Over the last decade, the idea that an artist can be independent of the gallery system has become a reality. It may come as a surprise to some readers that there was a time, and not that long ago, when this was impossible. The system (an integration of galleries, auction houses and art history) was stacked against artists, and there was no easy outlet for them to bypass the established means with all its power and money. But although it is normative for artists to be independent business-wise today, it is important that they continue to fight a particular prejudice. For it is not uncommon to find the outmoded idea that artists who are independent of the gallery system are of a low rank and not as legitimate or important as those within the system. This prejudice has been around for decades and has enabled the system to maintain a degree of psychological power over the artistic community. Witness the kind of artists and exhibitions that critics and academics write about, and you can see just how infected they are by the very fact of their narrow subject matter. It was in a similar context of psychological ‘warfare’ that the original derogative term ‘vanity gallery’ first arose, a way for the gallery system to belittle those who tried to become independent (it was artists who first started independent galleries). Today, there is a proportion of artists who still refuse to exhibit alongside other artists because they perceive the latter beneath them in some way, whereas others are obsessed with their ‘world rankings’ on questionable comparative websites. Sadly, artist art fairs (I will refer to them as ‘entretive fairs’ from now on) have not been immune. For the same issue has affected some of them to an extent that they are not entretive fairs at all. And it is to this issue that I wish to turn. I propose to do this by outlining three key features, marks of authenticity, if you like, of an entretive fair.

(1) Entretive fairs are not dealer or gallery fairs

When entretive fairs emerged in the early twenty-first century, no one really understood what form they should take. With no precedent or model, the closest type of event was a gallery show or dealer fair, like Frieze or London Art Fair. So they tried to imitate them. In came judging panels, curators, printed catalogues, extra-curricular activities, lectures, shoppers, VIP agents, lanyards, sponsorship, and even ‘highbrow’ magazine advertising. However, it quickly became obvious that the task was impossible to deliver at the same level because artists were not gallery businesses. They did not have anything like the same revenue. So in came the investors and the debt. People were convinced that the entretive fair was going to be the same as a gallery fair in appearance but with artists instead. And investors, confusing Tech with everything else, went in big, thinking it would pay huge dividends in time. All this was, to some extent, fed by the prejudice of the gallery system, as outlined in the introduction. And it worked to a degree. Artists were persuaded to part with £2000-£8000+ for display space (equivalent to galleries in some middle-market dealer fairs) only to lose it all with little or no return. And some did not seem to mind because they were sold a one-off ‘experience’, like taking a once-in-a-life-time holiday. It was prestigious to be in what looked like a large-scale dealer fair for artists. Indeed, some gallery fairs went mixed (fearing the competition), and sold their cheaper stands to artists. However, the income stream from artists still wasn’t enough for entretive fairs to compete with gallery fairs (or the mixed) and so the debt ballooned. This was confounded by a central problem. Without ‘warmed-up’ clients (usually those of galleries in a dealer fair) mixing amongst ‘cold’ visitors, the majority of artists struggled to break even. No matter how many seminars on selling they were put through or which expert lectured, most still could not reach anywhere near what they had paid for the space. The business model had failed because the form and model of a gallery fair did not respect the actual needs of artists. Indeed, it worked against their financial interests. For an artist needs a low break-even point so that they can repeat their display several times a year and develop a market over the long-term. It is not a one-off ‘experience’, a ritzy PR ‘show’ or a once-in-a-life-time opportunity to become ‘discovered’. Instead, it is about developing an income stream over time that is regular, consistent, and even scientific. Hence, display fees should always be low in relation to artists’ incomes. This inevitably impacts the form of an entretive fair. It determines what it will look like, what it must focus on, what it can do, and what it actually is. Its form, then, organically develops from the artists’ lives and needs, instead of trying to fit them into a ready-made mould. An entretive fair will never look like a gallery or dealer fair. They are chalk and cheese. The danger of entretive fairs that imitate gallery fairs, and call themselves entretive fairs, is that they give artists a false impression of a true entretive fair. Indeed, they appear as they do because they are servicing high levels of debt. And with so much debt, they are effectively ‘zombie’ companies without going cap-in-hand to investors, who may choose not to fund them in time, especially as interest rates have returned to their historical level after a decade of ultra-low rates. So much debt is socially irresponsible and artists should think twice about whether such an organisation is aligned with their own beliefs.

2) Entretive fairs do not turn artists into subcontractors or employees

If an artist is contracted by a gallery they are a subcontractor. (Artists who are linked to online galleries that take a commission are also subcontractors.) The gallery owns the client list and selects artists who manufacture (or could do so) the products that their client list would like to buy. The system is deductive. The gallery and client already know what type of product they want before any artist is chosen. Indeed, the gallerist could sell the same type of work by different artists to the same client. It is the client’s interests that determine what products are sold and even made in some instances. Galleries that take artists to dealer art fairs are often showcasing those products to a wider but known market. It is both deductive and inductive then. If they get a ‘hit’ for a new artist in the market, they focus on the interests of the buyer and generate other sales from their stock. The artist is usually the lesser party in the relationship and holds little power. If a gallerist wishes to terminate the services of a subcontractor (perhaps the clients change their interests) that is business. The client list is held by the gallerist, and they negotiate the sales and process payments. They pay their subcontractors either a fixed salary (in this respect artists are more like ‘employees’) or/and a percentage of sales (I will discuss the commission-based system in the next section).

It is worrying that some entretive fairs have become dealers in disguise, converting artists into subcontractors. They actively sell (or even pre-sell) artwork to their own client list. This is, in principle, no different from a gallery. It also creates a hierarchy because not all artists are sold privately, some are left out. It also affects the submission process (a fair would never accept an artist whose work it deemed ‘unsellable’ to its client list). However, because they also take exhibition fees, they are more akin to a ‘vanity gallery’ than a gallery or an entretive fair. (There is actually nothing wrong with a ‘vanity gallery’, and I do not use the term derogatively, on condition that the artist is understood to be the greater party in the contract.) This is contrary to what happens in an entretive fair and is against the principles of freedom and independence, which are at its core. In an entretive fair, the artist sells their products directly, meaning that they pitch to visitors and process payments using their own devices. The buyer becomes their client. It is inductive, though over time, as they return, the process becomes inductive and deductive. They do not make sales through a centralised system. In a number of circumstances, non-UK sellers or technological problems, this is contravened but on the whole there is never a legal requirement for a fair to collect artists’ sales and no exhibitor’s work is sold privately. An entretive fair does not turn artists into subcontractors.

3) Entretive fairs do not charge commission on sales

The commission-based system is a recent invention and, in its modern form, developed in the late nineteenth century. This fact is often not realised by artists, particularly its advocates and vocal supporters. The system was not invented by artists but dealers as they began to subcontract living artists on an on-going basis (instead of selling antiquities and old masters). It went hand-in-hand with artists being subcontractors. We should distinguish this commission-based system from artists being commissioned directly by clients, for example institutions contracting Renaissance artists to produce altarpieces or interior decorations. This involved, on the whole, no middle party and the artist received payment from the commission directly. When a portraitist is commissioned directly by a client, as artists were for centuries, similarly this would not be a commission-based system. However, some portraitists today are subcontracted by agents who take a cut from the sale. This would be a commission-based system because the artist is actually subcontracted; the agent is really a dealer in modern portrait commissions.

For centuries, the idea of someone taking a cut from an artist’s sale was abhorrent because artists considered themselves independent trades people. Indeed, artists often despised print sellers for making money from their creations but the relationship was equally balanced. They went into contract together as two independent businesses. Sometimes a print seller would receive a number of prints as payment to sell at their convenience or all parties were invested in what was considered to be a piece of stock. Dealers did not take a commission and pay artists a salary. The artist was not a subcontractor, which would have been likened to ‘slavery’. When artists first inaugurated art societies and began to open up their own public exhibitions, the societies made money not from commission on sales but on the sale of catalogues at the door. This all began to change from the mid-nineteenth century as dealers supplemented the annual salons and became more sophisticated and comprehensive as businesses. Amongst these dealers, some began contracting artists rejected by the salons. These galleries paid the artists a stipend because they could not make sales until they had fully developed an alternative interpretation of the painterly sketch and, by way, created a new market. With the advent of the twentieth century, and as the importance of salons faded (to be replaced in part by art fairs) the dealer system proliferated becoming the main avenue of art promotion in conjunction with contemporary art auctions, museum collections policies and academic art history. The irony, and often not pointed out in art history, is that this system produced celebrity millionaire artists who were essentially subcontractors with far less independence than artists in previous centuries.

Sadly, the commission-based system has found its way into entretive fairs where it has no place. Shockingly, commission is taken from exhibitors during the fair and in the subsequent month after the event by some organisations. Commission can be as high as forty per cent. This is opposed to the core values underlying entretive fairs. However, the practice of taking commission is often defended (even by some artists) by claiming that it incentivises event owners to work on behalf of the artist but, as we have already pointed out, an entretive fair is not a gallery and does not subcontract artists. This is to import the gallery system into an entretive fair. Indeed, if such an argument is made it is a clear indication that the entretive fair is very likely privately selling a number of the artists and is not an entretive fair. But even if this were not so, it is a poor argument to suggest that a fair is incentivised by commission when it has already obtained a sizeable display fee. Commission is just a cherry on top of a large cake. The cake is already there with or without. The commission is on top of a display fee. In contrast, an entretive fair never takes commission because the artists are perceived as independent businesses that make their own sales directly from visitors. The difference turns on how artists are perceived. An entretive fair, then, is not a type of enlarged temporary ‘vanity gallery’, where sales are processed centrally and exhibitors are subcontractors, but a direct business-to-consumer event.

In conclusion, entretive fairs are not gallery fairs, they do not turn artists into subcontractors and do not charge commission. Underlying these three key elements is a core value. For in the twenty-first century, we have all become accustomed to more independence via the internet, especially social media. The practical outworking of this cultural phenomenon is that we have become more aware of acting directly without the need of a middle party. And this is the important point. Artists do not need anyone to sell their work. They have all the information to learn, develop and act at their fingertips, quite literally. The entretive fair is a partner in this new endeavour, serving artists by generating conditions that stem organically from their needs. For just as physical parliaments and representative democracy will one day be replaced by more direct means, such as digital democracy, so the future step of art fairs is for artists to collectively become an entretive fair and do everything directly themselves.

Dr C G Barlow. Copyright © 2024 C. G. Barlow.