Fundaţia Culturală Art Promo, cu sprijinul Ministerului Culturii şi Cultelor şi suportul Muzeului Naţional de artă Contemporană, a organizat în perioada 20.11. - 23.11.2008, la Sala Dalles din Bucureşti, prima ediţie a Târgului de Arte Foarte Frumoase - TAFF.

TAFF a fost o prima încercare de organizare a unui târg de artă profesionist din ţara noastră, într-un spaţiu de veche tradiţie, consacrat încă din anii '30 promoţiunii artelor vizuale.

Publicul a putut să vizioneze şi să achiziţioneze lucrări de artă ale unor artişti consacraţi, reprezentând artă modernă şi contemporană din ţara noastră şi din strainătate. De asemenea, au avut prilejul să întâlnească galerişti şi experţi dispuşi să ofere consultanţă în toate aspectele privitoare la autentificarea şi cotarea lucrărilor de artă, precum şi la condiţiile legale ale unui gen de comerţ de artă aflat încă într-o situaţie emergentă.

Expozanţii au fost atent selectionaţi de organizatori în raport cu prestaţia profesională demonstrată în ultimii ani, fiecare dintre ei reprezentând o certă competenţă în domeniu. Această manifestare, în premieră pentru noi toţi, a reuşit să facă diferenţa între adevăratul obiect de artă şi brocantă, printr-o selecţionare atentă a lucrărilor propuse, limitând oferta la lucrări de certă valoare.

Prin intermediul acestui eveniment, organizatorii au urmărit stabilirea de criterii profesionale pentru piaţa de artă, necesare separării lucrărilor cu adevarată valoare de confuziile brocantei şi de nepermisul atac al falsurilor.

TAFF vine în sprijinul iubitorilor de artă şi al colecţionarilor de artă din România cărora, în contextul unei pieţe de artă dispersate şi superficial definite, le-a oferit informaţii structurate despre sistemele şi tendinţele actuale în comertul de artă. Aceste tematici au fost şi subiectele conferinţei internaţionale care s-a desfăşurat în cadrul târgului sâmbată, 22 noiembrie, la care au participat personalităţi pregnante din domeniu:

Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr - Adjudecător / Preşedintele Asociaţiei Palais de Tokyo
Bo Knutsson - Preşedinte CINOA (Confédération Internationale des Négociants en Œuvres d'Art)
Jan de Maere - Vice Preşedinte CINOA
Simon Hewit - Jurnalist (Art + Auction New York, Antiques Trade Gazette London, Desillusionist Moscow)
Mihai Oroveanu - Director General MNAC (Muzeul Naţional de Artă Contemporană)

Organizatorii TAFF au întreprins şi o acţiune făra precedent în România. În cadrul târgului s-a expus şi ofertat o lucrare unicat a celebrului artist Salvador Dali.

Această primă ediţie TAFF s-a constituit un test util, care a început să structureze şi să ierarhizeze actanţii comerţului de artă de pe piaţa de artă românească.

Developments and Trends:
Contemporary Art Fairs within the Art Market Context



It's a pleasure to be back in Bucharest. Seeing old friends, making new ones and, over an orange juice or an Ursus, or two, chatting about the art market.

And plenty to say. The auction in Paris, of course; I'll come back to that later. Then this new fair. I've been asked to talk about art fairs so I'll start with the most important one for us today.

The one here!

It's always exciting to see history being made, as many of us felt when we watched Florida and Ohio swing for Obama - or, all those years ago, a helicopter hovering above central Bucharest, waiting to whisk Nicolae and Helena to what they thought was safety.

Well, we're watching history being made in Bucharest right now with this new art fair. Make no mistake, it's a breakthrough for the Romanian art market. The organizers are pioneers. Brave ones, too. Visionary. I predict that in a few years time this first fair will have become a legendary event.

History will look back kindly. Right now we look around and see some bad, some good and the best intentions.

What's good?

The central location. A spacious exhibition hall. A good logo. The striking Dali promotional image. International visitors. A well-stocked bar with tasty food. And the boundless enthusiasm of the management team.

No first effort is ever perfect and the organizers will be looking to address one or two issues for future events. There will be questions asked about some of the merchandise and about the wisdom of mixing old and new. Up here on the balcony there are some fine paintings, but it would be good to know more about them, some basic details about titles and dates and which gallery is selling them and, if it's not a gallery, just who.

I've been to many fairs in many different countries. They all have their own character and their differences, but one thing they all have in common is that the exhibitors are galleries.

You would expect this debut Bucharest art fair to have the total support of the city's galleries but this does not appear to be the case.

To a foreign observer, that is a mystery.

Maybe they didn't all hear about it.

I did!

I suppose it's easier to send an e-mail to a journalist in Switzerland than to make a phone call to a dealer in Bucharest. But it won't help the fair if the journalist has no dealers to report on!

I repeat: the fair needs to have the total support of the city's galleries.

The fair should serve as the shop-window for the Bucharest art scene!

I don't just mean shop-window in the promotional sense. I mean shop-window in the literal sense. For a practical reason: Bucharest doesn't have an art dealer district. Your galleries are spread across the city. Many art dealers actually operate from their own home.

It's a far cry from Paris, as Maître Cornette will tell you, and from Brussels, as Mr de Maere will tell you. Both cities have districts crowded with galleries.

As an Englishman living in Switzerland, I can tell you that the same is true in London, Geneva and Zurich.

And I can also tell you that it's true in Budapest.

I was in Budapest earlier this week for the Budapest Art Fair. I know that Hungary is not a country Romania likes to compare itself with - but, for the art market, I think it's fairer to compare Bucharest with Budapest than, say, with Paris, London or Geneva.

The Budapest Fair has existed for 15 years. It is staged in a palatial exhibition building with plenty of parking. It has a stylish catalogue. It has 50 exhibitors, some from abroad. Half show antiques and modern art, half show contemporary art.

Budapest has a dealer district - based on a couple of streets, lined with galleries - near the Parliament in the city centre. There about a dozen auction houses in Budapest. Here are catalogues for just some of the sales planned in the next two weeks.

Budapest, Bucharest. Both middle-sized capital cities of middle-sized East European countries. Both open for business, or rather re-opened for business, in 1991.

Both cities begin with BU.

So does business !

B.U. Be You ! Be Yourselves !

Bucharest has its own style, its own history, its own art... and its own way of doing business.

But Budapest offers a good example of what can be achieved in a post-Communist art market.

Budapest has a 15-year start, and that may be the length of time it will take Bucharest to develop a structured art market.

As I said: today's fair is just a start - perhaps the symbolic start.

New art fairs crop up all the time. Some of the most recent are those in Shanghai, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Most new fairs follow the money.

But what is an art fair ?

It's a display of art by galleries, usually 50 to over 200 of them, in a large space, held in the same place at the same time every year.

Most fairs have high ceilings and white walls. The setting tends to be impersonal.

Most have an Artistic Director. Most have a catalogue, an art bookstall and one or more bars charging ridiculously high prices for bad beer and sad sandwiches.

You don't find Ursus and plachinte in many fairs!

You can see installations, sculptures, video and above all paintings.

The spotlighting is important and the dealers think it's crucial. They spend all the fair worrying about it.

Often there are special sections for young galleries and young artists, a very good idea.

All fairs have someone sitting at a desk with a laptop, looking busy and worried, often smoking, and talking only to a small group of people clustered around him or her, like revolutionary conspirators.

This is the dealer, and his staff. The bigger the fair, the less friendly the dealer. In my experience, dealers do not like talking. In fact they do not really like people, they certainly do not like journalists, and I am not sure that all of them actually like art.

Dealers are very, very important people. When they are at fairs, and not surrounded by conspiratorial staff, they only ever talk into their mobile phones, not to real people. Only dealers' assistants talk to real people !

However, the current crisis may make dealers a little less important and, who knows, a little more friendly. We shall see.

I feel sorry for dealers because they have a hard life, living in a suitcase from one fair to another, spending all day in a building with no windows, only ever seeing the light of night.

One of the nice things about coming to Bucharest, or to any city with an young emerging market, is that dealers have not had time to become successful, blasé or cynical. Some of them even talk to journalists... the cleverer dealers, who realize that journalism is free publicity, and the best sort of publicity because it is objective. Not like advertisements, which tend to be boastful.

Well, journalists try to be objective. Sometimes. Some of us!

Art Basel, staged every June in a small city in the north of Switzerland, close to the French and German borders, is unquestionably the world's leading contemporary art fair.

It takes place in the large Messe fair complex close to the city centre, in two very large halls.

The main hall has the best galleries upstairs and the merely good on the ground floor. Both floors are packed tight with galleries.

The second hall in a huge open space with large sculptures, installations and video displays. It also hosts a stage where artists, critics and journalists talk about art in front of the public all day long.

Outside, on the piazza, you can see a dozen particularly enormous sculptures and, all around the city, you can find seven or eight smaller fairs, often in former industrial premises, hosting galleries who are simply desperate to be in Basel during Art Basel.

Anyone who is anyone in the contemporary art goes to Basel. It is where all art market specialist have to be and, for non-specialists, it is the place for a crash-course in contemporary art.

Don't go just for the day because you won't have time to see more than 25% of what's going on.

Basel is literally full of art lovers in early June, so full that many people have to stay in hotels in Zurich, an hour away.

When you are in Basel you feel that you are involved in a massive event like the Olympics or Soccer World Cup. You can really feel the power and appeal of contemporary art.

Last year that feeling was especially powerful because Art Basel overlapped with three other important events: the Venice Biennale; and two events in Germany - Dokumenta in Kassel, held once every five years, and Skulptura in Münster, held once every ten.

The Venice Biennale (in odd-numbered years) is perhaps the most prestigious art biennale and, with its national stands, feels like an Art Olympics.

Of course nothing is for sale at a Biennale, but it is a source of information and place for contacts, trends and ideas. Last year I saw Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova in Venice. Abramovich had moored his luxury helicopter-topped yacht right alongside. A few weeks later he was buying Bacon and Giacometti in New York and opening a new gallery in Moscow.

There has been a Biennale in Moscow, since 2005, and it has been instrumental in spreading the impact of Russian cotemporary art - and in bringing foreign contemporary art to Russia. Well, I say Russia; Russia is a relative notion. I was in Khabarovsk and Vladivostok last June, reporting on a travelling exhibition assembled by a Moscow collector of contemporary art.

Vladivstok has a population of over 600,000 - and just two art galleries. Khabarovsk has a population of over 600,00 - and no art galleries. People there do not know contemporary art at all.

In Moscow, meanwhile, another Biennale, devoted entirely to young artists and called the Young Biennale, was taking place in 30 different venues all over the city. A new gallery and exhibition complex in a former winery, called Vinzavod, has become the centre of the Moscow art market and the focus of art market activity.

It's important for every capital to have such a focus, and that includes Bucharest!

But it isn't all rosy in Moscow.

With Russian art becoming more and more popular, and Russians, or some of them, increasingly wealthy and keen to start buying art, you would expect its contemporary art fair, Art Moskva, to be an engine for the local market and developing into one of the world's top fairs.

But in fact it is going backwards.

In 2006 the fair invited a group of German dealers in a sensible effort to open its doors and broaden its international appeal. In 2007, there was no special guest section, but a number of foreign dealers. This year, however, there were few foreigners, and the total number of exhibitors had dropped from 70 to 40 - this in a huge venue, the House of Artists by the River Moskva, which can easily accommodate over 100 galleries.

What has happened?

Sad but simple: the leading three or four Moscow galleries, who are closely involved in organizing the fair and its invitation committee, have blocked applications from major foreign galleries because they are scared of losing their clients - and their artists - to them. I heard that 300 galleries applied to show in Art Moskva. Just 40 were accepted.

I guess that's a problem you'd like to have in Bucharest one day!

Protectionism doesn't work any better when it comes to art than in the economy in general. Competition is essential to raise standards and offer the customers wider choice, and in fact to educate the customer in the case of contemporary art.

That's in everybody's interest - certainly the interest of the galleries.

In Paris, FIAC has met a lot of criticism from Paris galleries because they used to represent the majority of the exhibitors and are now under half.

But the public doesn't mind. The public are not interested in dealer politics! They are pleased to have more choice, especially with American galleries keener to show in Europe than a few years ago, because of the strong euro.

FIAC takes place in the Grand Palais on the Champs-Elysées. Some fairs take place in huge, soul-less exhibition centres on the outskirts of a city, and that's not always the best idea. I was in Turin two weeks ago for Artissima, which is about 6km from the centre of the city and not easy to get to.

They're building a new metro line to help you get there but it won't be ready for another 2 or 3 years and the main road has been dug up so getting there right now is a nightmare.

Artissima, incidentally, is one of the three fairs in northern Italy, along with those in Bologna and Milan (and not forgetting a couple of new fairs down in Rome).

Artissima is a good place to see young Italian galleries, while Bologna has a reputation for being the most commercial Italian fair. But too many cooks spoil the broth, as we say in English, and it is hard to keep track of all these fairs, whether in Italy or everywhere else - and certainly hard to visit them all.

Two of Europe's oldest and largest fairs, each with over 200 exhibitors, also have access problems. ARCO in Madrid and Art Cologne in Germany are linked to the centre by public transport but, when you finally arrive at the fair complex, you're only halfway there. The ARCO complex is so big they even have buses to take you from the complex entrance to the hall where the fair is.

ARCO has a reputation for Latin American art but some observers feel it's not as strong as it used to be, and losing energy.

Art Cologne is so big that it takes up four different halls, each the size of several football pitches, and each is identical so you never know where you are.

But it's biggest problem is dealer politics. Attempts to make the fair smaller and better, by removing lazy local dealers who have been showing there for decades, have been thwarted by the courts.

FIAC, like Art Cologne, mixes contemporary art with modern art dating back to the early years of the 20th century. Some see this as adding welcome variety, others feel it is incoherent. But these are long-established fairs with their own traditions. Newer fairs tend to concentrate on very contemporary art only.

Frieze is perhaps the most famous example, staged in central London, in a giant tent in Regent's Park. It's a fair where even Basquiat looks old-fashioned, and it targets very trendy nouveau riche collectors. Frieze made a big splash when it was launched a few years ago. Some now feel it is the most vulnerable of the major fairs, in the current economic situation, because its appeal was based on its newness and its appeal to a new type of investor-buyer.

Other examples of contemporary art fairs to have sprung up in recent years, from Kiev to Hong Kong. Art Basel has exported its Swiss know-how to America, setting up Art Basel Miami in early December, already regarded as the best fair in America. Middle-ranking fairs in Europe have been developing in Brussels and Vienna.

Fairs go up and down. After moving back to the central Grand Palais, Paris has emerged with a stronger FIAC, in October, and also has Art Paris in April. FIAC also has galleries in the Louvre and sculpture in the Tuileries Gardens, plus several satellite shows, two of them on the Champs-Elysées. During FIAC the centre of Paris seem almost obsessed with contemporary art.

I saw Ivan Gallery from Bucharest at one of those satellite shows in Paris last month, and I've seen Plan B from Cluj at a satellite show in Basel.

Satellite shows are less costly, friendlier, younger and more adventurous - the sort of event that other Romanian galleries, looking to broaden their international appeal, might like to take part in.

That could be important because, if I read the situation here in Bucharest correctly, there are not as yet a large number of domestic buyers.

Attracting new foreign ones means raising the profile of Romanian art internationally. An art fair here in Bucharest is certainly one way of doing that. Ensuring Romanian artists can be seen as much as possible outside the country is another.

I said earlier that the trend is towards fairs which specialize exclusively in contemporary art. But there are a couple of exceptions to that.

The biggest art fair in the world is generally regarded as TEFAF in Maastricht, a small town in the southern Netherlands near the borders with Belgium and Germany.

This began in the 1980s as a fair specializing in Old Master paintings but as it grew it came to include antiques in a general sense, hosting many of the world's best dealers in furniture and works of art.

Until two years ago contemporary art was regarded as a completely separate market. But then Maastricht decided to introduce contemporary art. It broke a taboo so earned plenty of (free) publicity. But above all it reflected changes in consumer taste.

That taste is more and more eclectic. It's no longer a shock to see a contemporary painting hanging above an 18th century commode. Tribal art, with its bold forms and stylizations, can go particularly well with contemporary art, even though they are often continents, and centuries, apart.

This development is good news for all contemporary art dealers. We often talk about "collectors" when discussing the art market, but there are more and more people who buy contemporary works of art - paintings or sculpture - with little thought of becoming collectors, more of stylish interior decoration.

This ties in with the second exception I referred to. It is to include 20th century Design, mainly furniture and lighting, in fairs of contemporary art - an innovation which I think began at the Paris FIAC two years ago. This is part of the same trend of Art entering people's homes as a matter of course - as a normal consumer purchase. It can only be good news for the art market.

I should also mention photography as well as painting, sculpture and Design. Photography has become big business and has its own specialist fairs, led by Paris Photo in November - now with a summer offshoot in London.

But photography is also more and more common at contemporary art fairs, too. Many buyers of contemporary paintings began by buying photographs, largely because they are less expensive. Many dealers therefore sell both.

Fairs have become so important today that some dealers do the majority of their business at fairs, not in the gallery. You sometimes wonder if galleries may actually be in the process of becoming redundant. So many people these days go to fairs, where they have a huge choice under one roof, rather than make the effort to travel around visiting individual galleries. I think we'll see more and more dealers operating from an office, by appointment, or even from home - if I'm correct in that assumption, the situation here in Bucharest, which on the face of it looks under-developed in terms of galleries, may not actually be a drawback at all.

Everyone wants to cut back on costs, especially in the current economic climate, and running a gallery entails hefty overheads.

Fairs can also be an economic means of communication. All major fairs have marketing and promotional staff and, in my experience, they usually complain that they don't get enough information from participating galleries. That's foolish because these people, if handled carefully and kept fully informed, will do a lot of a gallery's PR for free.

Other PR help can come from tourist authorities, and local or national government. Art fairs can be good for tourist business and good for a city's or a country's image. I know that there are historic reasons for artists and galleries to be wary of "government" here in Romania. But, as we say, don't look a gift horse in the mouth!

As long as no censorship is involved, take all the help you can get.

As a journalist you would expect me to say that Communication is the name of the game. Not quite: it's a slight exaggeration. But it's certainly half the battle. No business can succeed without good communication.

That brings me back to the landmark auction of Romanian art to be staged next March in Paris. It's a wonderful and unique opportunity to bring Romanian artists to world attention.

Artists, galleries and culture officials need to give this auction their total support because if it is a success you all will benefit.

We were talking yesterday about a title for this auction. I would like to suggest La Roumanie Ressurgit.

Romania Resurgent.

Let's make it happen!