My last blog entry engendered some response from dealers I know, decrying the fate of the fairs and echoing the open question I had closed with- what to do. Sadly, no one offered any particular suggestions on how to improve matters.
What was asked of me was why I thought the fairs were on the ropes, and in this respect I have an opinion, and you, my gentle blogophiles, by the fact of your reading this, perhaps can guess what the answer is. As with the retail venue, the fair is being displaced by the virtual venue. For those of you who keep track, and we certainly do, our gallery traffic is at best static, but our internet traffic- site hits, inquiries, unique visitors- increases nearly every month, and has seen a 40% increase for the month just completed compared to April, 2008. Do we have a corresponding increase in sales on the internet? Not exactly, but what I can say is that buyers who formerly traded only with us in our galleries now buy from our website. Put another way, once someone has stopped in and satisfied themselves with our offerings, they have then felt comfortable to buy online. More significantly, though, it is a rarity to find any first time visitor who has not prior to darkening our threshold browsed our website.
The problem with the fairs is that a prospective buyer who traditionally would attend to browse the offerings of a variety of dealers now has the opportunity to do so 24/7 on the internet. Where formerly it was the perception that, with the fair in town, that represented the window in which to browse and make a purchase, now no such time constraint exists. For all practical purposes, a virtual fair exists on the internet at the beck and call of the web browser.
Somehow or other, with tough trading conditions, the presumption seems to be that the art and antiques business is fusty and needs to rejuvenate, and I mean that literally, to attract younger buyers. Reading some of the advance press for a fair now recently completed made an elaborate point of this, with one of the organizers encouraging younger buyers to attend, and stressing that much of the offerings at the fair would be in a lower price bracket. The irony is that it is just that lower priced material that is more prone than anything else to being searched for on the internet.
In an effort to reinvent fairs, many have lost their character, redefining themselves as luxury goods venues, offering things like jewelry, wine futures, and classic, and new, cars. While the notion of this is to broaden the appeal of the fairs by attracting all manner of moneyed folk, it has the unfortunate effect, through its disparate offerings, of diluting the focus on art and antiques. What most people fail to realize is that, no matter how much of the ready any punter has, when they work through the fair entrance, they’ve already decided how much they plan to spend. The more that’s spent on bling, the less that’s spent on art and antiques.