BALTIMORE—Like hundreds of art galleries around the world, Goya Contemporary is thinking about the big “art fair” week that opens in Miami on the cusp of December. For six days, Goya will trade its white cube gallery in this leafy Baltimore neighborhood for a white tent pavilion in the Florida sun.
In Miami, they call it Art Week. But in today’s global art markets, the first days of December there will mark one of the world’s largest art fairs, the kind of venue where, over the past decade, art galleries have been doing much of their business.“Though it is exhausting and it’s long hours, when you go to the fairs, you are among the best,” says Amy Eva Raehse, director and curator of Goya, which has specialized in prints, paintings, and sculpture since 1996. “You see colleagues from around the world.”
The hub of the Miami event will be Art Basel Miami Beach (Dec. 1-4), an offshoot of the world’s largest annual art fair (Art Basel in Switzerland). It occupies the vast Miami Beach Convention Center and features 250 galleries exhibiting work by 2,000 artists. Goya Contemporary, a middling gallery, for the past four years has signed up at a smaller venue, Art Miami, which holds its showcase in a pavilion across the waterway in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District. “We had a great year last year, so we filled out our contract [for this year] quite early,” Raehse says.
The art fair is as old as the European marketplace. Since the late 1990s, however, the phenomenon has mushroomed. There were 55 relatively major art fairs in the world in 2001 and that increased to 205 in 2008. In their home towns, Art Basel and Art Miami are two of the old timers. The number of newcomers at Miami’s art week has grown, with about fifteen “satellite fairs” set for pavilions and other venues.
As to a pecking order, Art Basel Miami Beach is top of the line. Galleries from around the world pay a high fee to exhibit there. Art Miami, which will feature Goya and 100 other exhibitors, ranks second, and thus booth space costs less. Other satellite fairs—Red Dot, Pulse, and Design Miami, for example—rank down the line in costs and fame of the artists. Whatever the rank, Miami becomes a giant art magnet: everyone benefits from the tens of thousands of potential art buyers.
Soon enough, Goya will be packing the ninety works it will have on hand for exhibiting over the six days of public viewing. The fairs draw professional collectors and newcomers who may not know the difference between a museum and gallery when it comes to contemporary art. Says Raehse: “Some people have asked, ‘Is anything for sale?’” For neophytes, in fact, the Miami experience may be a conversion to contemporary art and to an interest in its gallery systems and trends.
“Do people buy works for above their sofa?” Raehse says. “They do.” However, the core of visitors at the Miami venues tends to be serious collectors. Some art buyers “collect deep,” she says. “They follow a particular artist, support that artist.” They also are interested in art history, concepts, and techniques. These are the collectors that Goya and other galleries love. Indeed, at Art Basel Miami Beach, ordinary tourists can brush shoulders in the exhibition hallways with some of the biggest jet-setting collectors in the world.
While Goya will have a range of works, both on the primary and secondary market (that is, directly from the artist, or re-sale of past works of brand-name artists), it will feature six in particular, among them the Baltimore African American artist Joyce J. Scott.
In October, Scott will be among 27 artists invited to exhibit in at “Prospect.2,” an international biennial of contemporary art held in New Orleans. As Scott’s representative, Goya gallery has been busy helping to present the 35 works and a large outdoor installation. “It’s a great honor for Baltimore,” Raehse says. It also illustrates how much a gallery such as Goya can spend on the road.
The gallery tries to go to five fairs a year, rotating around the country to build contacts and see the art market at work. The staff went to Art Basel in Switzerland this summer for “research.” Goya, which began as a fine prints gallery (etchings and lithography), will show some community spirit this fall by displaying at the Baltimore Museum of Arts “print fair.” It will also attend the big one in New York City: the International Fine Print Dealers Association fair in November.
“We never like to dilute ourselves too much,” Raehse says of what might look like a grueling out-of-town schedule. But art fairs are the way of the future, the veritable shopping mall for local and global collectors. At the Baltimore gallery, each show can draw several hundred visitors, especially at an opening. At the fairs, however, thousands wander by the booth, and many of them are deeply into discussing art.
Naturally, Raehse says, “We always keep the fairs in mind.”
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