Close Encounters at Auckland Art Fair
By Gregory Burke
TONY
Prior to my moving from New Zealand to Canada in 2005, a trip to Europe usually meant packing as much in as possible, and in this sense the Art Basel art fair offered a special opportunity as a one-stop-shop to meet gallerists, artists, colleagues and collectors. In those early days there were two groups; the preview day art community and the fair goers, though the distinction tended to evaporate after the first day. The Kunsthalle bar was the late-night hub for hanging out and comparing notes, and it was there in 2001 that then-Frieze editor Matthew Slotover commented to me that London needed a fair like Basel. A year later Art Basel in Miami Beach launched, followed by London’s Frieze fair in 2003. Those launches proved to be a watershed moment in the rapid transformation of the international art fair, from being an important component of the art ecology to being a central element of the global art economy. As a result, smaller and lesser-capitalized fairs have struggled. While some have slipstreamed on the pull of the larger fairs by co-locating with them, it is the regional fair that has been hardest hit, with certain fairs folding altogether in response to dwindling attendance by international collectors and the consequent non-return of major galleries. It seems regional art fairs might need to redefine their niche in order to survive.
