All’s Fair at the Art Fair
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“This is a big party for the Chicago art world every year,” says Miller, who’s participated in five of the past six fairs. “It’s a huge disappointment for the art-ists in a gallery when you’re suddenly not invited.” Last December both Miller and Belloc Lowndes received form letters from Ilana Vardy, director of Art 1999 Chicago, telling them they’d been put on a waiting list. Belloc Lowndes had got the same notice the previous year but then ended up in the show, so he assumed the same thing would happen again. But in late March both men learned by fax that their galleries were out of luck. “I’m a bit ticked,” says Belloc Lowndes, “be-cause we’d already made a lot of preparations when we found out just four weeks ago that we weren’t actually going to get into the fair.” Miller fired back a fax to Vardy and Blackman: “Being absent from the show will reduce the gallery’s ability to attract quality artists, and/or keep good artists. . . . If there is any cancellation, consolidation, or a broom closet which was overlooked we would be most grateful if we were allowed in the show.” He got no response.
After reviewing the names of dealers given last-minute entry, Miller noted that several of them had trekked out to San Francisco for Blackman’s first west-coast fair, a considerable gamble that stretched Thomas Blackman Associates to its limits. “Perhaps Tom was inclined a little more toward choosing them,” speculates Miller. Gray denies this, calling Art Chicago “the least political art fair I’ve ever participated in, and I’ve been in quite a few of them.” Yet Ingrid Fassbender, who followed TBA to San Francisco last year, was told in March that she could have three of the five booths she requested, then a few weeks later she was given two more booths. She agrees that TBA is trying to curry fav-or with overseas dealers: “They’re not as picky about the quality of the work in some of the European galleries. They want that European representation.” And the shifting local lineup does show some desire to increase the fair’s international cachet. Mil-ler and Belloc Lowndes both favor paintings, often considered a less adventurous medium than sculpture or instal-lation, while the Chicago Project Room handles several European conceptual artists. Concludes Miller, “I guess we just weren’t hip enough to make the cut this year.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/J.B. Spector.
