“An art fair is a device to promote Western art to a wider audience at the expense of Eastern galleries who thought it glamorous to get into the bandwagon without understanding the basics of the market which the Western galleries literally dominate because every important artist is inside their pocket whose one painting easily offsets the cost of one booth, and they control and own every important magazine, app, museum, auction houses, curator and putrefy every art news to their advantage leaving the Eastern galleries with nothing short of disposing all their hard earn monies into one silly fair and still make a loss.
And if the prices of their Eastern artist escalates more or less at par with the Western artist’s which is a one in a million chance, most collectors if given a choice will hop over and collect Western art without a second thought because of the ready market and the fame of these artists created by the West the same way financially more well off people will dump their local cars for foreign makes.
This is the unfortunate circumstance right minded Eastern galleries has to bear with whilst the naive galleries continues to mimick the Western galleries thus many went high and dry and got bananas to go home with and a load of sponsorship obligations to repay instead of happily going home with fat sales to content with.
Prove me wrong for no right minded Western galleries will join an Eastern set up Art Fair for all its worth simply because they are first and foremost very discriminatory, second, it doesn’t support their umbrella Western dominion objective and third, if it is not a Westerner who controls or set up the fair, then, it is not a Western control art fair and they won’t join so that you will gradually cease to exist to prove to you it is a business model not worth pursuing which in short, is theirs to do and control.
A booth at prestigious art fairs cost about USD100k. Do you realize how many works a gallery has to sell if the artworks are only worth USD1K each within that 4 days spread but the only time you do some selling is only the first 3 hours of vernissage? Still that can only offset your booth cost but not your shipping, insurance, set up, manpower, and whatever else.
In short, an Eastern Art Fair has got to be contented and survive on its own depending on Eastern booths alone or perhaps third world booths from Africa, Middle East or South America. And the only reason one sees Western galleries appearing in China Art Fairs is because of one reason only. it is a big market. Guess what they are selling? Western Art of course.
And that’s the sad truth about art fairs.”
fiveloaf 