Valerie Kabov
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Lines in the Art Market Sands for the African Contemporary Art (African Art at Art Dubai 2013)

4/7/2013

 
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Ways to impress at Art Dubai 2013
This year’s edition of Art Dubai was uniquely important for African contemporary art. For the 2013 edition’s focus exhibition Marker, Art Dubai invited the well-known Lagos based curator by Bisi Silva to develop a concept with a spotlight on Africa. Silva, chose to side-step the Africa is a country issue by presenting a tableau of West African contemporary art, bringing to debut Art Dubai five important West African art galleries: Senegal’s Raw Material Company, Cameroon’s Espace Doual’art, Carpe Diem from Mali, Ghana’s Nubuke Foundation and Silva’s own CCA Lagos from Nigeria. Silva’s reputation and irrepressible energy also delivered to Marker and its participants impressive media engagement and a higher than could be expected number of African visitors. In my opinion however, by far the most crucial outcome that Marker delivered was to focus the attention of the African contemporary art community on the issue of engagement with the art market by the African contemporary art galleries and artists on the continent. 

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Soly Cissé at Raw Material Company booth at Art Dubai
Art fairs are proliferating around the world and have become a key vehicle for sales and professional and commercial development and sustainability for artists and galleries. However, African galleries are in a blind spot of this major not to say massive part of the art industry. When First Floor Gallery Harare debuted at Berliner-Liste in 2012, we were the only African gallery in the fair and one of only two African galleries (the other being from South Africa at abc) in the total of four major art fairs taking place during the Berlin art week representing close 800 international galleries. The same sad numbers would be in evidence from Basel to Cologne, New York and Hong Kong.

Due to this paucity of representation of African art galleries, some of us in the African contemporary art community might have expected that this substantive show of force at Art Dubai will “mark” all triumphal arrival of African contemporary art galleries on the art market. If this was the expectation, it was unrealistic. However, what Marker did create was a sense of awareness of the breadth of the art market among many contemporary art organisations operating across Africa, which have been sheltered from the art market by years of philanthropic funding. Sheltered from the risks but equally from the rewards and opportunities. It also raised awareness of the skills and professional engagement that needs to be built up inside the African contemporary art community if we are to become the rightful beneficiaries of the growing awareness and appreciation of African contemporary art internationally instead of following the predictable paradigm of becoming the unvalued developer of talent and net exporter, like all too many other African domestic industries.

Now the art market does not have any special rules when it comes to selling and it is important to recognise that when knowing how to engage. While art as a product is special, when we deal with it as a product, we are in a market place and with people who buy and sell and trade in all sorts of things all the time and reduce things to time, money, value and profit.

As African contemporary art galleries begins to gain a foothold in the international art market, having begun to make a mark in the critical sphere, they need to realise that the learning curve is steep. In this sense, entering the art market at Art Dubai was in many ways, like being thrown head first in the deep end. To some inexperienced observers of the art market the conspicuousness of money, business and wealth in Dubai seems like a guarantee of sales of almost anything, including art. This is definitely not the case. Unlike more established art fairs in Europe like Art Basel or Frieze or Art Cologne in cities and countries, Art Dubai is not based in a city with an established art collecting culture. As a result, Art Dubai has the double uphill task of both establishing itself as an art fair and creating a collector culture in a city where everything is new and has to be done from scratch.

Having taken some time to analyse Art Dubai 2013 from the market perspective and speaking to a number of exhibiting galleries like London’s Bischoff/Weiss, Bolsa de Arte from, Porto Alegre (Brazil) or Sfeir-Semler from Beirut/Hamburg several things became very clear. Most of the exhibitors saw, Art Dubai as part of their long-term marketing strategy. They were, coming to the fair primarily not to sell but to develop new contacts and collectors and deepen engagement, which may in the future yield sales not only in Dubai but also in their home bases. For anyone who visited the Sharjah Biennale running concurrently with Art Dubai in the neighbouring Sharjah Emirate, it also became eminently evident that some of the bigger name galleries like Yvon Lambert or CRG Galleries New York, who were making a debut at Art Dubai, were doing it to leverage the participation in the Biennale of the artists they represent. Moreover, the vast majority of international exhibitors, from Australia’s GAG Projects to Paris/Brussels’ Almine Rech and New York’s Alexander Gray Associates, brought to Art Dubai not Australian or French or US artists but rather Australian/French/American artists of Middle Eastern origin, taking the low risk, slow approach to engaging the Dubai market and with a consciousness of the sensibilities and sensitivities of their might be patrons. These calculations and strategies and interplays of relationships between fairs, biennales and museums are the realities of the art industry today and need to be mastered by newcomers.

For, while most of the African participants in Marker, are highly experienced and established art professionals and institutions in their own fields and countries, they were by and large novices to the art market and this level of engagement with the industry. It is perhaps not surprising that the experience of the fair may not have been the easiest of undertakings, for some as much at odds with their operational as well as curatorial modus operandi.

An international art fair if anything is a place, which forces you to have your feet firmly on the ground, where experience and expertise count for 80% of success. The other 20% of success is having international quality product in a market that has limited interest for niches and ultimate interest in sustained quality and merit that can reach beyond national borders and beyond national prices. It was not a surprise, that Solle Cisse’s works at Raw Materials Company were a hit with international curators and collectors. The work stood out for quality, which was not constrained by its geographic or cultural provenance but rather leveraged by it.

Negative comments about engaging with the art market are much too common among art professionals in the not-for-profit sector, yet it is a blinkered proposition and a self-defeating one, especially in the African context. Taking a look at the interplay between Sharjah Biennale and Art Dubai, should be sufficient evidence to dispel the notion that the for-and-not for profit sectors of the industry do not have a symbiotic relationship.  African artists and galleries do not need to compromise on quality or play up to the market to gain attention or sales, however they do need to be international market ready and to know what being market ready means.

One of the most positive things to be carried away from Bisi Silva’s Marker at Art Dubai is that African galleries, rather than European galleries representing African artists made their presence known in a substantial way. Moreover they stood out as a contingent, with (unintentional) courage to show their local artists and represent their contemporary art rather than accommodating the local market tastes. This is the courage and integrity that we can and should sustain going forward.

Whatever the perceived difficulties that Marker “Africa” had at this year’s Art Dubai, they are minor teething problems and an unavoidable part of growing maturity of our domestic art scenes and galleries. There is no room for discouragement and all the room in the world for thinking soberly and strategically about what it takes and what we need to learn and achieve to become equal partners in the art industry. As in other spheres of human activity political and ideological independence is not possible without economic independence and art world really is no different.

In her review of Marker for Contemporary &, Christine Eyene raised a questions about what lessons are to be learnt from Marker in the lead up to 1:54 the first contemporary African Art Fair in London this year, running as a satellite to Frieze. To my mind the answer is unequivocal. Non-engagement with the art market is not an option if we are to build up our domestic art sectors that are viable and to deliver to African artists on the promise of viable professional careers.

Equally evident to my mind is that African galleries need to be smarter and more strategic leveraging art market opportunities. Unlike many of our international counterparts, we live with realities of higher costs of transport and travel and no capital investment or lines of credit or bank loans to support new gallery businesses and limited to non-existing local markets. The challenges are huge, we cannot pretend they are not, but equally huge are the imperatives to realise the dreams of the talented artists on the continent for genuine recognition and economic independence.

The 1:54 Contemporary art fair will be another opportunity to make a statement of arrival and claim to a rightful place in an art market and a context that is developed, robust and expansive. This opportunity is not an unambiguous one. Participation in 1:54 is open to any gallery exhibiting an African artist. If African galleries don’t step up their place and their opportunities to engage and learn and develop, will be taken by European and American galleries already making a profit from exhibiting African artists.

These are the options and lines in the sand in Dubai or elsewhere. 



It's not about New York...

4/1/2013

 
In the past week, two distress signals emanated from the global art capital (New York) as an alert to the art community at large. The first came out in The Art Newspaper reporting that Nicole Klagsburn is to close her gallery in Chelsea after 30 years in the business (http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Nicole-Klagsbrun-to-close-gallery-after--years-in-the-business/29137). Klagsburn cites the burden and corrupting influence of the market driven art system as the cause:

“structure of the system is overwhelming. A dealer’s job … gets swallowed up by this endless sea of events, fairs and biennials. The pace of it means you don’t have time to reflect or think, or strategise about the right steps for your artists’ careers. The standard of the art goes down, but there are always buyers and, if you don’t take part, you’re not successful.”

Two days later, almost chiming in, Jerry Saltz wrote a “eulogy” for the “gallery show” in the New York Magazine, roughly along the same lines:

“Chelsea galleries used to hum with activity; now they’re often eerily empty. …Fewer ideas are being exchanged, fewer aesthetic arguments initiated. …Instead, the blood sport of taste is playing out in circles of hedge-fund billionaires and professional curators, many of whom claim to be anti-market. There used to be shared story lines of contemporary art: the way artists developed, exchanged ideas, caromed off each other’s work, engaged with their critics. Now no one knows the narrative; the thread has been lost. Shows go up but don’t seem to have consequences, other than sales or no sales.” (http://www.vulture.com/2013/03/saltz-on-the-death-of-art-gallery-shows.html) 

The views of two stalwarts of the contemporary art world are neither to be lauded nor rued, especially by those of us somewhere South-South-East of the global centre geographically and conceptually. Their comments point not to the capitalist, globalisation malaise but to failure of the gallerists and art advocates in understanding the role and the place of the market accurately in the art sector. What both are describing are the capitulation to the market by the “art leaders” especially in the case of gallerists and many art institutions over the past two decades. While they welcomed the market and enjoyed the sales and sponsorships they neglected their duty to be the drivers of quality and allowed themselves to be consumed by “the customer is always right” mindset, which makes them complicit in the lowering of standards being complained about.

Too many art openings, gallery and museum have lost appeal by excluding artists by prioritising the sponsors and the moneyed collectors. Too many gallerists no longer see their jobs as being purveyors of art but being merely purveyors. The results are predictable.

However there are opportunities in the current situation, which are both immense and important if we have courage and vision to act.

The flipside-upside of the marketisation of the art world has created a global infrastructure for dissemination and creation of art. The market has made contemporary art prominent and relevant in a much broader range of countries and cultures than in the past. As much as they are maligned, art fairs have created earning opportunities and enabled the participation in the art scene for a much wider geographical and cultural spectrum of artists. This in and of itself has expanded the sustainability of contemporary art sectors around the world and the very creation of art and art scenes engaged in critical dialogues relevant to their countries in cultures across the planet. If this means that New York is less of an art capital, so be it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, while people may not be flocking to art openings in New York, but the openings in our tiny space in Harare are packed and people are discussing critical issues and exchanging ideas and the same phenomenon can be felt in Bangkok and Lagos and Bogota. The globalisation of the art market has created an infrastructure for democratisation of access and decentralisation of the art world and this is major progress.

What is important and relevant to recognise however is that the contemporary art sector has allowed itself to be market led and that has never led to the making or the propagation of quality art. We can accept that much of the interest in contemporary art and emerging art markets was and is primarily driven by greed, but we don’t need to be passively led by it.

Art dealers and leaders need to leverage the infrastructure and the momentum present in the globalised market to assert the primacy of art over money. This is in fact a survival imperative if contemporary art is to retain any credibility and long-run value (c.f. fad prices). There is no alternative.

Jerry Saltz’s nostalgia for New York of yesteryear is nice but not helpful. We know that art is not going to perish and new forms of presentation, exhibition and representation will emerge and re-emerge as they have done for centuries and millennia. What the art world needs now is leadership, courage and vision of where we are and what the best interests of art and artists require. That vision means recognising that art centres today have shifted and will continue to shift. That today art is made everywhere and arguably the best art no longer comes from established centres of the past century and that is very very ok. Our job is to make sure that quality and talent succeed, wherever they come from. Other than that, plus ça change, plus la même chose.

    Author

    Valerie Kabov is an educator, contrarian, researcher, interculturalist, idealist, cynic and art advocate above all...

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