An opportunity arose and I decided to visit Berlin. I had never been there before and the opportunity included a visit to an art fair that takes place every year. In realty, it’s not just one fair but four contemporary art fairs in the same period.
The fair called Berliner Liste was particularly interesting to me because of the aspect concerning the participants. As in most commercial art fairs, there is a space dedicated to artists that wish to exhibit their work without having their own gallery. However, it seems that the participation of the artists in this particular fair was considerable and the sales of artwork were also substantial.
So I visited the Berliner Liste. The space provided for artists was equal to that provided for galleries. But the sales were not as considerable as I had imagined. I also found out that the participation fee was a sizeable amount for a struggling artist. All said, I don’t think that the fair will have any future because the only people that really benefit from its existence are the organizers.
Certainly, it’s not an easy moment for anyone involved in such a luxury market like fine art. But I cannot imagine that the artists themselves will have to play a dominant financial role in the changing market. Many artists today are willing to pay for exhibition space or their own publicity. I can understand an art ‘superstar’ with the financial power to be able to do this but I don’t understand the sense of such expenditures for an unknown artist.
A possible solution could be the dwindling of the current immense market into a smaller and more selective one. This would cause many unimportant distractive elements to disappear from the art world horizon. But the problem remains about re-calculating the intrinsic value that art has in our society. We’re not talking about just another consumer product after all.
