I Love a Fair
I love a fair, whether it's an art fair, computer fair or a dogshow. The trade fair is a genial invention: get all the people from a given business-buyers and sellers-together in one big room and see what happens. Lots of stuff happens, and if you've never participated with a stand in a big international print fair, you don't know what you're missing. We're just back from Estampa in Madrid, currently Europe's most important fine-art-print fair and, after devoting an intensive week to it, it occurs to me that running a stand there is not unlike organizing and executing the Normandy invasion.

You've got a million details to bring under control, not the smallest of which is how to stuff a truckload of assorted impedimenta artfully and tastefully into a too-small fair stand. You've got your strategy, your logistics, your tactics, your allies and enemies, your big guns and your Sergeant Bilko's. And if you don't think it's war, just ask anyone who's been on his or her feet for a week doing battle with rapacious bands of school kids (who will decimate your scarce and costly documentation in a single daring raid!) and doddering old dears from the nearby old folks' home which somehow received a stack of free passes.

See You Next Year
Though participants like to complain about the organization of the fair (positions of their stands, rising prices, shortage of coffee shops, price of the lunch menu, lack of promotion, it's too hot, fewer visitors and buyers than last year…) most of them will be back next year. And let's face it, professional fair organizers deserve a lot of credit. They have just 11 months to organize an annual miracle: to erect a small town in a soulless hangar, make it pleasant and inviting with all mod cons, run it smoothly for five days, then knock it down into it's components of chipboard and electrical cables and cart them off till next year. No small order.

You meet all kinds of people at a big print fair, from small groups of artists who have banded together to rent a stand and show their work to powerful print-industry movers and shakers-big galleries, editors and art investment companies. But all is not always quite what it seems. As the days of the fair advanced, we watched bemused the drama taking place at two nearby stands located one opposite the other. One belonged to a working artist, an experienced printmaker and fair participant who had participated in the first edition of Estampa 10 years ago and most of the subsequent fairs. She was showing her own work. Directly opposite her was a well-funded posh art-investment stand, manned by a team of aggressive young executives offering a frankly expensive portfolio of prints by well-known Spanish artists.

Condescending Potentates
These art potentates greeted the printmaker condescendingly the first morning, then went briskly about their business without giving her a second thought. It was clear that they had little regard for their smalltime neighbor. As usual, not many prints were sold on the first day of the fair. The printmaker sold just three or four prints, mostly to clients from previous year's fairs. The art-biz execs didn't make a sale that first day, but they still had plenty of wind in their sails, confident in their big-name artists and their ample media coverage. They still spoke with a suspicious too-loud confidence in their voices.

The days that followed were the logical evolution of the first. The printmaker spent her time greeting old friends, colleagues and clients, wrapping up quite a few packages of prints in the process, while at the same time taking orders for Christmas gift editions. The walls of her stand were soon peppered with red "sold" dots. The dynamic investment people, still waiting to sell something, talked on their cell phones and busied themselves at their laptops. They struggled to maintain brave faces, but the wear and tear on morale showed through. They became much more human, visiting their printmaker neighbor to make small talk (when she had time…) and offering to bring her back tea ("Camomile, please…) whenever they went to the coffee shop.

Condolence and Solidarity
Before lunchtime on the last day of the fair it was clear that their battle was lost and morale was at low ebb. Empathizing with their plight the printmaker broke out a bottle of Rioja wine, a dish of hazlenuts and six stem glasses and carried her offering of condolence and solidarity across the aisle to her dejected colleagues. She was greeted with open arms by four of the humblest, most loveable young people one could ever hope to meet. As she poured out wine for everyone and passed around the nuts, the marketing manager, the one with the MBA and the Volvo station wagon, put his arm around her affectionately and said, "Why don't we just take our stuff over to your stand and let you sell it?!"

Estampa Madrid 2002 Wrapup