Rachel and Friends, 2009 ©Alex Prager, Courtesy of the Artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery
Art enthusiasts have been anticipating this week’s VIP Art Fair – the first virtual art fair – with mixed opinions from all sides of the game. Fair booths and lounges have been translated on to the comforts of a (lonely) screen. An online art fair definitely saves all the legwork and on airfares, but without this pumping physical action, it filters out all the fun. In the midst of this virtual fair, we pulled a few highlights for those who don’t feel like becoming a registered VIP. If you’ve been to the fair, we’d like to hear your comments.
I promise to love you, 2010 ©Tracey Emin, Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery
Nari Ward, 2010, Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin
Lee Bul, 2010, Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin
Lost in my Life (price tags) 2010 ©Rachel Perry Welty, Courtesy of the Artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery
Carla Two, 2010 ©Richard Learoyd, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Tamika sur une chaise longue, 2008 ©Mickalene Thomas Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery
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Lee Bul’s piece looks great. The fact that I didn’t see it in the VIP Art Fair points to the difficulty of navigating the site. It’s kind of easy to rail on the fair since it’s the first one to try to bring the aspects of an art fair that are unique and special to a purely online experience. All in all, the idea remains more interesting than the result.
January 28, 2011 @ 4:44 am
It’s an interesting idea to do a virtual fair, but I don’t think it gives the work justice. The art in essence becomes a representation of the actual piece, and this is a problem especially for 3-dimensional objects. Since it’s the first one, it’ll obviously pose some issues. I wonder if they have a page for user comments or feedback.
January 31, 2011 @ 2:11 am
I found the experience as satisfying as viewing work in a booth at a live art fair, surrounded by cacophany and jarring juxtapositions, or smooshed into a space too small, where you can’t back up to take it all in, surrounded by “boothboard”, and so on. Something does get lost in translation. But certainly not everything, especially if the work is good.
I found the navigation to be easy and intuitive. I had no issues with it and am wondering what difficulties others had, since they haven’t elaborated beyond saying they didn’t like it. I only got to 64 galleries in the 7 total hours (3 sessions) I was on the site. I also looked at the collection and other videos and took some tours. There was a lot to see. Just because someone didn’t see everything doesn’t mean there was a problem with navigation! It was easy enough to type in a gallery, artist or work’s name and just go there.
More reasons I think an online fair makes sense: Most look online before buying anything or going to any kind of show. Research something before you go there…I do it all the time. Slides and photos are how curators, museums, galleries, dealers and buyers have communicated for decades. Online images are a natural extension of that.
As far as the privacy gripes go, I sign the guest book when I visit a gallery. You are supposed to do that. Is it going to kill people to delete an email from a place they visited? If you really don’t want to hear from them anymore, just unsubscribe yourself and move on!
It was unfortunate that chat went down or the dealers might have gotten more action (which would make them more likely to do this again) and viewers could have questions answered on the spot. I would have liked chat because I do sometimes want to know a little more. I don’t always have someone’s ear at an opening and I can’t get to galleries in the daytime.
Since most of the work online was 2D, and some of it was even video, I think it mostly worked fine. I am into sculptural work and much of that was photographed correctly, from several views and with good closeups. On that stuff, the scaling and zooming worked really well. The trouble some were having with scaling was not the website’s fault. It was that in too many cases, galleries only submitted limited views: little and big, or llittle medium and big. Some just had little views. That was annoying.
Overall it was much better than I thought it would be. There are glitches to fix and many constructive suggestions, on every website addressing this show, to include in the next one. I am looking forward to it!
February 1, 2011 @ 5:01 pm
MM – it’s great to see a positive reaction — perhaps there is hope for online art fairs. I think it’s a valid point that many or most art transactions are first communicated by images over email; however, it is unclear whether an online art fair is a way of improving the practice of selling/showing artwork to individual collectors via email.
It would be interesting to bring the gossip/theater of a fair into the online space: perhaps through a facebook integration so you could see who is look at what and what they are saying about it.
February 1, 2011 @ 6:22 pm