Well, the public came out. In force. The line to get into Seattle Art Fair stretched the length of CenturyLink Field and into the dreamy sunset, as it were. Fair director Max Fishko said the estimated size of the crowd was 4,000 people.
"A line? For an art show? I love it. I just so love it," said Greg Bell, senior curator for Vulcan Inc., wearing his seersucker and bow tie. He's the double agent I described in a recent story about this inaugural fair, which lasts all weekend and turns out to be a highly comfortable environment in this heat (pay 20 bucks for air conditioning, get free art, my husband says). The show looks good. It's spacious, and the art that I could see in the madness last night looked strong. Fifty-plus-foot ceilings help, and so does the Olson Kundig National Forest (a VIP lounge that's so Seattle, it's lined with 20-foot-tall trees).
At an art fair, "the house always wins," an artist joked to me last night, because the dealers have to pay the fair for their booths whether or not they sell a single thing. (Booths here cost between $5,000 and $15,000.) The real question if you want to know whether this fair will happen again next year is, are people buying art?
The word this morning is yes, at least some. I overheard early on that the Yayoi Kusama pumpkin at Zwirner was snapped up (list price: $1.2 million). UPDATE: The Kusama didn't sell. (A woman I was standing with told me that the fair director himself had said it to our group when I stepped away for a minute; I thought my source was solid but I double-checked with the gallery, and nope.) My favorite thing about that booth is still the Alice Neel, which you must ask to see; it's in the back room, majestic and fresh though almost half a century old.
Platform Gallery's Stephen Lyons said the gallery sold a work by Ryan Sara Murphy last night, and several buyers said they'd return this weekend, when it will (presumably) be less crowded.
Sarah Traver and Jeffery Kuiper of Traver Gallery—where the actual gallery downtown has an installation by Mark Zirpel this weekend as well—said they sold a wall-mounted sculpture by Jamie Walker.
Walker is director of the UW School of Art, and when he walked into the sparkly festivities last night, I noticed him immediately—in part because he was the only one wearing jeans and sandals. Jeans?
"I always wear jeans," he told me. Seattle, do Seattle.
Meanwhile, I also met a French hedge fund manager who lives in New York and recently switched from collecting Renaissance art to contemporary. "The apartment," he said, is getting full, but he is still here to buy. He happened to be in Seattle for meetings.
Speaking of Seattle doing Seattle, people have been asking me about Out of Sight, the exhibition of 100 local artists that's happening right next door to the fair. I'm telling everybody to get over there and see it. There's some very good work. (There's also some absolute crap. That's how it goes with a hundred artists.) Go separate the wheat from the chaff yourself.
I've got a silly number of interesting photos from fair-related events already, and I'll be posting all weekend to Instagram (@thejengraves), Facebook, and Twitter (@jengraves) rather than here. Follow along!
