| The Art of Being Industrious |
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 What has quickly become one of the biggest and most successful visual art events on the African continent, the Joburg Art Fair presented by FNB, will be returning this March with its annual infusion of contemporary culture. CLASSICFEEL’s Lara Koseff chats to Ross Douglas – director of the fair’s organisational body, Artlogic – about how this landmark event has evolved, stumbled and continued to sustain its magnetism.
Speaking to Ross Douglas – although he more than once crushed my naïvely optimistic observations with a weary frown – one can almost gauge a sense of highly contained enthusiasm. His approach seems to define the current local contemporary art zeitgeist. Through the incredible highs and lows of the past two years, the South African arts sector has emerged, still intact and slightly wiser, with a reluctance to get ahead of itself. While the first Joburg Art Fair, presented by FNB in 2008, made an astonishing R25 million in sales, last year’s fair made around half of that. Yet at the same time there was an incredible increase in visitors, Douglas asserts, from around 6500 to 10 000. While the recession was bringing out the art buyer’s more conservative side, interest in the fair and simply viewing (rather than financially indulging in) its wares had almost doubled. ‘The interest was there but the cash wasn’t,’ Douglas says.
After last year’s fair Artlogic seemed to recognise that a massive drop in sales can often be an ostensible letdown, yet the fair has various subsequent chain reactions. ‘What was interesting about this fair,’ Douglas reflects, ‘was that despite the fact that sales weren’t so good at the fair itself, a couple of galleries I’ve spoken to did massive sales after the fair. So what you have during a recession is that people take longer to make a purchase decision because… there are not that many people lining up to buy [works]. They’ll see the work, negotiate, and take a couple of weeks to buy it. So there were good follow-on sales.’
Something else that interested Douglas was the increase in art book and catalogue sales at the fair, as well as a broader increase in art publishing, which ultimately means an increase in enthusiasm and interest. ‘Conventional décor magazines are now writing a lot about contemporary art, newspapers have a lot more about art than they used to. Sue Williamson’s book [South African Art Now], is a really big book on art that’s come out… there seems to be a lot of writing about contemporary art, it seems to have gathered a momentum.’
Read more in the February 2010 issue of CLASSICFEEL |
