Affordable Art Fair offers chance for a gamble

By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) – For about the price of one Jeff Koons
sculpture or a single Andy Warhol painting, a savvy collector
willing to take a gamble could buy everything at New York’s
Affordable Art Fair this weekend.

With around 300 artists and 78 galleries represented from
as far afield as London and Bangkok, the chances that something
might end up worth millions are not bad.

Everything at the fair is priced under $5,000 with the
average price around $1,500, according to the show’s founder
Will Ramsay. With each gallery showing some 50 works, the total
value if everything sells would be a little under $6 million.

“It’s not bad art just because it’s all under $5,000,”
Ramsay said in an interview before the three-day fair opens in
Manhattan on Friday.

“Ultimately people should buy what they like,” said Ramsay,
whose London gallery was showing a collection that had ceramic
dogs, including a bull terrier wearing a tweed scarf priced at
$790, by artist Olivia Brown.

“Go with your gut. If you discover in 20 years time it’s
gone up in value, then you can feel smug about your taste.”

“Investing in art is a completely different ball game,” he
added. “You’d never invest in the stock market in an unknown
stock. If you’re buying for investment you should definitely
take advice.”

The Affordable Art Fair has been an annual fixture in New
York since 2001, aimed at busy professionals with little
experience of collecting. Last year sales totaled $3 million.

“The whole ethos of the fair is to welcome in people who
maybe felt intimidated by the art world, maybe to get rid of
that fear factor,” Ramsay said.

Coming just a month after contemporary art auctions at New
York’s major houses, it’s still a busy time in the city’s art
world, with the Museum of Modern Art opening a summer show
“Dada” on Sunday, including iconic works such as a photograph
of Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a urinal.

Last month a Jeff Koons sculpture, “New Hoover
Convertibles,” featuring a trio of Hoover vacuum cleaners, sold
for $5.28 million at Sotheby’s, while two Warhol paintings sold
for $11.8 million and $5.2 million at Christie’s.

The Affordable Art Fair boasts no such famous names, but
most of it is more accessible to domestic buyers than some of
the contemporary art on view in museums.

It was mostly paintings, photographs and sculpture, with
nothing too shocking. “There’s some really good contemporary
art. There isn’t much on the video installation front but
there’s plenty of other sophisticated art,” Ramsay said.

Artist Nina Bentley from Connecticut was offering various
paintings on the theme of aging, priced from $250 to $1,000.
She said most of the art was likely to be more appealing to
those decorating their homes rather than curators seeking
daring works for their museums.

“There’s no Damien Hurst because I think people are
thinking this is not for a museum, it’s for a sale,” she said.