The Future of Art Fairs Is in a Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard

Amid the tourist-thronged block of Hollywood Boulevard across from the TCL Chinese Theatre, where tourists skip along sidewalks speckled with stars as they pass a Hooters, a Madame Tussauds, and a TMZ Celebrity Tour kiosk, an unlikely new neighbor opened Thursday afternoon: a contemporary art fair.

As the art industry scrambles to find new fair models that let mid-tier galleries participate without driving them to bankruptcy with booth fees and travel costs, three prominent figures in the Los Angeles art scene—collector Dean Valentine and dealers Alberto and Mills Morán—proposed a radical idea. They would return to the hotel fair model, a throwback to the Gramercy International Art Fair held at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. in the 1990s, where booth prices could be kept low due minimal infrastructure-building costs. For dealers who are really hard-up for cash, they could always sleep in their booth—there’s an option to keep the bed in the room. …Read More