Culture has gone virtual. When 2020 upended our lives the international museum and gallery sector responded by creating a wave of exhibitions and events able to be experienced remotely. Art fairs were no different and as this year numerous international fairs have been cancelled; online-only formats were launched to stand in for the events. Alongside our own Auckland Art Fair which should have taken place in May, significant international casualties have included Art Basel Hong Kong (March), international pack leader Frieze London (October), and Art Basel Switzerland – the centerpiece of the European art market, due to celebrate its 50th anniversary this June with more than 250 international galleries.
Along with many other markets the art world is looking at how it connects with buyers, effectively rebuilding how creative industry does business. While art lovers argue that nothing can replace the experience of standing in front of an art work – and many living outside of Auckland relied on the art fair to bring pretty much every New Zealand gallery worth its salt plus some international galleries from around the region to one place – online art fairs seem to have done pretty well. It is perhaps no surprise that given the art world that runs on contact and communication, a social eco-system even, managed the transition to online platforms with eager participants. We are increasingly welded to our digital screens after all.
With barely any lead time, pivoting the Auckland Art Fair to a virtual event in May during lockdown generated art sales of NZ $1.6 million according to their website, with all proceeds going to the artists and their galleries. It is tempting to consider whether the Auckland Art Fair gained a boost from bored New Zealanders stuck at home with little else to do and beginning to hate their walls, or a desire to support local artists and initiatives during an uncertain time, but the results speak for themselves. In fact, Auckland Art Fair directors Stephanie Post and Hayley White are planning another virtual art fair in November 2021 with the actual fair returning to Auckland’s Cloud venue in February, all going well.
While some may miss the excitement of the opening parties and the buzz of being surrounded by art objects, artists, and art conversations; it is time to be realistic. Online art fairs prove a smart move with international travel showing little sign of resuming anytime soon.
Earlier this year UK based The Art Newspaper reported the respected Swiss dealer Dominique Lévy as saying she doesn’t foresee anyone wanting to visit an art fair before a vaccine for Covid-19 is found. Online art fairs are flourishing and, at time where many aspects of our lives and how we do things are changing, there’s good reasons to get on board and see new work in your (Anna Wintour approved) tracksuit pants from the sofa.
In April Art Basel launched its Online Viewing Rooms to an incredible response, so much so that upon launching the site crashed from the number of visitor interactions. While the Online Viewing Room was already planned before the cancellation of Art Basel Hong Kong, its release was fast-tracked, Marc Spiegler, global director of Art Basel explaining “It became clear this was something we needed to accelerate and expand.” Disappointingly for many of the early online art fairs, technology was behind the game, affecting the user experience and ultimately making buying art in the virtual space a pretty unrewarding experience. This has led to a push for art fairs as well as galleries and some digitally adverse critics and curators to critically think through how to present artwork digitally.
I asked the newest art fair in the digital space, New Zealand’s May Fair how they approached this. Describing themselves as a new and dynamic alternative art fair which presents emerging and unrepresented artists from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific, May Fair was set up this year by Ophelia King, Becky Hemus, Eleanor Woodhouse, and Nina Lloyd. Lloyd and King were directors of Karangahape Road’s artist-run space Fuzzy Vibes, while Hemus and Woodhouse are behind Wet Green, an address-less art platform. Imagined as a series of booths rather than a lineup of images and captions, May Fair focused on presenting context around each artist’s practice. By engaging with and commissioning two texts from a variety of artists, curators, and writers to accompany each digital booth render, the platform feels like a valuable contribution to the wider scene.
Like many other fairs, May Fair was intended to launch physically, but when it couldn’t the organisers took a fresh approach to moving online. “It was important to us to create exhibition spaces where visitors felt welcome and had the same kind of exploratory sense of discovery that you would get in person.” Says Becky Hemus, “We wanted the interface to be as intuitive as possible. It was important to us that the basics were covered, that how you ‘enter’ the fair was abundantly clear and that information was accessible without compromising our objective to create a unique visitor experience within the digital space.
When reimagining how the fair would exist we came up with the idea to create a virtual May Fair building to house all the booths, this created a strong base for the user to become familiar and excited with as we stagger released booths over the month. Once inside a booth, the viewer is presented with three rendered vantage points of the space – each dreamt up by our curators and artists – creating a digital environment one can imagine themselves within.
We wanted each booth to feel like an exhibition rather than a catalogue of artworks for sale as, with emerging artists in particular, each show is a chance for a new person to engage with someone’s practice.” – Becky Hemus, May Fair.
Virtual art presentations and events can’t match the real thing, and they’re not setting out to. However, it is very likely online events will play a pivotal role in supporting the art market’s recovery and keeping artists paid. This is a time for everyone in the creative industry to be responsive and resilient. Galleries and artists are facing intense economic difficulties. In 2019 the global art fair market was estimated to have reached US $16.6 billion. Causing a substantial loss of income for the industry. Interestingly though, a silver lining has emerged, with a recent mid-year survey* finding that across all of the high net worth collectors surveyed, 59% felt the pandemic had increased their interest in collecting, including 31% saying that it had significantly done so. Will our dedicated collectors of New Zealand art and first-time buyers alike match this international trend? I certainly hope so, because, as we all should know by now. Art at home will give you more pleasure than money in the bank ever will.
