Back in 2006, in an article titled “A storm of art as Baselmania engulfs Miami,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith predicted that

Art fairs will continue to flourish until the bottom falls out of the art market, or until dealers, who invented them, decide that there is a better way to do things.

The global recession never quite saw the bottom fall out of the art market, but it has arguably spawned a number of dealer-invented alternatives to the more traditional art fair model, such as Independent in New York, Sunday in London, and ABC in Berlin. But back in 2006, Smith highlighted one pioneering effort as an indication of what she thought the future held:

Two dealers already on this quest are Ronald Feldman, a longtime SoHo gallerist, and Joe Amrhein of Pierogi, a Williamsburg fixture. They have rented a raw one-story building in the Wynwood district here and filled its 12,000 square feet with works by artists they represent.

Fast forward to 2010, and the model Pierogi and Feldman built has evolved into a venture that now includes seven contemporary art galleries, including London’s Hales Gallery, who began participating in 2007, and New York’s BravinLee programs, Postmasters, P•P•O•W, and (my own gallery) Winkleman, who all join for the first time this year. The focus of this expanded effort, called simply SEVEN, is in creating an exhibition experience within the context of Miami’s art fair week defined by the needs of each artist’s work. The press release on the event’s website explains this idea in more depth. What the press release doesn’t explain is how each decision about SEVEN (whether on marketing, installation placements, shipping costs, etc.) is agreed to by us, the participating dealers, and that the costs are so significantly less than participating in one of the larger fairs that the 24,000 square foot space we’ll be sharing this year offers an opportunity to present work in Miami that would be cost-prohibitive, if possible at all, at the big box fairs. Because each of the participating galleries’ programs include presenting large-scale installations, for the first time we new participants have the chance to bring such work to Miami and better reflect what we’re about to that audience. Read More »

Adam Levine of A.R.T. filed this report from Paris:

Last Thursday, October 21, Deloitte sponsored its third annual ‘Art & Finance’ conference, in Paris. The overlap between the worlds of art and finance is, to the discomfort of many people in and around the art world, not insubstantial (though not yet ‘substantial’ either). Whatever the case, it is growing. A number of themes emerged at the conference, three of which are worth highlighting.

First, there was widespread agreement that the market is opaque and inefficient. The consensus of this self-selected group of art and finance enthusiasts is that something needs to be done.

Second, the next step forward would be to create a viable index that could be traded (and used to hedge against risk). A corollary, of course, is the illiquidity of the art market. I have been struck by how clever some of the methods for indexing the market are (particularly in dealing with the liquidity issue). I am equally impressed by the application of macro-economic theory to the art market. Without getting too far into methodology, however, I wonder if we have it wrong when we try to analogize standard economic models to the art market. Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. But given the lack of identical product in the art space, I feel new methodologies will need to be explored.

The final theme to emerge at the conference was that art has become an asset class, and it should be treated as such, particularly by wealth managers. But clever arguments about asset allocation and fiduciary responsibility ran up against an uncomfortable reality: Art collectors, unlike those at this conference, on the whole do not appear to think of their art as part of their investment portfolio. Read More »