VIP ART FAIR

Day 5 of the VIP art fair and I wanted to comment outside of the Facebook or Twitter forum. The much anticipated and first online art fair featuring some of the biggest galleries in the world, opened..or went LIVE on Saturday. Idyllic in their fantasy of collectors waking up with their coffee and logging on to preview and buy art online (with substantial price tags). The reality was that the opening was a total nightmare. Wrought with technical glitches and overwhelmed by users, the experience was far different from the fantasy!

My experience was not so easy, your supposed to be able to login and preview all the sections and have the memory log what you have seen and create favorites. After previewing a large portion I was totally bummed to see that they hadn't saved any of the works I had previewed. I get that I might not be really interested in buying works, but I wanted to support the galleries and artists I love and thought it would be cool to post a list of my fav picks. A day later I went back to and it seems like it was a lot better. I kept trying to see what the feedback was and went to their twitter site etc. but NO comments were revealed. I am usually not interested in the hater vibe but wanted to know what my peers were thinking.

SO it was great that JTD Neil posted about it on Artworld Salon this morning.
http://www.artworldsalon.com/blog/2011/01/zuckerberg-to-vip-art-fair-users-are-fickle/

Apart from the user experience I think I have to give some positive shout outs to VIP art fair for having the balls to follow through with the question that has been on all of our minds since the onset of world wide web, CAN YOU SELL ART ONLINE?

To be honest, if you know the work and you have a good relationship with the gallery and get good condition reports etc. then I think it is cool to buy things online. I have been sent jpegs from galleries with hopes of making decisions on works of art. Collectors buy work at fairs from the gallery binder, or now with ipads, so what is the difference? BUT, VIP art fair has not re-sized the images so some are big some are tiny making it hard to see and even harder to think of wanting to purchase.

Bottom line is was this a success or a failure? I have to say SUCCESS. Apart from the sales aspect, the fair did create an interesting online experience with awesome videos of artists in their studios and collectors giving tours of their homes and works of art...so that was cool. But let's remember that this fair didn't come out of the ether...galleries did have to pay, and for that..we might have to re-think the model and say perhaps more beta testing next time!