According to Nanne Dekking from TEFAF, the overall market for art and design declined in 2018 by one percent, reflecting a market that is not healthy. There has however been some growth in art selling from $1 million to just under $10 million and $10 million and up, a clear reorientation of the auction market.  For a Citibank art advisor a similar tendency was noted; their clients “sweet spot” has moved over the last two years to between $500,000 and $3 million, a noticeable shift not due to less art works in the market but rather more expensive estates entering it. Fewer works of art have been sold at auctions over the last years but at higher prices.  For auctions, the USA has retained its position as the art market leader with $16.7 billion in sales last year, a 20 % increase from 2017.  With the two top segments of the art market growing, the share of the remaining three, offering art work for under $100,000 has been getting smaller over the past six years resulting in the closure of many galleries that sell within that market. As Jeff Rabin suggests, this part of the auction market may disappear as the upper middle class leaves the art market. Rental of gallery space, a shrinking audience and rising costs for participating in art fairs make  survival problematic. The logical corollary is that the extraordinary creation of global wealth feeds the top end of the art market, which has now narrowed down to a small section of the frequently discussed 1% ultra-high-net income earners of the population.   Art costing more than $1 million accounts for 40 percent of the market but only 3 percent of all sales. As Larry Gagosian suggested, the $100 million price tag is replacing the $10 million charge for a work of art. The mega galleries in New York  like  Gagosian,Zwirner, Hauser and Wirth, and Pace  are epanding heavily with Pace spending more than $100 million as reported by the New York Times. The upscale 5th   Avenue Yares Art gallery is doubling its size by taking over the space across the hall formerly occupied by Mary Boone. In that context, Christie’s and Sotheby’s have extended their dominant role in the global auction house market for fine art. 

In a recent study of all aspects of the 2019 Art Market by Art Basel / UBS, art fair sales are estimated to have reached 16.5 billion in 2018, a growth of 30% in 2010 to 46% in 2018, of which close to one third originated at international events. Global dealers increased their sales share from 30% in 2010 to 48% in 2018 and their sales value increased to 46%, slightly below their gallery sales.  31% of all sales were concluded at international events and only 15% at local and national fairs.  Sales at international fairs were just 2% below those carried out by galleries. Rising income from international fairs outstripped the growth of income from galleries, reflecting a decade long decline of gallery sales.  Participating dealers serving the high end of the art market use the fairs as platforms to attract new buyers and increase sales rather than primarily serving the clients they have already. Whereas total art sales in the United States approximated   $12 billion in 2009 they reached $30 billion last year.   

Of the galleries present, American galleries formed the largest group amounting to 18% of fair exhibitors. As distinct from smaller fairs the top fairs are however oversubscribed with more galleries excluded since they are dropped in the vetting process. The Art Basel / UBS study of the most important 20 international art fairs lists three held in the United States. The Armory show had 65,000 visitors in 2018, Art Basel Miami 83,000 and Frieze New York 41,000. Frieze had a 22% in increase in attendees from 2017, the highest growth of the three.  In 2019 the new Frieze Los Angeles Fair had 30,000 visitors in its first edition with Frieze New York attracting 36,000 in 20019. If individuals attending the Frieze Sculpture show at Rockefeller Center staged from May 25 - June 28 are included  the number of 2019 Frieze visitors  is  larger. On the global level Frieze now ranks second behind the Art Basel fairs but catching up.

ARTnews reports that 78 of the 200 top collectors in the world attending the most important 20 US art fairs were billionaire and that 99 of the top collectors reside in the US. In the Forbes listing of 2017 there are 585 billionaires in the United States and 7% of the population, amounting to 17,350 people, are classified as millionaires. With a much smaller population, Germany had 123 billionaire and 2,183 German millionaires in that year.   

Using the criteria of quality of art work shown, innovation of programs, sales, and size of audience served, there is no question that with the recent addition of the Los Angeles, Frieze Art Fair Frieze is becoming the most important international American art fair. New York Frieze 2019 delivered a superb performance. There were new sections and curators, cooperation with numerous museum leaders, collaboration with El Museo del Barrio New York, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the DIA Art Foundation New York, the New York Drawing Center, and the addition of new important exhibitors. 200 groups of visitors from major  global art museums and istitutions attended.    A tribute to Linda Goode Briant’s pivotal New York gallery Just About Midtown, JAM, and eight solo presentations by eight artists from Briant’s roster were held. Some of the other new components of the fair included a virtual reality exhibition named Electric showcasing VR artworks,  Diagolos, a space for the celebration of Latin and Latin American Art in the Global Art World, as well as the Frieze Sculpture Show, a major public art initiative that expanded the Frieze fair beyond Randall’s Island to public spaces around Rockefeller  Center with the work of 14 international artists from April 25 – June 28. A large section of the fair was devoted to the Doors of Perception, a first time collaboration with the Outsider Art Fair which has preciously only shared its work with Christie’s. The onsite execution and sale of original art work by Steve Keene priced at $50 or less at the fair was a significant innovation. In the Spotlight section of the Fair 33 galleries featured solo presentations of work by overlooked artists, and in the Frame and Focus sections subsidized platforms with numerous additions showcased the work of galleries 10 years or younger and their artists. In the Frame section Cederic Eisenring’s urban photography work, represented by the Cologne-based DREI gallery, and shown over the last few years in numerous European venues, introduced an innovative multiform approach with images taken of East Coast bronze sculptures. He obscures fictional and realistic boundaries by intertwining his prints with self-reflexive quotes from graphic novels.

From the perspective of Victoria Siddall, the Director of Freeze Fairs, the New York edition of the fair is “the leading platform in the city to discover as well as to buy art...to expand the potential of an art fair, showcasing new and under-represented art forms alongside the most significant names in contemporary art”. The 2019 edition offered a unique opportunity to discover emerging influential but underrepresented artists. Apart from the  participation of  new top-tier Asian  galleries from Taipei, India, and Korea there were a growing number of  galleries from China, joining pace setting large international galleries  such as Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Lehmann Maupin, David Zwirner, Marlborough and others representing 26 countries. 

Dialogos was a section prompting reflection about contemporary influential Latin American artists which kept the viewers’ attention. Among the work shown were images by Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-American known for earth-body performances, and investigation of her identity. She was a rising, groundbreaking artist when she died at the age of 35 after falling from her high rise apartment window under mysterious circumstances. Her artist husband Carl Andre was tried for murder but acquitted.  Firelei Baez, an artist from the Dominican Republic, takes with her large thematically multi layered  eye catching  painting  Untitled ( Central Power Station) 2019, a prominent position in this section. Executed in acrylic and oil on archival printed canvas, the work reflects Baez mastery of different modes of visual involvement with representational images and cues merging on a patterned surface.  Born to Dominican Haitian parents, her wide ranging thematic interests cover  heritage, ethnicity, the diaspora experience in the Caribbean and the United States, and related political  topics. Her work in different media has been shown widely and she is the recipient of numerous awards. Untitled has already been sold to an American museum. Dialogos also features the work by Gala Porras-Kim. Her impressive 13 International Dogs, created in 2019, was executed in graphite, color pencil, and ink on paper mounted on canvas and offered for $18,000.

The Outsider Art Fair or the Doors of Perception section of Frieze was shown in a large booth curated by Javier Tellez, featuring 43 international artists with more than 300 works of art.  Arranged by the Outsider Art Fair in collaboration with Frieze New York the selected artists included Henry Darger, Aloise Corbaz, Martin Ramirez, Adolf Woelfli and George Widener, covering works executed from the 19^th to the 21^st century. They were presented in a maze-like setting with works displayed from floor to ceiling.  Frieze offered for the first time work by outsider artists, individuals who had no formal training in the arts and created their art in a highly individualistic artistic language. Their frequently complex works break the traditional and formal codes of the arts and open the doors of perception. These self-taught visionaries on the margins of society include mental institution patients, disenfranchised individuals cast away by society, and those who prefer to work in isolation from others. The successful annual Outsider Art Fair has been staged in New York since 1993 and in Paris since 2012 and has established itself as a niche for self-taught artists.  Outsider Art has become a recognized growing sub-field in the art market as Christie’s Outsider Art exhibition, now in the fourth year, clearly shows. More collectors are participating in Christie’s outsider sales, contrary to their traditional focus on Post-War, Contemporary, and Modern Art. This is in part prompted by museums and gallery exhibitions as well as by the higher prices achieved at auctions that have made outsider art more visible. At Christie’s, the estimated price range for the January 2019 Outsider Art auction ranged from $700 to $ 500,000 with the top sale reaching $684,000.  Overall sales by Christies at the 2019 Outsider Art auction set a new record of $4,261,625. The inclusion of Outsider Art in the Frieze 2019 New York Fair will certainly enhance the value of works of art in the outsider tradition. During the Frieze Outsider Art session more than 40 works were sold including Adolf Woelfli’s Otilien Berg from 1920, pencil on paper, for $40,000.

One of the most startling innovations of the 2019 fair was the working presence of the painter Steve Keene who made and sold his art work at his P.P.O.W booth.  He claims to have sold more than 250,000 paintings over the last 25 years. As a Yale university trained artist he does not belong to the outsider art group, yet he is unique in the structured upscale Frieze world because he produced hundreds of paintings on small wood panels during the fair. Sold for $15 - $50 each Keene made them in his booth in an assembly line fashion. His stage was jammed with fair visitors watching the rapidly styled execution of brightly colored paintings on mostly domestic subjects. Keene executed a dozen identical pieces at the same time. There could not have been a bigger contrast between his booth and sales performance and the sedate presence of the established global galleries at this frieze fair.  At Gagosian, three of  John Chamberlain’s  steel sculptures  priced up to $3.5 million were sold.  Malborough annouced the purchse by an unnamed European museum  for 550,000 of Red Groom’s 1995 soft sculpture large mixed media Bus, large enough to accommodate numerous visitors.  Several galleries  reported selling out all of the works presented including but not restricted to  Francois Ghebaly, Halfgallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery and Galeria Nora Fisch. Others sold most of their work like David Kordansky and Rachel Uffner. 

The Global Lead Partner for Freeze New York 2019 continues to be for the eighth year the Deutsche Bank which also featured in its Frieze lounge the mixed media and drawing work of the Philadelphia-based Nigerian artist ruby onyinchyechi amanze. Her work is part of the Deutsche Bank  collection of  art made by 5,000 artists from based in more than 40 countries. Supportive partners were BMW, Bombay  Sapphire, Financial Times, Johnnie Walker and others. The Swiss  Luma Foundation supported the Frieze Artist Award.

Claus Mueller   filmexchange@gmail.com