The lockdown phase of Covid was a nightmare for art fairs. Now, art fairs big and small are making plans to win back visitors — and dollars.
Art fairs are in-person experiences par excellence: a place where visitors gaze at artworks in gallery booths and collectors shop for them in between sips of sponsored champagne. So for the international fair business, the lockdown phase of the pandemic was, by all accounts, a nightmare scenario. Most of the 408 art fairs held in 2019 were canceled outright in 2020.
This month, Art Basel and the Treasure House Fair are opening their doors to visitors in Basel, Switzerland, and in London, and the picture is much more upbeat. A total of 359 fairs were held around the world last year, roughly one for every day of the year, according to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2024.
Still, the outlook is not quite as rosy as that tally would have you believe.
To start, at least 85 fairs have died since 2019, including — in 2023 alone — Masterpiece London (Treasure House’s forerunner), Fotofever in Paris and BRUNEAF in Brussels, according to the report. In response to these challenging conditions, those fairs that remain are listening closely to their audiences, trying to look and feel distinctive (rather than identical) in each city, and introducing branding and boutiques to appeal to a younger clientele.
At the same time, the fair business is also increasingly dominated by two big franchises — Art Basel and Frieze — that are buying up rivals. Art Basel started a new fair in Paris in 2022, driving FIAC out of business, and Frieze’s owners announced last July that they were buying the Armory Show in New York and Expo Chicago.
“You’re certainly seeing consolidation at the top,” said Melanie Gerlis, the author of the 2021 book “The Art Fair Story: A Rollercoaster Ride,” and an art market columnist for The Financial Times.
Gerlis acknowledged that there had been a bounce back since the end of the lockdown period of the pandemic. “People had missed seeing each other and had money in the bank because they hadn’t been out and about and on big holidays,” she said. She noted that there was an urge to “gather in the same place at the same time.”
