The first VIP art fair, in January 2011, was – as you probably know – a thorough disaster from the kickoff – not only because almost no one bought, but because for much of it, no one could buy, thanks to dozens of tech glitches that undermined the entire affair.
Undaunted, organizers set forth to create VIP Artfair 2.0 (would someone please tell me what is wrong with the simple number “two,” and why decimal points have become de rigeur in the naming and marketing of things other than computer programs and operating systems?) which ran last week, presumably strengthened in this edition by $1 million in backing from Australian art collector Philip Keir and the Brazilian investor Selmo Nissenbaum. Predictably, it, too, failed – though what actually surprises me is that this failure actually came as a surprise to others.
An art fair, boys and girls, is not a department store. The notion that viewing art online can replace the experience of attending a real art fair is like believing that watching the Super Bowl in your pajamas is the same as running quarterback yourself. People go to art fairs to see the art they don’t get to see in their own backyards, works they are only otherwise able to see virtually on gallery web sites and the apps of various collections. They go to art fairs for the buzz, which is as tangible as impasto as collectors roam aisles, encounter friends, stay out too late at parties, stumble into one another over hotel breakfasts, visit and revisit paintings they can actually touch and witness in real light, at all angles, the glistening of oil paint and flat saturation of acrylic into canvas a feast of visual wealth.
That’s what an art fair is.
Granted, as the New York Times described it, the creators of the VIP Art Fair did what they could: “Individual works,” they reported, “have ‘scale’ buttons under them that you can click to produce a little gray doppelganger of a real-world fairgoer (in silhouette with arms crossed, as if contemplating the work) to get an idea of its size.” But anyone who really thinks that this suffices has no real sense of what art is – and only of, well, what “shopping” is, like the way department store web sites allow you to “try on” an item of clothing. (Noted ArtInfo.com, “Like Starbucks, VIP has its own lingo when it comes to the different sizes, though here instead of ‘Grande’ and ‘Tall,’ one selected among ‘Premier Large,’ ‘Premier Medium,’ ‘Premier Small,’ and ‘Emerging’ galleries, as well as sections for ‘Focus’ solo shows and ‘Multiples & Editions’ being sold by museums and institutions.” The cutesy-ness would be nauseating if it weren’t, in principle alone, so thoroughly offensive to begin with.)
In the recent world of art speculation, the ‘scale button’ concept might suffice for some – but even speculators, on the whole, want the real thing. If nothing else, they need to check condition, never mind the desire to assess a work’s presence in a room, its proportionality, the way it reflects shadow and light. After all, if a picture of a picture really were enough, who would ever visit the museums?
Many years ago, in fact, I drove with my then-boyfriend from Basel down to Florence, where we parked the car – quite coincidentally – along the side of the Santa Maria Novella – a church I had studied in delicious detail in college art history classes. Seeing it rising there in front of me, I burst into tears: There it was. Right there. In front of me. To see, to touch, to surround myself in. That is what art is.
