The Internet revolution has at long last reached international art fairs as a new event tests buyers’ willingness to shop online for contemporary works.
Billionaire collectors and their agents spend weeks each year traveling the world to events such as Art Basel, Art Basel/Miami Beach, Frieze and FIAC. Now they are being urged to save time and money — purchasing from the comfort of their own homes at the virtual VIP Art Fair, announced this month.
“Just out of curiosity, VIP is going to attract a lot of visitors,” Todd Levin, a New York-based art adviser and curator, said in an interview. “People have become confident about buying from
J-PEGs, as long as they can be sure about the condition of a piece.”
If VIP is a success, other online events may follow and traditional “live” fairs may have to enhance their Web presence, said dealers. While advisers such as Levin will continue to travel, the event will challenge the Internet’s reputation for being mainly a selling platform for lower-value artworks. VIP will offer heftily priced pieces by artists such as Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Damien Hirst and Andreas Gurksy.
Collectors are increasingly willing to use the Internet to buy art at auction. Already, a quarter of bids at Christie’s International auctions are made online, with such sales in the first half of this year increasing 63 percent from the equivalent period last year.
Two New York-based couples — dealers James and Jane Cohan and Internet entrepreneurs Jonas and Alessandra Almgren — have spent more than two years devising the VIP fair. For a week, from Jan. 22 to Jan. 30, anyone will be able to use the Internet to browse works at more than 50 of the world’s leading contemporary-art galleries. International art-fair regulars Gagosian, White Cube, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth and Sadie Coles are among the event’s 12 founding participants.
VIP tickets, costing US$100 on the first two days and US$20 thereafter, will give would-be buyers interactive contact with galleries through instant messaging, Skype or telephone. The fair’s Web site will allow visitors to zoom in on the paintings, enjoy multiple views of sculptures and watch videos.
“It’s a lot easier to go to an art fair when you can do it in an easy chair,” Levin said. The lavish parties and dinners thrown by galleries when collectors fly into town wouldn’t be missed. “If the social aspect is why you’re participating at an art fair, you’re not going for the right reason,” he said.
Dealers are attracted to the VIP Art Fair, the first of its kind, by the opportunity of gaining new clients from emerging economies, said James Cohan, co-founder of the fair, who also has a gallery in Shanghai.
Buyers from China, which this month became the world’s second-largest economy, have so far been a limited presence at Western dealer-led art events.
The fair also appeals to increasingly cost-conscious gallery owners who spend hundreds of thousands of US dollars each year on booths, travel, shipping, accommodation and entertaining.
“The overall cost is about a fifth of what dealers normally spend,” Cohan said in an interview. Participants will be charged between US$5,000 and US$20,000 for a virtual “booth.”
“It’s a brilliant idea,” said Anthony McNerney, managing director at the London-and Hong Kong-based gallery, Ben Brown Fine Arts, which is not,
as yet, participating in VIP. “It will take time to take off. At first, probably
only things that people know will do well, such as editioned sculptures
and photographs.”
Ben Brown routinely sells works by photographers such as Candida Hoefer purely on the strength of Internet inquiries and phone calls, McNerney said.
“It’ll probably take a year or so before a Korean or Indonesian collector spends US$1 million for a work at a virtual art fair, but there could be anomalies,” McNerney said. “People tend to be quicker to make decisions when using the Internet. At art fairs, visitors look at things and have a think about it.”
On the Net: vipartfair.com
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50