Our own crisis?

Another one came in my email today, a notice from an art show that they were extending their deadline for entries. I’m also seeing a serious increase in the number of ads in the forums that I read saying “getting out of the business, selling everything.” I have no proof, neither the emails nor the ads go much into details about why, but it appears we are having our own little financial crisis in the art fair world. It mimics every financial crisis I’ve read about in the past few days. Money was getting made, people wanted to make more money , things got bigger, people got greedy, forgot who put them where they were, pushed and sometimes stomped on the people who put them where they were, stomped people started to bail, less money got made, stomping increased, more people bailed.

I’ve heard stories of what it was like to do an art show many years ago. Artists showed up and were charged a minimal fee that generally went to some sort of fundraising endeavor. I remember that the two shows I did twenty years ago were in answer to an ad in the newspaper looking for artists to do the show. I called the number and was told when and where to show up. There was no application process, very few rules.

Somewhere along the way, someone said, “We need to organize this better.” It was a good thing. Security was added, liability insurance, stable display requirements. Artists were pre-screened, rather than being first come, first served. Quality was increased, but expenses of putting on an art show increased. Competition increased, not only between artists, but between shows. Again, this was a good thing. Shows that did things well attracted the better artists. Artists who did things well got into the better shows. All was good.

But then came more shows and more competition. Shows added big name performers and corporate sponsors to attract more patrons. Booth fees went up because expenses went up for the big name performers and artists still applied in droves because the show had prestige and they could count on sales. Booth fees went still higher and still artists applied in droves. More artists were doing art shows because there was money to be made from doing what we love. More artists meant more artists were willing to pay the higher booth fees in order to get into the good shows. Now apparently application levels are dropping.

Fewer artists are willing to pay higher booth fees to be in shows attracting fewer patrons because there are more shows. Why are booth fees going up? Because there are more shows trying to attract patrons with extras like big name performers and freebies from corporate sponsors. Some of the big shows have become more like carnivals than art shows in order to get higher attendance which they can report to the artists in order to get higher booth fees and more applications. More applications increase the prestige about the show. There’s something almost irresistible about applying to a show with a 15% acceptance rate. It must be great, everyone is applying. But the big name performers and corporate sponsors tend to attract people who aren’t serious art buyers. Sales for the artist go down. It used to be that for every artist who said “no way’ to an astronomical booth fee to be next to a corporate sponsor with a microphone hawking cell phone plans, there were two or three or said “I will, I will”. Maybe that is changing and booth fees will become reasonable again.

(As a full disclosure however, my application is still in for the show where the corporate sponsors are hawking cell phone plans with microphones and I’ll gladly do it, at least once.)