Traditional commercial art fairs are glorious meat markets of art. It’s an overwhelming spectacle, a structure made of art and money, of champagne sponsors and super-cosmically expensive works. It includes uncomfortable art assistants perched in bespoke artist-designed chairs and the silent competition of culturally elite women, in expensive yet unconventionally tailored black dresses. It’s a mix of irate gallerists ejecting people from booths, and tiny take-home editions. I love it, but I also know what it is. For the record, I like commercial galleries, too.
As much as I love it, I’m also fully aware that the specific framework of the (traditional) art fair creates specific outcomes. For example if, as a gallerist, you pay perhaps £30,000 for your booth, you need to recoup that outlay. Therefore, you pick ‘the best runners’ from your stable, and from their works you pick the ‘greatest hits’. Visit a few international fairs and you’ll see the same work, by the same artists. And that’s fine – it’s just not something I’m interested in replicating.
This is relevant because, alongside fellow artist Kevin Hunt, I am organising an art fair for Liverpool (CAVE). We wanted to create something that would function in the city, and devised a site-specific model that takes no commission or exhibition fees, excludes galleries and exhibits un-represented artists only.
The lack of commission allows each artist to autonomously decide the market value of their own work, and receive the full sale price. This creates a liberal, versatile system that empowers the artist. For example, sale prices can be responsive to the location (if the artist chooses), or deals can be made. The transactions are direct and organised between buyer and artist, and prices reflect that the artist only has their own overheads to recover. I like to think of it as buying trade rather than retail.
Selling work commission-free does in some cases lower prices, but the amount of money received by the artist does not change. If an artist were showing work in a gallery, and the artist used CAVE to offer similar work at a lower price, then ‘product devaluation’ could occur. But as we focus on unrepresented artists and fresh work, it’s really not an issue for us. Before an artist receives representation, prices and sale venues are often informal and in flux, and we simply continue this flexibility, allowing the artist to choose the sale price that they feel fits, in the context of their work and career.
The CAVE model demands that a conversation takes place between artists, buyers and audiences, and aims towards the demystification of contemporary art and art buying. In Liverpool this is particularly significant, as some parts of the cultural landscape elicit a high level of pride and ownership, but contemporary art isn’t one of them, despite the high quality and large output. By creating platforms for people to experience art, meet artists and have a good time, we hope to foster the sense of cultural ownership that can only enhance the longevity, enjoyment and development of contemporary art in Liverpool.
I think CAVE (particularly as a pilot event) is in no way hostile to the commercial gallery system. The career enhancement that a relationship with a commercial gallery can offer is, if that is the artist’s chosen career trajectory, invaluable. But the common model for art fairs wouldn’t work here, and the loss of the brilliant Ceri Hand Gallery shows that, for the moment, commercial galleries in the traditional model, if successful, must leave Liverpool in order to continue that success.
The art market is not like a Maccy D’s, where a fixed business model can be transplanted and propagated. Art markets need to be regionally sensitive and that’s what CAVE is; we designed it to succeed in Liverpool, using a model of unrepresented artists, dynamic and direct transactions, and publicity via free and available methods, whilst also making use of sponsors and patronage.
It’s a simple idea that allows us to raise the profile of artists, sell some work and have a party. Contemporary art itself is not elitist, it’s the multi-layered environments used to sell it and contextualise high prices that alienate people from buying art. But a gallery is an ‘art shop’, it’s where people buy art. So if you want to lower prices and make ambitious contemporary art accessible then you have to provide a platform for this, and that’s what CAVE is.
If we want to move to a time when the public in the UK feel Olympic-style pride about our contemporary art, then we have to take their involvement seriously. Instead of lazy or patronising gallery ‘workshops’ or ‘pat on the head’ art exhibitions, we have to offer them something different, and involve them with the best we have. That’s what we’re aiming to do with CAVE.
CAVE Art Fair, 13-16 September, Baltic Creative Campus, Jamaica Street, Liverpool. caveartfair.tumblr.com
