries to present their art. It’s important that we stress that there is a real educational component to this. To buy, you have to understand the context. You don’t necessarily get that when you walk into a brick-and-mortar fair, where dealers are busy and viewers can be intimidated. This way when you go to a gallery and you are on their wall, you will have access to the price range of the works and be looking at it in a relative scale to other works, and see it in detail by zooming in, and, should the gallery go to the effort, you can also see a film of the artist speaking about the work or someone else speaking about the work.

So where does the interactive component come in?

Now that you’ve gained access to all of this, you then click on a button called “chat” with any given gallery and what drops down is a list of the people available at that time — gallery directors — what languages they speak. We are suggesting that all galleries be available 18 hours a day, because we have exhibitors in many different time zones, from Australia, to Korea, to Europe, to the U.S.

How have you explained all of this to your exhibitors?

What I say to the galleries is that what we are doing is creating an elaborate Venn diagram in that each of us will invite our active clients, give them VIP cards, and create an aggregate of them. Just like in a normal art fair, we will have invited the people we want to attend. That doesn’t mean they will just buy from the gallery that invited them. What’s interesting to me is that, long term, people buy from a person, not from a place. That’s why we want to have that interactivity with a specific person. When it gets down to it, you are dealing with a human being and having that interaction is important. The live chat is about having a discussion with someone — it starts as instant messaging and could proceed to Skype or the telephone. It’s an instant rapport that takes away the whole anonymity aspect of being online. It creates the possibility for a relationship to develop. So that the dentist in Des Moines can deal with his patients while continuing to pursue his passion for contemporary art. That is the beauty of this, from my point of view.

So what’s the next step for me, as a collector visiting your virtual fair?

In the next stage of the process, let’s say a collector asks about a piece and the dealer tells them it's on reserve. The dealer can then invite that collector into a private room, and what happens is that the dealer can then take over the collector’s wall. So, on the screen, the collector will still see the gallery heading and there is a blank wall and from the dealer’s side, the dealer can click and drag inventory onto the collector’s wall, so the collector can view it. So the dealer and collector are now having a direct conversation that is entirely discreet and that enables the dealer to intuitively start the selling process and find out what might be of interest to the collector.

Does this take place while dealer and collector are talking on the phone?

Well, I’m 50, so for me it would. Skype is another option. I must say that if it weren’t for Skype, Arthur [Solway, the director of Cohan's gallery in Shanghai] and I would have killed each other by now. Skype is so simple and will be a part of the equation with this virtual fair.

A lot of really top galleries have signed on. What was most appealing to them about this? What convinced them?

Not to be immodest, but there was the innovation aspect. Across the board, everyone said, “Gosh, it’s amazing this hasn’t happened earlier.” To me, that was the most reinforcing and inspiring thing. We really have gotten a tremendous response.

Did you turn any galleries away who were interested?

It’s only by invitation and the list is not final.

How many booths will you have, total?

We are not saying at the moment. Suffice to say it will be a highly limited and selective list. The truth is, the only way this will work is if we have the best. We knew that from the word go.

It sure took you a long time to announce this project to the public.

We’ve kept this bottled up for too long. In the early meetings and throughout the process there have been so many opportunities to learn things, and the second edition will be so much more dynamic. We want to get the fundamentals straight and clear with this first edition.

Why have it in January?

We considered a lot of factors in the calendar. It’s far enough after the beginning of the new year for the western world. And it’s far enough into January, which is typically a slower period in the art world. And it’s before the Chinese New year, and at the end of the holiday or vacation period for Australia and South America. All of those things became important. As well as the art world’s calendar. Other fairs, like Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze, FIAC — we took the timing of all of those into consideration.

Purists — curators among them — would say no one should acquire artworks online, that they have to be in the presence of the real thing for a variety of reasons.

This event addresses three different scenarios: A. people wanting to buy something because they are already familiar with an artist’s work; B. people who have had an inclination toward an artist’s work but haven’t explored it in depth, and so get one step closer to possibly buying. And the buying may not happen during this event. Remember, every art fair is not just a selling opportunity — it’s a marketing and advertising opportunity. The third possibility is for people to learn about artists they didn’t know about.

But how can a newcomer — someone without a VIP card — get access to dealers?

There are three ways someone can enter the fair. One is with a VIP pass from a gallery. The second is that they can browse the fair without interactivity — anyone can go on as of January 22 at 8 a.m. Eastern Standard time and look at everything. What they can’t do without a VIP card is talk to the dealers. But if they want to do that, for the first two days of fair that will cost them $100. For the remaining five days, $20.

The equivalent of a real fair’s VIP preview days, in other words.

Correct. And because of the international nature of the beast, the opening day is 48 hours long.

What about the risks inherent in debuting a new and unfamiliar virtual fair model at a time when the art market is still in an uncertain state?

I think this model will work in an upmarket as well as in a downmarket. The market is tougher presently, and this event enables the collector who is working that much harder to maintain his or her own business to have the ability to still be engaged in an art fair experience and in the art world. I think I speak for all dealers when I say we are all working to expand our horizons and want to build our client base. There is that kind of excitement now. David Zwirner was the first dealer to sign on as an exhibitor in this fair. He said to me that it was interesting because his father, the dealer Rudolph Zwirner, started the Art Cologne fair, and the dealer Ernst Beyeler spearheaded Art Basel, and there was a team of New York dealers who started the Gramercy Hotel Fair which became the Armory Show. So in a sense, this new fair I am doing is a fair that has been designed by a dealer for dealers. Its emphasis is on being a platform for galleries and finding ways to best highlight their programs and the credibility of what they are doing.

Zwirner is on your list of “founding galleries,” which also includes galleries from Berlin, London, Tokyo, Melbourne, Brussels, San Francisco, Seoul, and other cities around the world. Among them are the heaviest hitters, like Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth.

We went to them first to engage them in this process and to work within their markets to attract the right kind of media attention and have access to the other advantages of their particular markets. It’s back to idea of the Venn diagram. It’s not about the ultra-hippest galleries in the world. It’s about the dominant players in various markets.