_Exploring the best international art fairs of 2018
Art Beijing
29 April–2 May 2018
Since 2006, Art Beijing has tracked the meteoric rise of the Chinese market, not only bringing local artists to a wider audience, but also introducing Western artists to the country’s burgeoning scene. This year’s show, its 13th, will also include separate sections for design and photography, with themed public displays of Chinese artists curated by Zhao Li.
Around 100,000 people attended the 2017 event, which featured 160 exhibiting galleries. Organisers reckoned that the sweet spot price for sold works was between £10k and £30k, with both contemporary and classic works available for sale.
The global art fair is as popular as it’s ever been, with the key players opening up satellite shows around the world and every major city clamouring for a slice of the cultural capital that being involved in such an event brings.
It’s as much about finance as it is about art, with dealers hoping to capitalise on the rampant speculation that has defined the modern market. Here are the best fairs for buying art, exploring new trends and watching the movers and shakers in the contemporary art world.
Frieze London
4–7 October 2018
Frieze is now a London institution, a massive tented city of all the wonders the art world has to offer, set up in Regent’s Park every autumn. Started by the publishers of Frieze magazine, the chronicle of the burgeoning British scene in the 1990s, Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp held their first fair in 2003. Today it has a satellite operation in
New York, a separate Old Masters show in London attracting interest from the world’s major auction houses, and a new Los Angeles fair set to premiere in February 2019. As much about being seen as seeing, Frieze is now the capital’s pre-eminent cultural event.
FIAC Paris
18–21 October 2018
Hosted in Paris’s Grand Palais, one of Europe’s grandest exhibition halls, the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain is pitched at the art world’s most illustrious and high-flying figures. Last year saw the fair venturing out into Paris’s well-manicured open spaces – such as the garden of the Eugène Delacroix Museum – with Fiac Hors les Murs, an open-air showing of sculpture that’s helped democratise its image. With around 200 galleries in the Palais, as well as a programme of performance art to accompany it, Fiac is rightly lauded as the dealer’s choice of international fairs.
Art Basel Miami Beach
6–9 December 2018
Probably the most significant art market in the world, the Miami Beach branch of Art Basel has been coming to the Magic City since 2002. In recent years, the value of art on display has exceeded several billion dollars, and the city’s own economic revival owes much to the lure of fairs such as this, bringing in a jet-setting clientele who are just as likely to buy a condo as a Koons.
The original Art Basel began back in the 1970s and now serves as the European hub for the global art world initiative. Back in Miami, the fair is just as well-known for the whirl of social events that surround the gallery shows.