Art Fair Survivabilty
“Established in 2004, Skate's Art Market Research provides high net worth individuals and institutional investors around the world with reliable and unbiased research supporting art investment decisions.” Skate’s Art Market Research proclaimed on Jan. 19, that 1,032,792 people attended the world’s top 20 art fairs in 2014, a 7.4 percent decline from the previous year. Some analyst have taken this as an indicator that Art Fairs are on the way out and as Skate also alludes that the market is shifting to other means of sales including online trading. Yet the report is vague on content concerning the effect of the world economic decline which seems to me to be a considering factor. I will predict that the numbers attending Art fairs will increase along economic lines and that if one was to formulate a graph of both Art fair attendance, and purchasing, over lapped with a graph of the world’s economic situation there would be a correlation. Yes, since Art Fairs took hold about ten years ago there has been a proliferation of them. In 2015 there were 269 art fairs listed internationally. These range from huge, such as Madrid, with over 92,000 visitors, to The Salon: Art and Design with 8000.
PARC is a baby compared to some of these huge Art Fairs, but it is the stronger of the two that take place in Lima. The decision of the organizers to host both at the same time is questionable and makes me curious as to what the motive could be. It is, I suppose likely that each wants to feed of the others audience, as all openings, and events take place on the same dates, and within the same time frames. There is, it seems to me a great redundancy in this though. All the energy and resources could be united to create one much larger Art Fair, instead of two widely separate affairs.
I once again believe considering the world climate and tendencies of buyers that the lesser of the two will eventually fail. I predict that PARC will continue into the future, and grow even stronger. Its location and it coordinators seem better structured. The ease of access is better, the accommodation of press better, the class which the events emanate is superior in my opinion. PARC also has a wide range of International and local galleries with a broad survey of representation of contemporary artists. It is for these reasons that I do not think PARC will become a causality in the Art Fair world!
Thank you for reading khipuz,
Art Fair Survivability
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