Money Changes Everything

Artist Chajana denHarder performs "Singularity" during the opening night at (e)merge.
Photo by Tony Wilson

It didn’t take long after the first (e)merge art fair ended before the organizers announced they would be back for a second year in 2012, which automatically made (e)merge a success as compared to DC’s last attempt at an art fair.

The uneasy relationship that artists have with art fairs is really part and parcel of the larger and much more ambivalent relationship between art and money. It’s actually no surprise that art and money rub up against each other in uncomfortable ways.  Most of us have an awkward and stilted relationship with the stuff.

Money is a lot of things.  But at its most basic level it is a tool, a device that we use to facilitate our economy. It is symbolic – the bits of paper and metal that we carry in our wallets and change purses on their own are worthless.  It is the value we place upon it that renders it important. Money performs a function in our lives, much in the same way that a hammer or a stove does. 

And yet, we do not have such a complicated relationship with a hammer or a stove as we do with money. We reach adulthood with an astounding array of assumptions and prejudices centered around the stuff.  Most we really don’t consciously acknowledge, either, because we acquired them by osmosis, absorbing the unspoken lessons bestowed upon us by our elders, who are no more cognizant of their tacit assumptions than we are of ours.

Imagine for a moment – you see a woman at an art fair, looking at a piece from a New York gallery. She is wearing a very stylish dress and a pair of high heels. Her hair and makeup are impeccable. After a short conversation with the gallery assistant, she nods, smiles, and pulls a credit card out of her purse and hands it to the gallery assistant. Now, imagine you see another woman at the same art fair.  She is wearing a pair of faded jeans, flip-flops, a faded t-shirt, and carries an old army knapsack over her shoulder.  She is in the booth of the same New York gallery. She is looking at another piece by the same artist. She has a short conversation with the gallery assistant, takes the gallery assistant’s card, and walks away. Both women, you later learn, bought the work they looked at.  One woman purchased the work outright, paying full price, and the other made arrangements to purchase the work on layaway, paying a small amount monthly for about six months until she had paid it off.

You very likely made certain assumptions about both women with respect to their financial status as you read the descriptions of their appearance. You probably presume to know which woman had to buy her work on layaway, even though if you read the paragraph closely, it is never explicitly stated. And if you are really honest about it, you have to admit that in the process of thinking about all this, you had certain feelings about each of the women I described, and those sentiments were based in no small part on your opinions of people who have money or do not have money, and on what you think of people based on how they spend their money.

The point of the exercise isn’t to tell you you’re right or wrong in your assumptions. The point is to acknowledge that you HAD them in the first place, and they most likely derive from lessons you learned by watching how your parents dealt with money.  They may have had a lot or a little. They may have saved it or spent it. And whether or not we shared our parents’ opinions, we learned our lessons about how to think about money from these experiences.  And they color our perception in surprising and unacknowledged ways.

All of that baggage is carried with us into the art world, which, like so many things, is facilitated by money.  Art costs.  It costs the artist time and materials and effort.  And if an artist intends to do things like pay his bills, he must recoup that cost, and then some. And those that seek to do so by selling the work must either enter into the apparatus that has been created for that purpose, or create an alternative (which costs time and materials and effort, just like making art). Like it or not, art fairs have become a key component in that apparatus.

And with respect to (e)merge, it seems as if the apparatus may be moving in the right direction.  Although the fair is only just over, and there seems to have been fewer exhibitors, many of the ones that did show up appeared to have “cracked the code” with respect to making the format work.  Exhibitors made better use of the spaces, and artists that created site-specific installations also seemed more confident in their efforts (though many of these ended up in the bathrooms, which tends to lend a certain tone to the endeavor that I find intriguing). Some of the exhibitors had better sales than last year. I’m sure that all the numbers are being crunched by all parties and soon we should hear something about whether (e)merge will be back again.

But standing around the pool at the opening night party, there were some complaints.  The $45 entry fee kept the crowds down, limiting the poolside affair to those who were willing to pay for the privilege of being there (drinking cost extra, an addition of insult to injury when you realize the drinks averaged about $10 a pop) or to those who were lucky enough to scam a free pass, or even better, one of the coveted VIP passes. This turned the party into a wan affair, especially when compared to last year.  It was another gathering of “cool kids club” of the DC art scene, not terribly different from the crowd you’d find at any popular gallery opening on a Friday or Saturday night, albeit more genial. When people threw themselves in the pool, the general opinion of those who looked on seemed to be that it was something of a cliché, and hardly warranted given the sparse and sober crowd.

What this says to me is that the marketing efforts for (e)merge this year were largely geared towards drawing out the well-heeled collectors, as opposed to drawing in the city to see what the DC art scene has been up to. From a business perspective, this makes a lot of sense.  While guys like Larry Gagosian are opening up cavernous gallery spaces around the globe, even he admits that his ability to sell $100 million works isn’t what it used to be.  And ultimately, the economy of an art fair is better served if costs are recouped up front via booth sales, as opposed to relying overmuch on individual ticket sales.   Exhibitors also have this persnickety habit of wanting to make sure that the money they put down on the front end for booth fees will be recovered in sales during the fair. Focusing on drawing in the people who provide those sales is only smart business.

Parsing through the scant number of articles about the fair found via a cursory Google search, a lot of the commentators were focused on the artists who weren’t represented by a gallery, and on the performance artists. Both of these constituencies, who often do not get exposure in a commercial art fair, are rapidly becoming the calling card of (e)merge, the thing that people see as the distinguishing factor from other fairs.  For those of us who grouse about $45 ticket sales or network fiercely to score a VIP pass from a friend, this should placate mutterings about the influence of “filthy lucre” at the fair.

I am happy about the obvious olive branch to the local DC art scene. I’m worried, however, that there’s not enough emphasis on building the profile of the fair outside the cozy little coterie of collectors that are either afforded VIP passes, or are willing to pay $45 to attend an opening night party.  (e)merge is never going to be able to create the kind of sales that will make it a credible rival to its cousins in Miami or New York economically. If it is going to be notable (and therefore commercially sustainable), (e)merge is going to have to capitalize on its popular appeal and its ability to draw in new collectors that are not currently part of DC’s small, committed, and very welcoming art scene. An awesome poolside party, while something of an annoyance to serious art types, hotel owners, and fancy collectors, is what’s going to draw in these new people, who will on the way discover that they like art and supporting artists. So while the decision to pare down the poolside opening night party and focus on the “big fish” certainly made sense in the short run, in the long run, it’s bad business.

There are signs of hope, however. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and this is, after all, only the second year of the fair.  The organizers need to be permitted to try things, some of which will work, and some of which will not. Art prizes experimentation, while commerce is entirely unforgiving of it.  Inserting a little bit more artistic experimentation into the commercial side of running an art fair should be allowed, and in the case of (e)merge, encouraged.

The other sign of hope came in the form of a young woman I met during the opening party.  She was beautifully dressed, wearing lovely shoes and her hair was impeccably done.  And she was ebullient at the prospect of having bought her very first work of art.  She was so excited to have discovered this artist, and was thrilled about the prospect of collecting more of her work. When I told her that I knew the artist, and that she was living in the area, she grew even more excited.  The idea that the artist is accessible made her joy even greater.  As a new collector, she was a little shy about her purchase, but was quickly reassured upon learning that every new collector has her moments of insecurity and self-consciousness, and her participation was what mattered.  It’s attracting people like her that is going to make (e)merge a success, both for the organizers and the artists.  And I’m not sure yet that (e)merge is doing enough to make that happen.

I should probably mention, in the interest of full disclosure, that my young collector friend bought her piece on layaway.

*P.S. I'll have more to say about Chajana's performance in a future blog post....