On-site insights

Major art fairs including the Frieze New York, Art Dubai, Art Central and Art Basel in Hong Kong have replicated the actions of hundreds of local and global galleries, museums and art institutions, all of whom have closed their doors to real-life visitors in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic. With numerous travel bans and lockdowns worldwide, in place of the physical realm, they've concurrently launched digital alternatives as a secondary form of "on-site" seduction.

Last month, Art Basel in Hong Kong launched a VIP preview of its digital-only Online Viewing Rooms to atone for the local fair it canceled in February due to the growing spread of coronavirus. (The group also just postponed its Basel gathering in June as Switzerland shut its borders.) However, the lack of real-life exhibition space hasn't affected digital sales at the high end, in which most buyers are seasoned collectors and existing clients.

Indeed, they're buying－and the cash is flying. As part of the Online Viewing Rooms, gallery Hauser & Wirth sold Jenny Holzer's XX 8 for $350,000, as well as works by Josef Albers for $600,000 and Pipilotti Rist for $140,000. The Gagosian sold a Georg Baselitz for €1.2 million and a Zeng Fanzhi for $450,000, among other sales. David Zwirner sold a Marlene Dumas work for $2.6 million, a Luc Tuymans for $2 million and a Liu Ye for $500,000.

"We've received very strong feedback from our exhibitors," said Art Basel director Marc Spiegler in a statement. "Many small-and mid-sized galleries have been using our platform as an opportunity to explore the concept of an online viewing room and to connect with new potential buyers, while larger blue-chip galleries have benefitted by cross-promoting their own digital platforms."While he acknowledged that nothing could replace the experience of visiting an art fair in person, he noted,"VIPs across the globe were also excited to view more than 2,000 exceptional artworks in one digital space."

Beyond core collectors, not everyone was charmed by the shift to viewing art in a digital space. For the VIP event, the Art Basel in Hong Kong site crashed within the first 25 minutes of launch. And when it did get its digital game back on, the feeling of viewing was functional without being fun, more superficial than substantive and, at times, aimless. It felt much like what it was－a poor imitation of a real-world gallery. A nine-year-old child in the vicinity was asked how the digital interaction felt. "There's no space for imagination," the child bemoaned."In galleries, you use your imagination."

Meanwhile and near-simultaneously, K11's Disruptive Matter and The New York Times: Carbon's Casualties exhibition, concerning technologies that can drive us towards a more renewable and sustainable future, was being shown on an online viewing platform via a third-party website operated by Matterport Inc. While it made for expansive viewing and a certain novelty, the technology was far from leisurely; in short, it felt little different from navigating Google Street Maps. It's hard to feel intimate with art when you're looking through two separate screens, or frames, to get at it.

David Zwirner was one of the first blue-chip galleries to open a virtual viewing room three years ago, realising how much business the gallery did via pre-fair digital previews. Collectors were comfortable buying based on PDF images and auction houses have increasingly boosted sales by posting on Instagram.

This is particularly true in Asia, where the collecting demographic trends younger than its Western counterparts and has generally been exposed to more digital art and public art via collectives such as teamLab. Chinese entrepreneur Michael Xufu Huang, the co-founder of the M Woods Museum who resigned his role and just opened the X Museum in Beijing, is typical of this trend. He's just turned 26. Increasingly it's not just about having a digital presence to sell, but offerings over and above the artwork, to entice.

Mindful of such demand, Hauser& Wirth, which, like Zwirner, took a space in Hong Kong's H Queen's in 2018, launched its Dispatches digital content initiative on March 21 in tandem with its first online exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings 1947-2007.

But here's the thing: hard as a virtual exhibition may try, it's not the real thing. What is real, though, in the virtual world, is curating a bunch of added-value content that wouldn't come so easily in the real world.

"Dispatches connects people with our artists－and all of us with each other," explains Iwan Wirth. "For many, this is an uncertain time; as a team, we needed to urgently adapt to this. With our exhibition spaces closed, we realized that necessity is the mother of invention and fast-tracked our existing digital strategies, working nimbly and creatively."

For example, Dispatches will lure aficionados and amateurs alike with its series of personal at-home and in-studio videos with artists; the chance to cook recipes submitted by artists, partners, directors, team members and friends; and "Family Saturday at Home", which allows parents and their children to engage and commune via Hauser &Wirth's interactive learning and community experiences.

For Wirth, he thinks of the digital space as a new location for art. He says,"Our new global digital team－drawing upon talent from other fields where digital and virtual reality are very, very advanced－is developing a robust new approach to the web as its own space, as another global 'location' of Hauser& Wirth."

If all the buzz on art's digital platforms sounds familiar, well, that's because we've been here before－in a new world called television. Galleries, conscious of the need to create more noise, are becoming more like TV channels, each competing for our viewing loyalty. One big irony of that approach is that it may not be the art that instils the loyalty, but the quality, variety and energy of the programming. And then the trickiest question: What type of programming gets a gallery over the digital gain line?

As such, galleries find themselves in a situation not unlike luxury brands a decade before them, most of which were late to a robust online presence and the e-feeding table, fearful that too much digital democratization might scare off their core customers. Now, it's the galleries' turn; the greater irony being that fashion's appropriation of art, especially in Asia, had been elevating the status of tiring luxury brands while simultaneously exposing gallery art to younger audiences with robust spending power.

Perhaps surprisingly, much like their luxury brand forebears, the galleries have played it relatively safe. There have, however, been some champagne moments courtesy of auction house Sotheby's; to whit, Korean pop star T. O. P curated a so-called "pop-up" show for the auction house in Hong Kong in 2017 at the behest of super-curator Yuki Terase, and the Supreme digital auction last year at Hong Kong's Hart Hall in the H Queen's building was also instigated by Terase and Sotheby's. In the context of culture and commerce, T. O.P's curated show for Sotheby's Hong Kong was the art world's equivalent of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld's collaboration with H& M in 2004.

Art galleries, conscious of the awe and intimidation they still invoke, must thus find ways to de-starch their high standing by adapting and adopting soft-power strategies akin to modern luxury and lifestyle brands. Chanel has an obvious advantage in this respect－customers who can't afford the total "Coco/Karl/Virginie" head-to-toe HK$100,000 look can still find entry points to the brand via HK$300 lipstick. But try asking Hauser, Zwirner or Gagosian for HK$300 artworks－they'll smile politely through their HK$300 Chanel lipstick and say,"No thank you."

As this story was being written, an email appeared in the writer's inbox bearing the subject line: "We are Live: Robin Rhode &Nari Ward－Online Viewing Room is Now Open". It was Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong, promoting its new show and flashing with more graphic-design tricks than Adobe. In a nutshell, you can whet your appetite online before seeing the show in person at the gallery until May 16. We took the "viewing room" route and while it was at least better than seeing no art at all, the "visit" and the technology felt abstract and, yet again, aimless.

Which is undoubtedly why Hong Kong galleries such as de Sarthe (showing Shifting Landscapes by Andrew Luk and Chu Teh-Chun) and Blindspot (with its Anonymous Society for Magick, curated by Hong Kong's own "super-curator" Ying Kwok) were, as of the time of writing, pushing ahead with real-life openings on April 11 as part of South Island Art Day.

Both galleries issued recent warnings about the precarious nature of visiting in these times of the hottest new phrase, social distancing: "To ensure the health and wellbeing of our staff and guests, we will take the following safety precautions: visitors will be asked to complete a health declaration and have their temperature checked on arrival; hand sanitiser will be provided at reception for visitors to use; and we kindly ask that those who have traveled within the last 14 days to refrain from joining the event."

It makes us consider, last but certainly not least, the plight of staff in these real-world galleries having to adjust to digital viewing demands. They must now find new means and ways to attract customers, both familiar and new, by crossing the content gain line. Ways of seeing, selling and creating art are changing. Will the next 12 months shape the next chapter of art history?

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