St. Louis fine art fair.
Five of the nation's top 100 fine-art fairs are in the St. Louis area—and the world's center is shifting.
By Lynnda Greene
Summer in St. Louis conjures images of certain traditions: ball games, Ted Drewes, Fair St. Louis, the Muny and, since about 1995, art fairs—a slew of them. But though most of us tend to think of these events as pleasant warm-weather fêtes, it strikes me that the art fair has come to serve a seminal function in our community. For the artists who show their works at any of the 600 art fairs across the country, they represent a means of livelihood, but for the rest of us they offer a reminder that the insight art affords us is less a product than a means of context, an invitation to reimagine our lives and our world.
St. Louis now hosts five of the nation’s top 100 fine-art fairs, according to industry mavens: the Saint Louis Art Fair in Clayton, which the Harris List ranks first nationwide; Art on the Square in Belleville; the Laumeier Art Fair; the Midwest Salute to the Masters in Fairview Heights; and the Historic Shaw Art Fair.
Next month we can attend two fairs in a single weekend, September 9–11. That the 10-year-old Saint Louis Art Fair ranks third in quality, volume and importance nationwide, according to the 2005 Art Fair SourceBook, demonstrates the vision of area corporate and nonprofit sponsors and the vibrance of our regional artistic community. That Art Outside, initiated by the Schlafly Brewery in Maplewood only last year, ranks not at all (yet) but already draws large crowds shows the boundless enthusiasm of local makers and lovers of art.
The proliferation of art fairs here and around the country has done much to dispel the idea that geographic distance from New York implies lesser value. In fact, some art leaders argue, New York’s hegemony as America’s mecca of artistic output and commerce has been waning since the 1980s. Though its market reach remains international, its dealers depend on a national network—a large and ever more diverse aggregate of regional systems, healthy but low-profile art markets in metropolitan areas such as ours—to supply inventory. This national market, with a geography that includes galleries, distributors, advertisers and an extensive network of regional art fairs now numbering in the thousands, is cross-scored by networks of artists, dealers, curators and collectors.
This means that the most important art creation and commerce may go on in cities such as ours, far from so-called arts capitals, where the rising cost of studio and commercial space undermines their ability to support viable arts communities. Unable to afford living costs in New York, most artists who show there tend to settle in smaller cities where work space is cheap and plentiful. St. Louis, an architectural treasure trove, offers everything an artist needs to live and work: ample studio space in fine old buildings located in affordable, walkable neighborhoods and easy access to an astonishing array of museums, libraries, universities, parks, art and cultural activities, sports and recreation.
Then there’s the arts community itself, which bears out a central dictum of art: that the background determines the foreground. Generous nonprofit incubator organizations such as the Regional Arts Commission and Art St. Louis, as well as private patrons and corporate sponsors, support a vibrant and diverse arts ecosystem composed of major arts institutions such as the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum, community arts centers and public arts projects, arts-education programs and commercial as well as just-do-it galleries—and hundreds of artists.
Currently the metro area boasts about 70 public and private spaces in which to see and buy art. Scores of intrepid entrepreneurs around the metro area who have found inventive ways of showing art in any number of cafés, bars, lofts, storefronts, churches, libraries, banks, abandoned malls, warehouses—even an old jail. These venues spring up and thrive or morph as demographics shift; as often as not, they move on to better quarters a block away, or 10, or maybe a couple of miles.
The Historic Shaw Art Fair in South City has been around for years. The Saint Louis Art Fair has grown from a tentative, fledgling effort into one of the country’s most important artistic marketplaces in barely a decade. New fairs will continue to bloom and prosper. Art’s great strength, after all, lies in its capacity to generate new forms of meaning—and new forms of access.
That artists struggle to balance livelihood and integrity within the machinations of a fickle marketplace has always been a troubling reality. But somehow, in the democratic setting of an art fair, the tension between aesthetic value and commercial value, the good and the goods, the artist and the audience, dissolves. A city street, park slope or town square becomes an open-air atelier, and, face to face with the artist and his work, we connect with an elemental truth: that the arts stimulate not just our economy but also our personal muses. For art-making is essentially a social process. Anytime we participate in artistic expression, be it as artists or as viewers, we exercise our cultural citizenship and expand our lives.
