A mart for new art

With contemporary art fairs sprouting around the world and taking root from Miami to Shanghai, the arrival of a new one may not sound particularly notable. But Stephen Cohen thinks he’s onto something in artLA, a marketplace for new art that will debut Thursday night through next Sunday at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

“It’s very exciting,” says Cohen, a Los Angeles-based photography dealer and veteran organizer of photography fairs. “We have a good mix of art: cutting-edge work, many different media, video projections, digital art, special installations by individual artists.”

Southern California already has annual weekend fairs for fine-art prints, antiques and crafts in addition to Cohen’s photoLA, which winds up its 14th edition today at the Santa Monica Civic. Another fair, the 10-year-old Los Angeles Art Show, has enlarged the modern and contemporary component of its mostly traditional agenda. A few hotel fairs featuring trendy art, fresh from artists’ studios, have come and gone. But there hasn’t been a big fair exclusively devoted to contemporary art here since 1993, when the once-vigorous annual fair at the Los Angeles Convention Center withered and died.

Cohen hopes to fill that void and fashion a niche for himself in an art world where some dealers say they do more business at fairs than at their galleries.

“Who knows?” he muses. “Maybe this is going to be the new model for how galleries work.”

Art fairs are hot -- as one-stop shopping and looking centers where collectors, dealers, curators, critics and artists catch up with art and one another. For every fair that’s on the rise, several are in decline, but they continue to proliferate. Seasoned collectors seem to love traveling thousands of miles to discover new art, some of which they could have found at home. Novices who are intimidated by galleries seem to feel more comfortable in a shopping-mall environment.

“There’s a thing about art fairs right now,” says L.A. dealer Paul Kopeikin, whose eponymous gallery is on mid-Wilshire Boulevard. He has rented a booth at artLA -- his third fair this month, after the San Francisco International Art Expo and photoLA. Photography is Kopeikin’s longtime specialty, but he also deals with contemporary art, and he’ll make that point at artLA.

For younger L.A. dealers, such as Caryn Coleman of Sixspace Gallery near West 23rd and Figueroa streets, the new fair is a way of gaining exposure and experience. Hoping to introduce her artists and exhibition program to people who haven’t visited the gallery, she sees the fair as a step to national recognition.

“Los Angeles is such a hotbed of new art and such a vibrant scene,” Coleman says. But it doesn’t have much presence at major art fairs with East Coast gatekeepers. Instead of trying to beat the system, she says, she and her peers must take the initiative and set up their own fairs at home and elsewhere.

Just how many people show up at artLA remains to be seen, but Cohen is counting on what he calls “the curiosity factor.” Los Angeles’ art scene has grown enormously since its last big fair petered out, he says. “We have so many influential artists, so many new galleries. We want to emphasize Los Angeles as an art destination for collectors from other cities. We also hope that L.A. collectors who go to fairs in Miami, New York and London will say, ‘Hey, look what’s going on here’ and shop closer to home. They don’t have to get patted down, take their shoes off or get on an airplane to go to this fair.”

No one, including Cohen, claims that artLA is the West Coast version of Art Basel Miami Beach, the 190-gallery international extravaganza that attracted 33,000 visitors and 800 media representatives to its third edition in December. Backed by Art Basel in Switzerland, the venerable grandfather of contemporary art fairs, the Miami venture was born in a blaze of publicity and quickly became a fixture on the smart-art set’s social calendars and international itineraries. With many more applicants than it can accommodate, Art Basel Miami Beach has spawned peripheral wannabes -- including the highly competitive New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) Art Fair -- and a galaxy of related cultural attractions.

“Art Basel and Basel Miami are industrial-size fairs,” Cohen says. “The fairs I do are big enough, and I think they are intimate enough that people can enjoy the work. You don’t have to be on roller skates to see everything, and you can interact more with the dealers.”

There’s also a big difference in price. Vendors pay about $40,000 for a booth at Art Basel Miami Beach; at artLA, the price range is $3,000 to $6,600.

Starting small and hoping to grow, Cohen has lined up about 60 galleries and private dealerships -- 22 from Los Angeles, 14 from New York, nine from San Francisco and a smattering from other U.S. cities, such as Chicago, Houston, Kansas City and Portland. Two galleries come from outside the country: Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects of Toronto and Wetterling Gallery of Stockholm. Art publishers and museums will be represented, and there will be panel discussions on art criticism and collecting.

Although most dealers will display works by a variety of artists, a few exhibition spaces will be devoted to the work of single artists, Cohen says. “Chico MacMurtrie makes robotic figures programmed on software to react to people standing in front of them,” he says. “Another artist, Diane Tuft, has a gorgeous installation, a kind of burned-out forest. She has cast charred trees in resin and put them on a mirrored surface in a dark space illuminated by spotlights. And Jason Hackenwerth does wonderful things with balloons.”

Cohen also has come up with a variation on Art Basel Miami Beach’s “Art Positions” satellite, where young galleries show their wares in converted shipping containers along the beach. He has borrowed three motor homes and engaged a team of curators to fill them with art. The motor homes will be stationed in the parking lot of the Santa Monica Civic throughout the fair.

Festivities will begin Thursday night with a benefit reception for the MOCA Contemporaries, a support group for Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. Other museum groups will get private viewings on Friday, Saturday and Sunday mornings, before the fair opens to the public.

ArtLA is the 29th fair that Cohen has organized, out of an office at his gallery on Beverly Boulevard. But he cheerfully admits that his latest venture began with a different project.

“I had reserved the space with the intention of organizing a fair for works on paper or ethnographic art,” he says. “But I needed a lot more lead time to do something like that and I didn’t want to lose the space. Paul Kopeikin suggested doing a contemporary art fair. Other people have asked me to do one too, so I decided to try it. In a way, it was crazy. I didn’t get started until early last spring, but I have a good staff and a core of dealers came together quickly.”

Western Project in Culver City, Faure & Light in Bergamot Station and Bank in downtown Los Angeles agreed to participate. The list grew as Cohen solicited participants in New York and at the Basel Miami and NADA fairs.

“Some people were on the fence,” he says, “They wanted to see how the election and the economy would go. But I sold out the show, partly by keeping the costs down and making the booths larger. “

But is one more fair one too many, even in Los Angeles?

“There are a lot of them,” Cohen says, “especially in Europe. A new one will open in Bologna, Italy, at the same time as artLA. But the good ones will last. Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. The fair in Cologne, Germany is going to stay. The Frieze Art Fair in London looks permanent. So do the Armory Show and the Art Dealers Association of America Art Show in New York.”

“Mine is a modest fair,” he says, “but I think it will grow by leaps and bounds next year.”

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artLA

Where: Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, 1855 Main St., Santa Monica

When: 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday, noon to 7 p.m. Friday, Saturday; noon to 6 p.m. Sunday

Price: $50 for opening benefit; $15 a day, $25 for 3 days

Contact: (323) 937-5525, artla.net