tldr: If you are an artist and you are reading this because you are wondering if you should do the Superfine! Art Fair, my suggestion is that you don’t. Very few of the artists I met at the fair made their booth fees back, and many didn’t sell anything at all. The curation of the fair is not good; they seem to give booths to any artist who can afford one.
The Superfine Art Fair was in Washington DC last week. I had a booth there and did my best to make some good contacts and move some good artwork. This was not my first art fair; I have done a fair called The Other Art Fair in Brooklyn and in Los Angeles in years past. These are all a relatively new type of event. Traditionally, art fairs have been like trade shows for galleries. The fair will consist of a big exhibition space and each gallery participating will get a booth where they hang work by artists they represent and hob nob with collectors and other art industry people. The galleries make a profit (most of the time) by selling artwork at the fair. The fair makes money by charging the galleries for the booths. The artists make money from their cut of the art sales.
The thing that makes this new type of art fair different is that instead of galleries the artists represent themselves. This looks great on paper because you cut out the middle man (the gallery) and the artist takes home more of the money from the sale of the work. There are a lot of these new style of fairs popping up all over the place. The Other Art Fair, Clio Art Fair, Superfine!, and StARTup are the ones I can think of without even doing a Duck Duck Go search (except to remember how to spell “Clio”).
So what did it mean for me to have a booth at the fair, exactly? It means that I paid over $3000 to the Superfine! Art Fair for the privilege of hanging my paintings in a booth composed of two six foot sections of wall that composed one quarter of an X shaped free standing wall segment in a large exhibition hall filled with over eighty other similar booths above Union Market in Washington DC. It also bought me the privilege of standing in or near that booth for twelve hours a day from Thursday through Sunday (plus an evening reception Wednesday night) so that I could talk to strangers about my work and try to persuade them to exchange their hard earned dollars for my original artwork. I got a nicely printed sign with my name and instagram handle marking my booth, and I got a lanyard with an exhibitors pass. I got to keep the lanyard, I did not get to keep the sign.
The Superfine people contacted me back in April. They appealed to my vanity and told me how much they admired my work and how well they thought I would do at their fair. They even scheduled a phone call with one of their founders so I could talk to them about my concerns about the fair (mainly the $3000 bit) and have them convince me that it was all worth it because of how much work they would do to bring the right kind of collector to the fair and how certain they were that my work would fly off the walls. I filled out an application. I was accepted almost immediately. All of this should have raised concerns. In contrast, I have applied to exhibit at The Other Art Fair four or five times. I have gotten accepted twice.
They also told me their curatorial team would work with me to choose what work I should show and create an exhibition plan. This turned out to mean that they asked me to submit a curatorial plan by pasting little thumbnail images of my paintings onto a gridded picture representing my booth’s wall space. I wanted feedback, so I submitted six different plans and asked a few times which direction they thought I should go. A week later they asked me if I’d decided on a final plan.
A few of the artists I met at the fair had never shown their work anywhere before. Let me say that again, because it shocked me: a few of the artists had never shown their work anywhere before this fair. You can make an argument for democratizing the art world by giving equal access to artists, but when the booth fee is $3000 I think it is verging on criminal to take that money from the artist and promise them great success. No, these artists did not make their booth fees back. I also did not make my booth fee back, so you make take this review with a grain of salt.
I went into the fair with a strategy of showing unframed work on Yupo with a very clever magnet based hanging system with prices starting at $100 for the 11 x 8.5” paintings, as well as two 48 x 36” paintings on canvas for $2285. This was already a loosing strategy, financially, because even if I sold out my booth I would just barely cover the cost of the booth fee, the hotel, gas, and highway tolls. But I brought backups and paid a little extra for some “hot storage” so I could replace paintings as they sold. I thought the $100 paintings would move very quickly, but it turned out that the big paintings drew all the attention and I don’t think non art collector types quite know what to do with unframed work (you frame it).
The only thing I sold was a $300 piece on Yupo mounted on archival foam core from my print rack. This sale happened on Sunday afternoon, after four days of not selling anything. I wish I had not sold it. Not only because it makes a better story to not sell anything at all, but also because another little quirk about Superfine! is that the artists themselves handle all the sales. That means you bring your little square reader or you post your Venmo barcode and the buyer pays you directly. That also means that you are obligated to collect sales tax, which I did, $18 worth. I spent about three hours last night trying to register my business with the District of Columbia so I could give them that $18 worth of sales tax. I did not succeed.
This is another point that bears comparison with The Other Art Fair. TOAF has a sales booth. When a patron buys a painting from an artist, the artist filled out sales slip on one of those carbon copy sheets that makes three copies. The patron brings the three sheets to the sales booth and makes a payment. The sales booth keeps one sheet and sends the patron back with two. The patron then gives one of the slips to the artist in exchange for the artwork and keeps the third as their receipt. TOAF handles all the taxes and fees and at the end of the fair distributes 85% of the sales price to the artist. This looks more professional and means that TOAF has a profit motive to actually sell artwork at the fair. It also means that artists traveling from out of state do not need to register their businesses on clunky government web sites in order to be compliant with tax laws.
Superfine! claims they moved half a million dollars worth of artwork at last years fair. I do not know where they get this number. They did not ask me about my sales numbers, and I do not think they were paying enough attention to know that my sales were so low.
There were some booths that seemed to be doing pretty well. My neighbor Lina Alattar sold a handful of gorgeous abstract paintings in the $2000 - $3000 range. A booth selling circular paintings of animals racked up a few dozen pink dots representing sales. Aaron Jackson Bowman who was in a booth shared by several artists represented by a gallery from somewhere out West also sold several canvases. So you certainly can do fine at Superfine!, at least for now.
As I said in my preamble, I don’t think the curation was particularly good. They seem to have taken anyone who could pay the booth fee. This is, or should be, a quick path to severe mediocracy in the art world. Even if I had made a profit at this fair, I would not do Superfine! again because they placed my both across from a booth with cartoonish paintings of dogs and clowns. I found myself telling other artists about how to find opportunities for juried exhibitions and how to look for galleries near where they live. I felt embarrassed to be there, and I am considering not listing it on my resume because I feel that I got swindled into participating in a vanity show.
So what did I learn?
If at all possible, talk to people who have done an event like this before shelling out $3000.
A really good sign is to find someone who has had an application rejected. Especially if you can find someone who’s work you admire who has gotten rejected; that means that the curators have standards and they are not just taking money from anyone who can afford it.
Don’t get involved in shows that are not taking a cut of the sales. What this really means is that they either do not care about or do not expect sales.
If someone contacts you out of the blue with a great opportunity, it is almost certainly not a great opportunity for you.
Work out how you will comply with local tax laws before you commit. If the fair handles sales for you this is a huge benefit in this regard.
What will I do in the future?
I don’t think this model of art fair is all bad. I do think that galleries are undervalued in the current market and would absolutely love to give anyone 50% of the sale price for selling my paintings, but I also think there is a place for this kind of fair where the artist represents themselves. I have had overall positive experiences at The Other Art Fair and I like to think that the fact that I’ve been rejected at least as often as I’ve applied means that they have pretty high standards. It at least means that it is still a reach for me, and I want to be reaching. I don’t ever want to be in a place where the only bar to get in is being able to cough up a certain amount of cash. TOAF does take a 15% cut, but I think this is a good thing. Their booth fees are also lower. I’ve paid around $2500 for 20 feet of wall space at both fairs I’ve done with them, as opposed to over $3000 for 12 feet.
So, I will most likely apply to do The Other Art Fair again next year. Probably the one in Brooklyn. Maybe the new one in Dallas. Or who knows, maybe they’ll start one in Boston. I will not do the Superfine! art fair again.
Thanks for reading. I know this was a long one. I’m going to try turning comments on, so let me know what you think.