Art & Design In Focus
Art & Design In Focus American painter Pat Steir’s Considering Rothko (2020-21), shown at Lévy Gorvy’s Palm Beach gallery this spring to a forthcoming private membership programme. It’s also evidence that though online art sales totalled US.4 billion last year – almost a quarter of the total value of the market – there is still a place for bricks and mortar. That said, Frieze’s success with online viewing rooms, a platform it had started to develop “long before” the dawn of Covid-19 as an adjunct to its fairs, suggests that OVRs are here to stay too. “They don’t replace the real-life experience of seeing art at a fair,” says Siddall. “But you’re never going to get every single collector travelling to every fair, so we’d been looking at ways to maximise our reach.” When last year’s edition of Frieze New York was forced to cancel, they were poised to move it online and in doing so, she says, “we busted many myths about what was possible to sell” via the internet. Hauser & Wirth, for example, sold 16 works on day one, including George Condo’s Distanced Figures 3 for US million, and paintings by Rashid Johnson and Paul McCarthy for US0,000 and US5,000 apiece. “It was at least equivalent to a good year in the real world,” says Wenman. Most of the works were new, made in some cases just days before the fair, and would never have arrived in time if they’d had to be shipped physically across the world. Hauser & Wirth’s clients were not the only ones to buy. According to Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics and author of The Art Market 2021, an annual analysis commissioned by Art Basel and UBS, 45 per cent of the 2,569 collectors she surveyed made purchases through an OVR last year, drawn in particular to works whose prices were displayed alongside, which is rarely the case in actual exhibitors’ booths. But there is an art to displaying art digitally. “We’ve taken part in 13 online art fairs in the past 12 months,” says Wenman, as well as 25 of their own online exhibitions, through “ The past year has been a time to innovate and find new ways to enable galleries to do business and artists to show work ” – Victoria Siddall which they’ve “developed a sort of hybrid approach, combining dynamic editorial” with ever-more-sophisticated technology. For the digital Art Basel, for example, Hauser & Wirth strove “to recreate the feeling of eating Wurst in the courtyards of the Messe”, the trade fair hall where it takes place, by means of a series of online interviews with “prominent people connected with the fair”, not just collectors and artists, but the general manager and chef de bar at Basel’s great grand hotel Les Trois Rois, among others its client base would normally run into. By the autumn, however, Hauser & Wirth had ventured into virtual reality, constructing the entire tents of both Frieze London and Frieze Masters. “Only our booth was finished,” says Wenman. “Fully lit” and hung with “an entire group exhibition. Around us, the corridors were full of crates just as they would be in the day before the opening, so it looked as though we’d just arrived a couple of days early,” he says. “We were not only showing the benefits of virtual reality as a way of seeing art, we were also seeing the future.” “OVRs have pushed us to be much more creative and imaginative in the way we commission photography and video,” explains Stéphane Custot of Custot Gallery Dubai and London’s Waddington Custot, who also believes digital innovations will play an increasing role in selling art. “I’m sure it’s something we will continue to build on.” Though as one of 50 galleries to exhibit at this year’s Art Dubai, the first art fair of 2021, he is “kind of optimistic” that we will see a return to fairs even if “they’re not going to be like they were because people will remain cautious”. What has encouraged him about the past year, however, is the quality of work that has been made during the lockdowns. “With fewer demands on their time, our artists – and I’m sure this is the case worldwide – had time to really concentrate on their creativity. They weren’t bothered by the telephone, by dealers coming to their studio and pushing them to From far left: Moucharabieh in the Night (2020) by late Moroccan painter Mohamed Melehi at Dubai’s Lawrie Shabibi gallery, which also exihibits at Cromwell Place; iconic German potter Hans Coper’s Small Composite Form (1962), shown by J&J Rawlin at Cromwell Place PHOTOS FROM TOP: ORIOL TARRIDAS, BENJAMIN MCMAHON, © CROMWELL PLACE (2) 54 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
PHOTO © VORTIC work.” Rather, they could focus completely on creativity. He mentions the painters Ian Davenport (“I’m amazed by his new works,” he says) and Fabienne Verdier (“I felt she was doing things she would never do in a normal time”). “So I think it will come to be seen as a very special time for art.” It’s also been a year of unprecedented collaborations between different sorts of institutions. Witness Christie’s partnerships with the art and antiques fair La Biennale Paris and the art-from-Africa fair 1-54. Not to mention new initiatives such as London’s inaugural Gallery Weekend over three days in June, featuring 87 businesses; and South South, launched by Liza Essers, founder of the South Africa- and Londonbased Goodman Gallery, as “an aggregator” to connect galleries, collectors, artists and curators across the global south, a series of regular by-invitation online selling events using auction technology, the better to create an “impetus to buy”. No sales figures were published after its first edition, but 56 galleries took part, attracting an audience from 138 countries and bidders from five continents: an “amazing” result, she says, that “unquestionably proves the necessity of the initiative”. More than pragmatic responses to an extraordinary year, these new ventures all promise to become permanent fixtures in the art calendar. But are they enough to eclipse the buzz, the thrill, the serendipity, the fun of fairs as we knew them? Neil Wenman thinks not. “They’re always going to be very important. They’re meeting points. They’re about seeing people and shared experience. There are certain things you can’t replace and that can’t just dissolve.” And more than that, “We’ve missed them.” Victoria Siddall concurs: “There is definitely a real appetite to look at art in person, to see people and to talk about it,” she says, her assertion supported by McAndrew’s finding that 80 per cent of the collectors she surveyed (a significant majority of whom also reported a deepening connection with art prompted by the pandemic) say they’ll be ready to visit an art fair by the final quarter of 2021. “But we won’t be going back to exactly what we were doing before,” adds Siddall. Fairs will be smaller, and, obviously, safety and security will be paramount. “But some good aspects are going to have come out of this awful time, and we’ll build on them and come out of this in better shape.” • ENVISIONING THE FUTURE Virtual reality is an experimental medium for artists, but what if it’s even better for galleries? By Willem Marx XR representations of David Zwirner’s and Victoria Miro’s London galleries, from Side by Side: A Presentation by Victoria Miro and David Zwirner on the Vortic Curate App It was on a department-store visit in 2016 that Oliver Miro first tried on a virtual-reality headset. Despite the 3D dinosaurs lunging at him, the technology was so impressive that a business idea began to percolate. Surrounded his entire life by art and artists, he had joined his mother Victoria Miro’s gallery in his early thirties after a decade working in financial services, and there were often moments in his job when an artwork needed to be viewed. He might initially examine an emailed digital image, but then standing before the actual work, he would be “completely surprised” by how it looked – “nothing how you envisaged in real life”. He also saw how the global dimensions of 21st-century gallery sales proved not only costly, but environmentally unsustainable; a client might encounter a work they liked at a fair in New York, have it shipped to London for one family member to view it, then on to Hong Kong for another to pass judgement – only to decline the purchase and force the work to be flown back to London, before ending up with another buyer in Miami. All this led Miro, four years ago, to seek out designers for a virtual-reality platform that would allow collectors and enthusiasts alike to examine and appreciate artwork from afar, to place them, he says, “in front of that piece of art in a digital way, that’s the best possible experience for them”. “It had never been done before,” Miro explains. “It was technically really, really difficult.” He spent around three years working with a series of virtual-reality developers, with his self-funded budget rapidly ballooning until a Paris meeting with Google’s former head of VR led, in turn, to an introduction to his current chief technology officer, an NYU adjunct professor who finally conquered the lighting, compression and distribution challenges inherent in Miro’s original vision. These cutting-edge techniques allow for a visually immersive experience that will run on any number of platforms: “a whole ecosystem”, Miro says, from › CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 55
