Commercial Culture & Cultural Commerce: The Truth Behind Art Fairs and Biennials
To say that an art biennial is a purely cultural phenomenon designed only to enrich the minds of the masses would be as incorrect a judgement as it is to view art fairs as entirely market driven. Both events have equally dipped their toes in each other's waters. This is because the boundaries between commercial and cultural practices are increasingly, yet always have been, blurred.
Lorenzo Quinn, Building Bridges, 2019. Installation view at the 58th Venice Biennale. Courtesy: Lorenzo Quinn.
This grey space between the cultural and financial values of art has become significant in recent years for several reasons: the fragility of the notion of ‘value’ concerning art and artists, the changes in indicators of artistic quality, and the increasing need for these agendas to work together rather than separately in public and private domains within the art world. Fundamentally, the distinction between culture-driven versus financial-driven events is, and always has been, performative.
Such distinctions between these two immensely important types of art events have arisen partly due to the discomfort of mixing culture and money. For example, Michael Findlay stated people are shocked when an artwork is sold for a large sum because they believe it has no other necessary function other than to be enjoyed.[1] Thus, it seems, for the large part, one should value art for its ability to inspire unique experiences, not for its financial worth. On the flip side, Findlay also notes how humans desire to create and ultimately will desire to own and purchase what others have created.[2] Therefore, what arises is the inherent and inevitable union between the cultural and economic realms, which, in the art world, is physically realised by the existence of biennials and art fairs.
If one examines their development and structure history, it is overwhelmingly clear that this is the case. In fact, these worlds have been operating hand-in-hand since the establishment of the first biennial in 1895 and the first art fair in 1967.
Exterior view of the Central Pavillion in the Giardini at the 59th Venice Biennale. Image credit: Roberto Marossi.
When the Venetian City Council created the Venice Biennale in 1895, they intended to transform the contemporary evening art scene active at Caffè Florian into a “prestigious international exhibition” that sought to unite internationally acclaimed artists with those in Italy.[3]
Whilst this original ethos continues to be at the centre of the Venice Biennale’s operations today, it is a little-known fact that the event’s history is littered with commercial activity. The most notable of these commercial endeavours was the creation of the Ufficio Vendite, or Sales Office, in 1945. During its active years, it held a strategic position of control within the Venice Biennale as it held great authority over which artists and artworks would be exhibited and sold in the main exhibition and the national pavilions, and often these decisions were guided by attractive offers from dealers.[4] This partnership was equally advantageous for the dealers and gallerists who sought cultural legitimacy for their artists. Thus what resulted was a highly intricate cultural network whose relationships were based on these interdependent commercial and cultural interests.
Although the Sales Office was forcibly closed in 1968, it does not mean that the event never dipped its toes into commercial waters again. Rather, these profitable side hustles only became more discreet. Notably, in 2015, French mega-collector François Pinault bought eight paintings on display at that year’s central exhibition, All the Worlds Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor.[5] Priced at $8.9 million, the series of paintings were created by the German contemporary painter Georg Baselitz, who is represented by the internationally renowned blue-chip gallery enterprise, Gagosian.[6]
Georg Baselitz installation, All the Worlds Futures, 2015. Curated by Okwui Enwezor. Courtesy: Venice Biennale website.
As the original biennial, the Venice Biennale is the standard-bearer for others taking place around the world, ultimately setting the precedent for the mixing of the commercial and economic. The Whitney Biennial (est. 1932) is one such example which has followed in the Venice Biennale’s footsteps.
Unsurprisingly, the Whitney Museum purchases artworks featured in its biennial exhibition. In 2019, 88 of the 250 works the museum had bought since April 2018 were featured in its 2019 biennial exhibition.[7] It might come as a surprise that, unlike historic exhibitions featuring lesser-known artists, such as the Society of Independent Artists, the Whitney Biennale has no open call process for artists to submit their works for consideration.[8] Rather it chooses artists associated with those the museum is connected with on a more personal basis.
In 2019 John Yau created a spreadsheet to uncover the criteria for successful participants that year’s biennial. He discovered that this network was more tight-knit than one might think, with many artists being affiliated through organisations or artistic schemes to board members or curators of the museum.[9] This is important because it demonstrates how the precedent set by the Venice Biennale of culturally legitimising artists represented by certain entities has translated into a different biennial setting.
Harold Mendez, When the night is going wrong or when the day is full of empty promises, 2017. Courtesy: the artist and Tiffany & Co.
Like the Venice Biennale, there is still a significant buying angle at play here. One of the major additions implemented into the Whitney Biennale experience when it collaborated with Tiffany & Co. in 2015 was that visitors could purchase a series of limited-edition works of art created by five participating biennial artists. These will be sold in the museum and at Tiffany & Co’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.[10] With price tags ranging from $2500 to $10,000 in the collection of artworks for the 2015 biennial, these ‘trinkets’ are very different from what one would find in the typical displays of a museum gift shop.
Robert Indiana, exhibition poster for Art Cologne’s first fair in 1967. Courtesy: Caviar 20.
The inverse is found by examining the history of the development and structure of art fairs. It is thought that art fairs originated from religious festivals and gatherings created during antiquity times. Indeed, the founder of Art Market Cologne (later renamed Art Cologne), Rudolf Zwirner, based the structural model for the fair on the Struttgart Antique Book fairs.[11] On the economic success of the first iteration of Art Cologne in 1967, Zwirner recalled that “we were extremely surprised, for suddenly it became visible: Here is a very broad desire not just to see art but to own it, a desire that had not been evident in the galleries at all.”[12] Of this statement, it is interesting to note Zwirner’s emphasis on the shift from seeing to owning. He makes it clear that the importance of the economic value ascribed to art was growing and iterates on how galleries were responding to this phenomenon. Marrying the aesthetic and the economic spheres to create a stimulating artistic experience, galleries can attract more visitors to their fair booths and therefore increase sales.
Art Cologne successfully balanced the commercial and non-commercial experience through its desire and intention to be a cultural zeitgeist, with its finger on the trigger, shooting a bullet into the newest and most innovative trends in art. Therefore, the fair provided a platform for those galleries displaying and selling emerging Neo-Expressionist painters and American Pop artists. The reason behind this, as Melanie Gerlis notes, is that Art Cologne was founded in the spirit of post-war freedom.[13] Noticing that the art trade had remained stagnant following the war, Zwirner wanted to invigorate the market by capitalising on the growing excitement surrounding the city as a cultural capital and the shifting, increasingly liberal interests of its European clientele.
Art Basel in 1973. Courtesy: Art Basel.
Art Basel took these ideas even further. Founded by leading Basel gallerists Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt in 1970, Art Basel was distinctly mercantile and commercial on the surface but had elements of culture at its core. Supporting this process of cultural intellectualisation of the fair, Marc Spiegler, the director of Art Basel from 2007 to 2022, noted how “a fair is more than just a place to sell art; it’s a site for exchanging ideas and concepts”.[14]
For Art Basel, this process of morphing from just a trade show into a more cultural and intellectual space was consecrated by the formation of Art Unlimited in 2000. According to the then Art Basel director, Lorenzo Rudolf, who had been in this role since 1991, this curatorial arm was created to combat its biggest competitors - the biennials.[15] Having felt that Art Basel had surpassed all other art fairs, he saw that there was “this phenomenon of the biennial turned into a market event; and even if it wasn't official, next to each artwork you would find the dealer, and he was selling it”.[16] Some of its notable displays include Antony Gormley’s Breathing Room II (2010) in 2019 and Urs Fischer’s Untitled (Bread House) (2004-6) in 2021. This “phenomenon” Rudolf mentions has been described by Paco Barragán as the ‘fairisation’ of the biennial.[17] The response taken by Art Basel instigates another phenomenon, the ‘biennialisation’ of the fair.[18]
Antony Gormley, Breathing Room II, 2010. Installation shot form Basel Unlimited in 2019. Courtesy: Art Basel.
Urs Fischer, Untitled (Bread House), 2004-6. Installation shot at Basel Unlimited in 2021. Courtesy: Art Basel.
Taking Barragán’s ideas even further, one notices how these events do not act independently. This much is clear from the old art world adage ‘See in Venice, buy in Basel.’ Held barely a month apart, this relationship is hardly an unlikely coincidence. For example, in 2019, leading international gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac partially paid for Adrien Ghenie’s critically-acclaimed solo exhibition at Palazzo Cini. Several weeks later, Ghenie’s work featured prominently at the gallery’s booth at Art Basel. Therefore, whilst he does not say that works are actually bought in Venice, they are bought because of Venice. Similarly, the success of Ghana’s pavilion debut at the same biennial and the taste for young artists undoubtedly prompted White Cube to highlight his work at their next Basel booth alongside noted names such as Tracey Emin, Theaster Gates and Antony Gormley.
Yet, these events must continue to uphold their exterior motives and functions. In what Panos Kompatsiaris calls a ‘legitimacy crisis’, if biennials become too openly commercial, they lose their cultural value.[19] The opposite can be said for art fairs. Consequently, art fairs and biennials have no choice but to continue upholding these strict binary values, no matter whether they are truthful or accurate… At least in the public eye.
Footnotes:
Michael Findlay, “The Value of Art: Money, Power, Beauty,” Artnet News, published November 1, 2012. https://news.artnet.com/market/defining-the-value-of-art-27673.
Findlay, “Value of Art”.
La Biennale Venezia, “History,” accessed April 1, 2023. https://www.labiennale.org/en/history-biennale-arte.
Ricci, Simoncelli, Evans, Goodrum, Maho, “Biennale di Venezia”.
Henri Neuendorf, “François Pinault’s $8.9 Million Baselitz Spending Spree at Venice Biennale,” Artnet News, published May 12, 2025. https://news.artnet.com/market/francois-pinault-georg-baselitz-venice-biennale-297073.
Neuendorf, “François Pinault”.
Nancy Kennedy, “Whitney Museum acquires 88 works by 2019 biennial artists,” The Art Newspaper, published November 13, 2019. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/11/13/whitney-museum-acquires-88-works-by-2019-biennial-artists.
Whitney Museum of Art, “FAQs,” accessed April 9, 2023. https://whitney.org/about/faq#:~:text=York%20NY%2010014.-,Can%20I%20submit%20materials%20for%20consideration%20for%20the%20Biennial%3F,is%20no%20formal%20submission%20process.
John Yau, “How Do Artists Get Into the Whitney Biennial?” Hyperallergic, published June 9, 2019. https://hyperallergic.com/503928/how-do-artists-get-into-the-whitney-biennial/
Ted Loos,“From Artist’s Hand to Shop’s Counter: The Whitney Teams Up With Tiffany,” New York Times, published March 15, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/arts/design/whitney-museum-sells-tiffany-limited-edition-art.html.
Naomi Martin, “From Antiquity to Modernity, How Art Fairs Became A Cultural Mainstay,” Artland Magazine, accessed April 2, 2022. https://magazine.artland.com/from-antiquity-to-modernity-how-art-fairs-became-a-cultural-mainstay/.
Artforum, “Emerging Market: The Birth of the Contemporary Art Fair,” accessed April 2, 2023. https://www.artforum.com/print/200804/emerging-market-the-birth-of-the-contemporary-art-fair-19751.
Melanie Gerlis, The Art Fair Story: A Rollercoaster Ride (London: Lund Humphries, 2021), 22.
Stella Seah, “Is There Fair Play Between Art Fairs and Biennales?” Mutual Art, accessed April 2, 2023. https://www.mutualart.com/Article/Is-There-Fair-Play-Between-Art-Fairs-And/FB4F3D1B008CA84A#:~:text=While%20art%20fairs%20always%20had,ideas%2C%20both%20scholarly%20and%20creative.
Martin, “Antiquity to Modernity”.
ArtPulse, “The Biennialisation and Fairisation Syndrome. Interview with Paco Barragán,” accessed April 8, 2023. http://artpulsemagazine.com/the-biennialization-and-fairization-syndrome-interview-with-paco-barragan.
Paco Barragán, From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-Liberal Biennal: On the ‘Biennialization’ of Art Fairs and the ‘Fairization’ of Biennals (Miami: Artium Media, 2000), 13.
Barragán, ‘Biennialization’ and ‘Fairization’, 13.
Panos Kompatsiaris, The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Theory and Art, (New York: Routledge, 2017), 25.
Ilaria Bevan
Editor in Chief, MADE IN BED