With less than 24 hours on the clock before SCOPE’s opening press preview, we tracked down SCOPE’s ultra-busy President Alexis Hubshman: “Catching up with me me is like catching light in a bottle,” he said, circling the gallery, ordering last minute adjustments.
WHITEWALL: This is only one third of the show that I’ve see so far, but I’m actually kind of surprised. The tone this year is kind of more joyous than I expected. It’s raining down bad news and blood outside, but not in here.
ALEXIS HUBSHMAN: That was a lot of what happened last year. In particular, the financial crisis really hit home in June. It was starting to become ugly. By then, a lot of collectors, a lot of galleries, a lot of artists, a lot of everybody had already made their hotel arrangements. They’d already made their airplane reservations. So they were coming here. I had 30,000 people last year at the fair, but what I found is they were holding onto their money a lot more.
And the work at that point was going along with Damien Hirst skulls, towards a dark, kind of brooding scenario. Which I like a lot. I’m into dark stuff, so I don’t want to say it’s not good. But what I’m doing this year is, I told everybody, let’s be a little more upbeat, lets be what art should be: uplifting. A bit visionary. Let’s look to the future.
I’ve had more RSVPs to our opening than I’ve ever had before. I’ve had a big PR firm call and say we’ve never had more requests. And, look, Art Basel, I can’t touch with a 100,000 foot pole, but the PR firm said they’ve never had more requests a. ) for a fair, b) for scope. And they posited the idea, and I think its true, that our price point is certainly lower. It’s less expensive because they’re emerging and new artists.
WW: Right. Thats one thing I was going to ask about. In a way it seems like you guys are really well poised. Not that you are going to have some troubles, like everybody.
AH: Of course.
WW: But it seems like, because of your price points, and because of where your artists are on the curve, collectors who can’t drop say, $2 million this year, you guys are in the perfect position for them.
AH: Exactly. The other thing is, when you buy an artist whose not well known yet, you become related immediately as a patron. You become a supporter. As opposed to — not a bad thing — but when you’re standing in line for a Murakami, and twelve different people are buying it. And that’s amazing, and it’s where I hope my artists get to, but in the meantime, what you have is this treasure hunt. You actually have the ability of a collector to come here and feel like they’re part of the chain.
WW: So I know your New York fair — the New York one is never that profitable. Is this one like your Black Friday, where the sales come in?
AH: You know, it’s funny. Sales-wise, you have to think of New York as our flagship fair. We’re at Lincoln center, we’re in my hometown, I’m super connected there, but more than anything else, I think of this as the end-of-the-year layer cake of all five fairs we do. This one is the sort of the alamgamation of what happened in Basel, what happened in Hamptons, what happened in New York. Its bigger, its more brash, more macro than micro, more maximal than minimal.
So yeah, it tends to make good money for us. Miami and New York are probably the big money makers for us.
WW: What’s your relationship to the other competing fairs. Do you feel like you’re starting to create your gravity here, and how?
AH: We have emerging contemporary art, and we’ve got Art Asia. There’s no other Asian contemporary fair down here. The fact that the two of us are together, it’s creating our own gravity. And for me, as much as I respect the fall off and the run-off of what Basel has colectorship-wise, with Art Asia, we’re starting to nurture our collectors.
Because I have roots in Miami, we’ve been tapping intot he wealthier Cuban population which is not something that is focused on by Basel. We’re looking less for the austere, dottering old german collector, which I love, but we’re looking to the diaspora — China, South East Asia, Russia, India, the whole next wave.
So I guess that brings me full circle — theres some sense that some of the countries that haven’t been as hard hit by the recession are the places where attention is kind of drifting. You talked about India, Brazil, China. Talk about 2010. Do you see yourself going in a more international bent?
We have London, we have Switzerland. Madrid has been on the table for a while, but the market got so beat up, we’ve had to hold off. In the old days, i would have just run headlong in. Now I sort of get to choose and pick. I was going to do Dubai — not interested anymore, I’m going to do Abu Dabi, to put things in perspective. Madrid I can’t wait to do, but I have to wait for the right time. I have a responsibility to my clientele
To make sure colletors show up.
Right. So we’re looking at Madrid, Abu Dabi. The other thing is Turkey, we were invited to do something in Turkey. In 2010 its the cultural city of the European Union. It’s very intertsing to us because thats the bridge for us between here and there culturally, politically, economically, geographically. So before I make that hop, skip and a jump, I’m smelling a Madrid move, smelling a Turkey scenario, and kind of working towards Abu Dabi.
