VAULT x Melbourne Art Fair 2022

Alison Kubler & Maree Di Pasquale in Conversation

Ahead of the 2022 Melbourne Art Fair, VAULT Editor, Alison Kubler sat down with the Fair’s CEO and Director Maree Di Pasquale. Together they discuss the turns the Fair has taken in the face of Covid, the function of creating multiple entry points and the art of collecting.

Tune into the interview for an inspiring and informative chat that heralds the extensive offerings of the 2022 iteration.

A full transcript of the interview is available below.

Congratulations on MAF 2022!

We are just thrilled to finally be here at this point. The last edition of Melbourne Art Fair was in 2018 because we are a biannual fair, which is incredible to think. And of course, we had a postponement or two in between. Melbourne Art Fair 2022 will be the first art fair in Australia since the start of the pandemic, which is an awesome responsibility. I think it's something that we're all craving –particularly the artists and the galleries – to finally physically be able to be in a space and show the work and to have collectors and buyers and the art loving public connect with contemporary art again.

In terms of you pivoting – because you did do that and you did it very well – specifically by moving online, how did that actually go for the art fair? You had to keep the brand going and keep the energy going – was it successful?

It was. I think what happened is that the pandemic really just sped up that technological evolution of art fairs. But we do have a hybrid format again this year, like most stuff around the world. So, what that did with the first postponement was force us to move online in a virtual space at a very rapid rate. And it was great – I mean the virtual iteration was. It had good sales, good interaction, but there's no replacement for physical space and that sense of what an art fair provides on-site. It's not just about the celebration, it's about being able to connect with other people from the industry. It's that melting pot where you have everyone together. There are very few forums like this, where you have galleries, artist, collectors, curators, critics, art students, buyers all in the same space together.

And what comes out of that aside from just the sale of artwork, which is incredibly important, is the relationships and the knowledge exchange and potential exhibitions and museum acquisitions. There's just so much that happens in a physical space that we try to replicate online, but just can't – it's not the same. So, this year we do have a hybrid format where we will have the virtual iteration that happens alongside the physical event, and that is really to compliment the offering. It's about allowing access to those who may not be able to travel from state or internationally to actually participate in a physical sense with the art fair. And so, there's increased programming around that. We've moved our international conversations program online for this iteration. We felt that this needed to happen in order to give that access, dialogue and experience to those that couldn't attend physically.

And that's very interesting, isn't it? Because once the genie was out of the bottle, we could never put it back in again. People do want all those layers of experience. I mean, we found that with the magazine too, it's a very interesting learning curve. And I think one of the things that you say is very true, even though we were all moving online, it's weird how time poor I felt. I felt like I didn't have time to be online and absorb it all. It's great that you can watch things back as well and have those conversations and enjoy them at your own leisure. Is that something you can do with Melbourne Art Fair?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's part of the experience. It's for people who are time poor that might not be able to attend in the live sense, but can sit back, watch and see what happened previously. We even have, for our collector program, international private collector tours that a part of that experience. It's actually incredible. So, it also lends itself to things that you couldn't do with that physical space.

Yes, that's true, isn't it? We're only limited by technology and our internet bandwidth, as I have discovered with home-schooling. One thing that I think is very important about art fairs is how they're quite polarizing. People either love them or they hate them, I find. But I've always thought they were this great democratic platform that allows someone who otherwise would never have walked through the doors of Gagosian can do that through the context of an art fair. And it's a much more welcoming thing, isn't it?

Absolutely.

What would you say to people who've never been to the art fair before?

Well, that's what an art fair is great at, right? We've got different target segments within the art fair experience, if you will. And of course, we cater to our high-level VIPs and collectors and we create moments and experiences for them. And now particularly within a Covid environment, in an incredibly safe way, we privilege their access and allow them to view and connect with the work. But what the Fair also does is open the doors and remove those barriers to those individuals that might be interested in art but may not buy on a regular basis and may have some hesitation and intimidation from walking into the gallery. When you walk in there's nothing worse than potentially getting that feeling of ‘I don't know all the answers so therefore I don't belong.’

And what an art fair does is just remove that sense of intimidation. It is democratic in that sense. It is completely open. The galleries are also understanding of that and are really there to meet new audiences. There's this understanding across the board from both the fair management, the attendees, the visitors, and also the galleries to welcome new audiences and remove that level of intimidation.

For many an art fair will perhaps be their first introduction to collecting.

That's it. So many people I speak to are first-time collectors, and I think this is why Melbourne Art Fair is so beautiful. MAF was born in 1988 in the top level of the Royal Exhibition Building started by a group of galleries who recognize the importance of international art fairs to create new markets. And so, there are people, many that you meet within the industry, that have been touched by Melbourne Art Fair, whether it's working their first job with the gallery, through the fair management, or buying their first piece of art. And it’s something that we hear a lot; “that's where I bought my first artwork. That's where I bought my first painting.” It's incredible. We don’t want to forget that rich history of Melbourne Art Fair. It goes far beyond the team and board in the industry now. The Fair’s heritage is so rich and it has a profound cultural significance for Melbourne and Australia.

And of course, the art fair has always been quite instrumental in commissioning things and activating art across the city. So, what's happening in 2022? What are the exciting things happening?

We really set it up. We felt that as a not-for-profit foundation, it's our responsibility, particularly in these times, to really create work and support contemporary art and living artists. That's our mission. Our commission program is now in its 15th year. This year we've worked with ACMI to commission our first moving image work and that's gone to Kaylene Whiskey – an incredible contemporary Australian artist on the rise – and we will be debuting that at Melbourne Art Fair this year. We've also created a new sector called Beyond, which is our life scale installation sector that rivals international fairs around the world. Beyond is curated by Emily Cormack, an independent curator based here in Melbourne who's wonderful. And so that sector consists of six individual large scale sculptural works where we've provided financial support to help, but certainly not commission, to help realize the pieces or assist the galleries in staging those exhibitions. And we've got artists like Marie Park, John Maleek, Caroline Rothwell and Nabilah Nordin, who have produced sculptural works that all respond to the Fair’s 2022 theme of ‘place’, which is a very timely theme given the place in which we find ourselves. So that's probably one of the most impressive sectors of the exhibition this year and it’s the first time that's happened. And partly because we're in such an enormous space. MAF is taking place for the first time at the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre in South Wharf. It has a 15-meter-high ceiling, 7,000 square meters of exhibition space and is an environment that lends itself to these big works.

Sounds like the scale matches your ambition for the Fair, which is wonderful. So, I have a question for you about NFTs. We just ran a story a few issues back about NFTs. I’m really curious, are you asked a lot about that in terms of how NFTs might play into art fairs? Do they?

It's interesting, because we're at that moment where we’re first art fair back in Australia and it's something that has come up quite a bit. The way that you'll see it on site is through the galleries actually – showing their own NFTs based on the artists that they're presenting because it is really artist driven and artist led. So, some of the galleries will have NFTs available on site but we won't have an NFT section if you will – we'll leave that to the galleries. However, we have partnered with a new platform called Droplet. I don't know if you know Droplet, it's a new NFT platform that's taking off in Australia, and Droplet will actually be collaborating with our restaurant partner The Lucas Group – they run restaurants such as Chin Chin, Society and a few others – to take over these spaces with NFTs across the city of Melbourne.

And I think that's very interesting, isn't it? Last Melbourne Art Fair you wouldn't even thought of NFTs? It wasn't even something we discussed, was it? Tt's been quite a quick evolution and again it'll be interesting to see how that translates down the line. Finally, Maree, have you seen any kind of emerging theme across this Art Fair, perhaps in terms of galleries and what they might be showing or what artists are making? Is there anything that you can see that might have been a response to Covid, and this precarious situation we find ourselves in?

Look, I think in the content of the individual works it certainly comes through. I think in terms of medium, what's been interesting for MAF, maybe it’s partly because of our focus on moving image, but we've seen a lot of video work come through the Fair and we've actually created a dedicated section for it. So again, this is the first time that MAF will have a dedicated video sector, which actually does back to your comments before about the virtual space. Although there's a focus on Australia with Melbourne Art Fair and being within the region particularly in the time of the pandemic, we've introduced this video sector to encourage, entice and engage with international galleries to exhibit work in Australia. So, we've got galleries like Lisson for the first time participating in an Australian fair, James Cohan, Jane Lombard Gallery, and Drawing Room is coming back. And they're all showing dedicated video work within the video space on site at MAF. There's just incredible video moving image artists. So that's definitely something the commission sector and even individual galleries have picked up on.

That's extremely interesting, isn't it? I was reading about how Instagram is moving to a video platform and I think I've noticed that as well as this optic in artists making moving image work. Maybe that's a little bit to do with being stuck at home and needing to be engaged on some level, which is kind of fascinating. So, I think ultimately, there’s a very positive, optimistic spirit, particularly for the city of Melbourne. I'm sure people are very excited to be back and going to look.

And the industry. I think we've all been craving seeing each other again. And again I stress, in a safe way, but just the physicality of being within an art fair space is something that we've all missed. And I think pre-pandemic, we had art fair fatigue, and I'll be honest I think that was very clear. There were so many art fairs around the world – 200 plus. And the pressure of having to attend and for galleries to participate was hard. I think now what the pandemic has done, it's allowed us to re-evaluate art fairs and what they mean to the sector. And it's certainly impressed upon the sector, I think, the importance of them and that they're actually missed. So, there is a definite air of celebration with our return.

Well, congratulations to you and the whole Melbourne Art Fair Team. I look forward to getting there myself. Thanks so much Maree.

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