ART FAIRS 087
of the gallery business: they drive anywhere from 10–40% of all revenue, according to dealers. If a gallery offers market-friendly material (which usually means attractive paintings), it can pocket more than $500,000 in just a few days (though travel, booth fees and other expenses can easily exceed $100,000). Some small and midsize galleries are working to limit their reliance on fairs. Te gallery business can be extremely volatile. In a slow month, a dealer might be uncomfortably in the red; in a busy month, they might accrue enough revenue to cushion them for the rest of the quarter. One sale could make the difference between a good month and a lousy one.
Art fairs are a necessary part of the gallery business: they drive anywhere from 10% to 40% of all revenue, according to dealers
However, the art world is very good at giving itself a bad name. Last autumn in Paris, the Wildenstein family was charged with being a criminal enterprise, responsible for operating as the state prosecutor put it, ‘the longest and the most sophisticated tax fraud’ in modern French history. Wildenstein has a billion dollar guillotine hanging over its head, having possibly deprived the French state of hundreds of millions of euros. Typically, their art was held in shell companies and trusts in tax havens, hundreds of paintings including 180 Bonnards for starters – 180! – being held at the Geneva free port, a prison-like complex of high-security storage facilities said to contain more art than the Louvre. Independent
Left Tom Postma Design is responsible for the look of specific areas at Art Basel Miami Beach, such as the info zones and restaurants. Its aim here is to capture the relaxed and distinct atmosphere of the beach
Right, top At Art Basel Hong Kong the firm plays a significant role in positioning the prominent art pieces in the Encounters sector
Right, second The Di Donna booth at TEFAF, New York. The city still accounts for the bulk of global art sales
Right, third There are now over 300 art fairs every year
Right, bottom Paris+ was assisted in 2023 by concurrent exhibitions at the city’s major museums, and this year will be boosted by a move to the refurbished Grand Palais. The city has proved the main beneficiary of the art world’s Brexit blues
of any national jurisdiction, free ports allow traders to ship and store property without paying taxes or customs duties. It has been estimated that $100bn worth of art and collectibles are held in the Geneva free port alone, to say nothing of those in Zurich, Luxembourg, Singapore, Monaco, Delaware or Beijing. Te world of art dealers is probably the largest legal, unregulated market. Not subject to the rules that encase banks, dealers are not required to verify customers’ identities, report large cash transactions or flag suspicious activity. Te tradition that collectors can insist on anonymity, long framed as genteel discretion, has not budged – just exactly, not rumoured but exactly, who did buy Leonardo da Vinci’s $450.3mn Salvator Mundi? A code of omertà has been the governing principle, the inscrutability of the trade making it a leading conduit for sanction-evading oligarchs and other billionaires looking to launder excess capital. Art fairs dived into this private world and have grown at warp speed for 20 years now. Tese events have grown so much, compete for the footfall of the rich, and have increasingly come to rely on design to attract the money. Now for the positive aspect of all this, the design side. Leading the field by miles is Postma in Amsterdam. Tom Postma studied at the Rietveld Academy and the Rijksakademie in the Netherlands. He worked as an artist for 20 years, mainly producing monumental sculptures for parks, but having become increasingly interested in architecture and design, he made a choice: to move from the independent life of an artist to the collaborative life of a designer. His first big assignment was an art show for the Palazzo Fondazione Levi on the Grand Canal during the Venice Biennale. It proved a good advert for his obvious understanding and appreciation of art together with his sensitive design capabilities. He began by designing galleries, before TEFAF, then quite a small business, asked him to work with it. And as it he grew so did Tom Postma Design. Today the firm numbers 75 galleries among its clients, 17 art fairs, 35 museums, foundations and institutions, along with a world-class list of retailers from Georg Jensen to Lowe and specialist clients such as the ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament. It is a special kind of design business for a special kind of client. TEFAF is now the most spectacular art fair going – there is nothing more elaborate. Designing a major art fair is like creating a small town, a temporary but real one: a place with corridors and streets and squares, special exhibitions, blocks of galleries, VIP lounges, restaurants and cafes, meeting rooms, conference halls, video-conference facilities, entrances and exits. It has to have a pleasant flow, a clear beginning and end, and get visitors to that gallery located in a corner, far, far away from the main action. Sightlines are all important, as is how you enter a gallery space, what you see, how the most important pieces are displayed, the viewing lines, the through lines, the rhythm. Tere is a floor plan and a grid, and by making places to pause and reflect, to rest, and take a drink, the designer has to
MARK NIEDERMANN
IVAN EROFEEV
KATRINA KRUMINA
MARK NIEDERMANN
MARK NIEDERMANN
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