In its twelfth year, the popular Affordable Art Fair will bring its bevy of non-blue-chip emerging art galleries to its eleventh host city to date: Los Angeles. This winter, organizers will hold their first West Coast event between January 18 and 22 at the downtown L.A. LIVE Center, where part of the building's top floor will be tented and climate-controlled for the fair.

"We really thought that it was the perfect location for the AAF," said Judith Pineiro, U.S. director of the Affordable Art Fair. "L.A. is one of the largest cities in the country, and it's just one city in L.A. County. There are 88 other cities there, too.

The fair is not just about selling art, according to Pineiro — it broadens its base of potential collectors by educating the public on how to collect work by emerging talents. "Art is for everyone, not just for an exclusive group," she said, adding that there is demand in the L.A. community for wares at the fair's particular price point. All participating dealers are asked to keep at least 75 percent of their art priced below the $5,000 mark, where young professionals and middle-class families can afford to buy. 

There are various educational programs, from a lesson on how prints are made to discussions about the basics of collecting. For some of the offerings, the fair teamed up with ArtStar.com and LittleCollector.com, two Internet art Web sites founded by art advisor Chrissy Crawford. The former is focused on adult collecting, and the latter hopes to inspire children to play into the art-buying process. At the Los Angeles fair, the "Recent Graduates Exhibition" will feature recent recipients of MFAs and BFAs from Los Angeles, curated by Melanie Edmunds.

Between the programming and the price tags, the fair attracts quite a crowd. Pineiro said that she expects to see the millionth visitor across all ten of its current fairs by the end of 2011. But while the fair has a healthy track record of attracting curious visitors, does it bring in collectors ready to open their wallets?

Some dealers gripe that they actually lose money. According to the fair's own statistics, at last year's New York fair, over $2.2 million in art was sold to just over 75 dealers, for an average take-home of under $30,000. With the cost of transportation and insurance for the art, as well as flights and hotels for the gallery staff, it may end up being a better opportunity for publicity than profit for many dealers.