An art fair in a convention hall is a retail environment pretending to be an exhibition, and the tell is always the floor plan — a grid that funnels traffic past the booths that paid for position. EXPO Chicago's thirteenth edition, April 9th through 12th, was reported as having a refined plan, and the refinement was real: fewer dead ends, and the small galleries no longer parked where nobody walks.
One cannot assess a fair of this size without conceding that the floor plan is the curation. One hundred and thirty galleries from more than two dozen countries. Festival Hall is a shed at the end of a pier built in 1916 for lake freight, and it has the acoustics and the light of exactly that.
Money Is The Material Here
Canvas, bronze, archival pigment print, mirrored acrylic, and the determining substrate, which is a booth fee that runs well into five figures for four days of floor.
Works moved in the low thousands at the edges and well past six figures at the centre, which is the ordinary shape of a fair and worth stating plainly because the fair's own language avoids it. Guy Stanley Philoche, who markets himself as the people's artist, unveiled a new mixed-media canvas at GP Gallery in Booth 300 — a photorealistic portrait of a child with a voluminous afro, mid-smile, in a plain white shirt. The work is sincere. The booth number is also the point.
The Institution Attached To It
This edition ran with ties to the Obama Presidential Center, which is a thing an art fair does when it wants to be read as civic rather than commercial, and which the Center presumably does because a fair at Navy Pier reaches an audience that a construction site in Jackson Park cannot. Neither party is doing anything improper. Both are using the other, in April, at a pier.
I walked a hundred and thirty booths in a shed and by the fourth aisle had stopped reading labels, which is a failure of attention and not of the fair.
What The Floor Did
Visitors stopped longest at anything mirrored, and photographed themselves in it. At the Philoche they stopped and did not photograph, which is the rarer behaviour and the better compliment. The booths selling work under five thousand dollars had the most bodies in them and the fewest transactions, and the dealers in those booths knew it and talked anyway.
EXPO is not a market wearing the costume of an exhibition. It is a civic occasion that happens to settle its accounts in cash.
Cover image: Festival Hall, Navy Pier / Wikimedia Commons