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ArtX: How much is too much?

By Toyin Akinosho
24 December 2017   |   3:46 am
To “rent” a space at ArtX 2016, the inaugural edition of the city’s largest art fair, a gallery needed to pay at least ₦850,000. For ArtX 2017, the lowest tariff was ₦2Million. This 117% jump unnerved some galleries, which dropped out, but it wasn’t so obvious to the audience. Afterall, Signature, which has been around…

Art revealed during ArtX

To “rent” a space at ArtX 2016, the inaugural edition of the city’s largest art fair, a gallery needed to pay at least ₦850,000. For ArtX 2017, the lowest tariff was ₦2Million. This 117% jump unnerved some galleries, which dropped out, but it wasn’t so obvious to the audience.

Afterall, Signature, which has been around since 1998, (when it began with private salons in Apapa), was there and it paid more, because its space was bigger than the smallest unit. So was the ubiquitous SMO and the quieter Bloom Art, both pop ups.

Bloom Art occupied a bigger space than Signature, which means it might have paid more. There was Arthouse too, an auction house which now “plays” gallery.

It says a lot about the fluidity of the art scene that the “galleries” that readily come to mind in Lagos are not the ones with clearly distinct locations. But that’s out of the context of the story.

ArtX organisers invited selected artists to take spaces for a heavily discounted amount. These artists each paid ₦500,000 for the unit that was going to galleries for ₦2Million, but they were not in control of their sales. They were only present at the units to explain their works. Anything about sales was handled by ArtX.

The works they exhibited also stay in the control of ArtX until three months after the show, when ArtX would render account to the artists and claim 50% of the amount sold. Is this a fair deal? “It’s standard gallery process as far as I am concerned”, one of the artists responds.

What about the cost of gallery space? SMO did not respond to email. Bloom Art didn’t respond to sms. Signature could not be reached. But we’d stay on the story.

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