Kavi Gupta

Paul L. Merideth

What’s Next?

Kavi Gupta plans to give Art Chicago a jolt with a new fair for emerging galleries.

By Deanna Isaacs

December 6, 2007

Ain’t much more pathetic than trying to get back a lost groove. You were hot, now you’re not. The attempt is almost always futile. But once in a while it isn’t. Last week the Merchandise Mart announced the launch of a new art fair that will cohabit with Art Chicago this spring and, it’s hoped, goose the reborn event back into the realm of the not to be missed.

The new fair, titled Next (as in “big thing”), will run April 25-28 on the Mart’s seventh floor—the same space that housed Art Chicago last year. Organized by local gallery owner Kavi Gupta and New York critic Christian Viveros-Faune, it will expand on the niche previously occupied by the International Invitational, bringing in “emerging” galleries from around the world. Art Chicago will move to the 12th floor. And Michael Workman’s next-big-thing fair, Bridge, which occupied the 12th floor of the former Chicago Apparel Center during Art Chicago last year, will be absent.

Gupta, who launched the Volta fair of emerging art as a satellite show for Art Basel in 2005 (and sold it to the Mart earlier this year), expects to have about 120 invitation-only exhibitors for Next, all selected by him and Viveros-Faune. Invitations went out last month, and as of last week almost all the spots were filled. In most cases it didn’t take more than a phone call. “We know all these galleries,” Gupta says. “They’re friends of ours.” The cost to exhibitors is a bargain compared to Art Chicago’s fees: a video booth at Next is $1,500, and a small exhibit booth for one or two artists runs $4,400-$6,600, less for nonprofits. A typical space at Art Chicago this year will cost about $16,000. “The problem with the art-fair system today is that it’s gotten so expensive that galleries are deterred from taking chances or showing really young, new art,” says Gupta. “With this fair we want to change that model. We’re trying to make it as affordable for them as possible, so they do take those chances and we wind up having a show here so unique that it stands aside from the art fairs in New York and Miami.”

Gupta says that Next will feature “the top emerging galleries from all over the world” and that individual dealer exhibits will be “more exhibition oriented, more curated” than they are in a typical art show. The floor space will be open—there won’t be a grid of booths—and the emphasis will be on video projects, installations, and single-artist shows. Much of this kind of work was born out of rebellion against the idea of art as salable object, but now, with contemporary work at auction commanding the price of, say, a nice little skyscraper, Gupta says just about any of it can sell. Buyers “are collecting video, looking for installation. It’s become the norm.” Chicago gallerie2s that got the nod are Bodybuilder & Sportsman, Lisa Boyle, Western Exhibitions, Bucket Rider, and Gupta’s own Kavi Gupta Gallery.

Art Chicago will move into former Mart showrooms with permanent walls and ceilings. The effect will be more like walking into gallery spaces, says Mart senior vice president Mark Falanga. He’s expecting a roster of more than 150 established dealers and what he calls a notable bump up in caliber from last year. All but 8 of the 132 galleries that exhibited at Art Chicago last year reapplied, and new applicants for 2008 included 40 galleries Falanga characterizes as “double A, world-class.” Selections are being made by a committee of nine dealers, including Chicagoans Paul Gray, Rhona Hoffman, and Stephen Daiter. Falanga says the list of exhibitors will be posted by the end of the month.

Last year Art Chicago’s sister shows and events were scattered across the Mart campus and as far afield as the Harris Theater. This year everything, including lectures (like the ticketed series held at the Harris last year), will be contained within the central fortress. The International Antiques Fair, the Intuit show, and the Artist Project will share the Mart’s eighth floor. At its debut outing last year, the Artist Project was shoehorned into lobby space in the former Apparel Mart and limited to 50 exhibitors. It will grow to as many as 200 artists this year, each paying about $1,500 for a ten-foot-square booth. And Falanga says a sixth show, also to be housed at the Mart, is under discussion. “The grand idea is to have something for everyone,” he says.

The city will again gussy itself up as Artropolis, offering related programs, most at museums and theaters, for the weekend. But the big question is whether elusive big-spending collectors will get on their private planes and show up. Falanga’s counting on two new tactics, besides what as he describes as a strong gallery lineup, to deliver them. Art Chicago’s director of VIP operations, Lauren Horn, has been dispatched to museums all over North America with a spiel designed to persuade their curators and “buying clubs” to attend. So far, Falanga says, about 30 institutions have committed to coming and many others are promoting the show to their members. Also, this year the Mart has had time to mine the lists of collectors it gained access to when it purchased both the New York Armory Show and Volta. Falanga doesn’t want to dwell on viewer stratification, but he says VIPs will be offered a menu of special tours and events.

Meanwhile Michael Workman, who held his scruffy show on a boat when Art Chicago was still at Navy Pier, says he had a bad experience at the Mart last year. Workman has Bridge shows running as satellites to the big fairs in Miami, New York, and London, but he’s soured on Chicago, which he now calls a “tough” market. He says sales were not strong for Art Chicago dealers he spoke with last year, and “as a satellite show, we’ve got to have a really strong main show that draws people from around the world. We can’t just do it on our own.” He also claims that the Art Chicago organizers “were making overtures to us to be their reject show. They said, ‘We want a place for all the people that we’re not going to take in the main fair.’ We didn’t want to be that show.”

Two New at CADA

There’s been a changing of the guard at the Chicago Art Dealers Association. Longtime executive director Natalie van Straaten has retired and was replaced last month by former CADA consultant Lynne Remington. At the same time Catherine Edelman stepped into the CADA president’s job, succeeding Roy Boyd, who’d served two two-year terms. CADA, an invitation-only organization that represents just 36 of Chicago’s 175 or so galleries, will use the opportunity to take stock. The biggest immediate change will be to clearly separate the two jobs van Straaten had handled out of a single office: in addition to her CADA duties she’d owned and run Chicago Gallery News, a for-profit publication that serves the entire art community. The overlap led to the common misconception that the Gallery News was a CADA project. It never was, van Straaten says, adding that she started the publication in 1982, five years before taking the CADA job. She sold it this year to Gallery News employee Virginia Berg for an undisclosed sum. Gallery News and CADA will still share an office.

Miscellany

After a fruitless two-year search for a new head of its jazz studies program, it looked like Northwestern University was throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The program was officially “suspended”; no students were recruited for next fall. Then Juilliard announced that clarinetist, saxophonist, and composer Victor Goines, who’d built its jazz program and run it for the last seven years, was stepping down; NU was on the phone with him the next day. Last week came word that he’d been appointed director of NU jazz studies, effective spring quarter. Goines is a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Wynton Marsalis Septet. . . . Danny Newman, world’s greatest press agent, financial savior of Lyric Opera and nearly every other performing arts organization in existence, and if you ever crossed his path, darling, your good friend, died last Saturday at 88. He revolutionized the stuffy world of classical music by bringing the concept of season tickets to it and by hawking it with chutzpah. If ever a performance deserved a standing ovation, his did.   

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