Mounting Art Basel

With only eight days left before the opening of Art Basel Miami Beach, and the numerous other fairs that have sprung up around it, New York dealers are busy with last-minute preparations. While major decisions, such as which artists to bring, were made months ago, final details such as pricing, and the packing of everything from the art itself to things like stationery and pens, are left to be taken care of in this final week.“We have to create a mini-gallery at the art fair,” Yancey Richardson, a photography dealer who is participating in the new fair Art Miami, said. “We have to bring everything we might need, from a first-aid kit to our guestbook, in which we staple business cards [of new prospective clients] and make notes about what they’re interested in and what we might do to follow up with them.”Many galleries now do as many as four art fairs a year, so the cumulative work of designing a booth for each (including floor plan and lighting scheme), and installing and de-installing it, takes up a good amount of a dealer’s time.“[Right now] we’re selecting furniture, and we have to select the paint color for the walls,” Zach Feuer said last week. “We’ve done a little maquette [of the booth] where we have the artworks printed out to scale, and figurines to represent people.” The most important piece of furniture the gallery decided to bring to Art Basel this year is a small bookshelf, so that they can have books on all of the gallery’s artists available, without cluttering up the booth.Angela Westwater, of Sperone Westwater Gallery, said the gallery keeps a foam-core model of its booth for each of the fairs it does and, after each, considers what worked and what could be improved. This year, Sperone Westwater is taking a variety of new and old work to Art Basel Miami Beach, including a piece called “The Flying Dutchman II” by Guillermo Kuitca; a new Malcolm Morley painting called “Monster Energy,” and a set of new photographs — which Ms. Westwater described as provocative and “a bit pornographic” — by Laurie Simmons.Some dealers do more than just design their booths; they turn them into full-scale home craft projects. The owner of Bellwether Gallery, Becky Smith, designed her booth for the New Art Dealers Alliance Art Fair with a dark wood floor and dark furniture in order to frame a wallpaper-like mural by Adam Cvijanovic, as well as set the booth off from the physical ambience of the rest of the fair, which Ms. Smith described as “rough and tumble, with a ratty concrete floor.”“My art handler and I bought a bunch of wood, and we’re staining it and we’re going to put it down ourselves,” Ms. Smith said. “It will look finished and chic.” She also ordered a round wood table and chairs from a catalog called Brocade Home, which she described as “West Elm meets spooky Victoriana.” Because the booth is more complicated than in previous years — there will also be monitors to exhibit two video self-portraits by the artist Abbey Williams — Ms. Smith is going down on Saturday, two days early, to start setting up.Different dealers do differing amounts of “pre-selling” — or marketing work to clients — before the fair begins. James Cohan, of the James Cohan Gallery, said that whether to promise pieces to clients in advance is “the conundrum of all art fairs. Because of the market today, we’re all in a privileged position where we have more clients than we have work, and it’s a struggle to not commit everything in your booth before the fair starts.” But he tries not to, he said, because the purpose of going to a fair is to meet new clients. Mr. Cohan is bringing to Miami, among other works, a Bill Viola video piece — the last one of an edition from “The Tristan Project” — which, Mr. Cohan said, “we could have sold a dozen times beforehand.”Lucy Mitchell-Innes, of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, said that her gallery rarely puts reserves on pieces they’re exhibiting and, when they do, those reserves only last for the first two hours of the fair — just enough time for a long-distance client to get a first in-person look at a work, and possibly call his or her spouse for a consultation. Mitchell-Innes & Nash is bringing a wide variety of work, including a special-focus exhibition by Enoc Pérez, who has a mid-career retrospective opening in Miami on December 6, at the Goldman Warehouse, a satellite of the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.John Connelly, who is exhibiting for the first time in Art Basel — he was one of the organizers of the NADA Art Fair, and in previous years showed there — has only one artist to worry about. Mr. Connelly is exhibiting in the section of the fair called Art Positions, set up on the beach in the shipping containers in which the fair infrastructure arrived from Switzerland. Mr. Connelly’s will contain just one piece, by Ara Peterson, a former member of the collective Forcefield. It is a 30-foot-long wall hanging that resembles a textile but is actually made up of tiny pieces of birchwood, laser cut in a pattern derived from video feedback. Mr. Connelly said it has two reserves on it.Asked why he decided to apply to the main fair this year, Mr. Connelly said: “The gallery is now five years old. It seemed like it was time to graduate and move on to this other context. And NADA encourages that, because they want the space for new galleries.” Plus, he said, “[t]he level of visibility of being in the big fair is important now, because there are so many fairs.”

Mounting Art Basel

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