Sammy Beckett once said this about art fairs: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

I’m not reporting anything new here as to why high-end art fairs are a bore. Simply put, they are redundant exercises in commerce, where art as an idea doesn’t matter. Quick math: If you’re a mid-tier gallery, you’re on the hook for at least a quarter mil USD all in with the booth, staff travel, shipping, parties, endlessly stupid, wasteful shit. Bigger galleries are at least double. For smart dealers with the right material, the fair can be a nice revenue stream, but 250K in costs better bring back at least that or triple or a mil plus. The artists mostly fall in line because they can use the money. Can’t blame them using the fair as a market. Also, it’s no secret that some of the work is already sold before the fair opens via bombing out PDF. When fair revenue can be twenty-plus per-cent of the yearly nut, the need to chase the dragon is why there’s always another time zone, another dumbass party, another hangover, sad airplane ride, jetlag, repeat. A necessary evil.

How to break it? Nearly impossible. The architecture of a fair means that there can’t be any real sense of difference regarding space. You can paint the booth red or build some strangely angled walls, but that’s just bluster. If you want to make it interesting, a gallery needs to toss out the financial playbook and do the thing that always makes for great art – present artworks that completely question what the fuck is going on. In this rare moment amid the noise, one might hopefully go silently inside of themselves, take a step back and ponder. Ah, the strange and uncomfortable. An absurd task in a soulless conference center, under hard florescent lights, surrounded by an overload of thousands of artworks screaming for attention. Gavin Brown did it with Urs Fischer’s cigarette pack bouncing around a huge booth. Andrew Kreps did it by hawking Darren Bader’s idea of a woman with a pretty face walking around Art Basel Miami Beach (edition of 2 + 1AP, of course). A quarter century ago, crammed into a Basel Statements booth, my old gallery presented a bonkers solo intro of paintings and a sculpture by a basically unknown artist named Takashi Murakami. All these interactions were hate/love, but got people talking, thinking, confused – sadly, all basically unthinkable experiences at today’s fairs.

As an art dealer, I admit to being terribly complacent. For my old gallery, solo exhibitions of artists were the most radical thing to do under the circumstances. Honest truth: An art fair is a capitalistic event, the infrastructure costs too much, so risks just don’t happen anymore. The money is too big. If you’re not buying, but looking, learning, thinking … much more calm and nourishing to wander around a museum, foundation, or gallery.

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This text appears in Spike #80 – The State of the Arts under the title “What Is It about Art?” To read the other 7 answers, you can buy your copy in our online shop.