How to Survive an Art Fair

An art fair is a trade show that has been persuaded it is an exhibition. Both things are true at once, and the visitor who forgets either one suffers. Forget the trade and you will be surprised that everything you like has a red dot. Forget the exhibition and you will spend the day comparing prices and leave without having seen anything. The trick is to hold both and to have a plan, because a fair defeats improvisation by sheer quantity.

Before you go

Download the exhibitor list and mark twenty galleries. Ten you know and want to check on, ten you have never heard of and whose artists looked interesting on a screen. That is your route. Everything else is what happens on the way. Book a preview day if you can afford it or know someone who can get you in; the first hours of a fair are when the good works are visible and the aisles are empty. By the public Saturday, half the walls have been rehung with second choices.

Wear the shoes you would wear for a day in a city. Eat before you enter. Carry water and nothing else.

Two hours, then stop

Judgement at a fair decays fast. After about two hours the eye stops discriminating and everything looks either equally good or equally tired. Plan for two hours of real looking, a break outside the hall, and one more hour for the return visits. Anything you have not seen after that you will not see well, and there is no shame in leaving a fair with a third of it unvisited. Nobody has seen all of one.

The fair is not a place to discover. It is a place to confirm. Discover in the galleries, in March, when nobody is watching.

A collector in Basel

How to look at a booth

Stand at the entrance to the booth and read it as a whole before you enter. Booths are hung like small shows, and the gallery's intelligence is visible in the hang: what is on the outside wall to catch the aisle, what is inside for the people who came for it, what is on the back wall where the desk is. Then go in and look at one work properly, at two distances, for a full minute. Then ask for the price list. Never ask what something costs by pointing; ask for the list, which every booth has, and read it in full. It tells you the grid, the range and, by the red dots on the desk copy, what has moved.

Buying at a fair

Fairs are where the art world negotiates, so negotiate. A first-time buyer at a booth can reasonably ask for ten percent. A buyer who is taking two works, or paying immediately, or is a museum, can ask for more. Reservations are real for a day and fictional after that; if you need to think, ask for a hold until the next morning and honour it either way. Take the gallery's card and the artist's biography, photograph the work and the label, and write down the price. Half of the works bought at fairs are bought in the fortnight afterwards, by email, at a slightly better price, after the booth has been dismantled and the gallerist has stopped standing up.

Shipping is the hidden cost. A large canvas from a foreign fair can cost a tenth of its price to move, crate and insure. Ask before you shake hands.

The satellite fairs

Around every big fair there are smaller ones, in hotels, warehouses and tents, showing younger galleries at lower prices. These are where discovery still happens and where a first purchase makes most sense. Visit them on the second day, when you have calibrated your eye on the main fair and can see, with some relief, that the interesting work is not only at the prices you cannot pay.

Then go home, and look at your notes in a week. The works that still bother you are the ones to write about. The rest was the fair.