Norwegiancrafts.no

Last year I interviewed Hans Ulrich Obrist, perhaps the world’s best known living curator. He expressed the need for an art fair in what he called ‘the art fauna’. We had been discussing whether or not the city of Bergen needed a fine art biennial, and I posed the question of whether an art fair would be as good an idea. Obrist responded by saying that a complex artworld needs both, just as it needs museums and galleries –put differently, it needs commercial as well as non-profit institutions.

In the contemporary artworld there has been an ongoing discussion about defining ‘important art’ – who or what has, or should have, the power to determine this? Should this power lie with the biennials in Venice, San Paolo, Berlin, Istanbul, Mexico and so forth? Or is it the art fairs like Art Basel, Frieze Art Fair, Art Forum Berlin and Arco Madrid? Should ‘important art’ be determined by key curators and art patrons? Can artists themselves successfully catapult their works into the stratospheric category of ‘important’?

What is obvious is that art fairs have become important venues for showing art, as important as regular museum exhibitions or prestigious biennials.

But let’s move back even a bit further in time; two years ago Marc Spiegler, currently one of Art Basel’s directors, explained to me that the main reason for a gallery or an artist to be present at an art fair is not for sake of immediate sales transactions during the five-day event; rather, the importance lies in the after effects.

For galleries, this means more collectors will visit them in-between the fairs, and for artists, it means that collectors become aware of them, and maybe go to see their works in exhibitions elsewhere.

In the world of craft and applied arts, similar observations can be made, but it seems that the marketplace is even more important to craft-persons than biennials or exhibitions are.

Perhaps this has to do with the status of craft compared with that of fine art.

Regardless, I think it is safe to say that the fair per se, be it for fine art, craft or combinations of the two, has become an increasingly significant venue form because it allows the artist to interact with an audience and to tap into a market. Meanwhile, as far as the crafts are concerned, the fair venue in particular seems to stimulate the market, leading to increased sales, recognition and status for crafts in general.

This summer Norwegiancraft.no visited COLLECT in London and EUNIQUE in Karlsruhe and experienced both fairs up close.

A Norwegian survey conducted in 2009 shows that the world-wide financial crisis has impacted the craft sector in Norway. Hence it might be an astute decision for Norwegian craft artists to get more involved in international craft fairs. As markets become increasingly global, one way out of financial misery could be through export markets.

This issue of Norwegiancrafts.no can therefore be seen as an attempt to explore craft fairs and global markets, and to learn more about the possibilities they hold for Norwegian craft artists.

Text: André Gali

Published: 15 Jul 2010