Diminished Art Cologne opens with focus on Asian buyers
Cologne, Germany - Art Cologne, the world's oldest dealer fair, opens in Germany Wednesday with a focus on super-rich Asian art collectors, but the organizers are nervous about the competition from other fairs snapping at their heels.
The 42nd fair, which featured 300 modern art dealers in its heyday, has 150 attending this year. Exhibitors will be offering 20th-century and recent art to an estimated 70,000 visitors until Sunday.
In a business now dominated by the London and New York auctions, continental art dealers and collectors have been finding themselves outclassed by a richer set.
As if to declare that this is no Eurocentric event, this year's Art Cologne has a special show of fusion art by the likes of South Korean video pioneer Nam June Paik. There are also works by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto in the special section.
A larger number of Asian dealers are also in evidence. Their booths offer European buyers a good deal of pop art and parodies of the Maoist realist style rather than fresher conceptual art.
The top-priced item on offer this year is "Semi-nude with Raised Arms," a 1910 work with a 5.5-million-euro (8.6-million-dollar)price tag by the German expressionist artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
More affordable is a 385,000-euro portrait by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. The 1914 watercolour with chalk lines depicts Mexican artist Diego Rivera.
Art Cologne has been troubled in recent years by a rash of more successful fairs in other cities such as Basle and London, but Art Cologne chief executive Oliver Kuhrt said Tuesday there was a tendency to over-dramatize the decline.
Organizers of Art Cologne say they are emphasizing quality over quantity now, insisting that the reduction in the number of dealers by about 35 since last year is deliberate as they aim to avoid German dominance.
They have appointed seven eminent dealers to an international advisory panel which will ultimately number nine and have engaged US dealer Daniel Hug, 39, as a turnaround specialist.
As sweating workmen set up their booths Tuesday, a long- established Dusseldorf dealer spoke in wonderment of the free bottles of mineral water put out by the fair hosts for dealers and their staff.
"All of a sudden they're being nice to us. In 25 years I thought I would never see that," he said.