ABSTRACT
Art fairs are central to the commerce of the visual arts, as well as major events through which cities seek to assert their status as cultural centres enmeshed in the international art marketplace and global circuits of cultural capital. They are also proliferating at the local level as artists and local authorities are drawn to art fairs to showcase and sell both art and place. With a focus on Australia, this paper examines the art fair as significant event in its own right and an increasingly important aspect of the art world and its formation at the interface of the national and the transnational. It points to their differential scale, including the key cleavage between those art fairs that are ‘curated’ and exhibit high-level content, and those that are relatively unmediated spaces where artists sell their work directly to the public. Indeed, what are emerging are primary and secondary networks and hierarchies of markets whereby the art fair as a key element of the field, both as commerce and display. Finally, the chapter suggests that different types of art fair operate symbolically as markers of economic and social status and as well as being the spaces of exchange and leisure.
