From Prints to Painting—2015’s Top Art Fairs by Medium
In the second part of our Art Fairs series, we draw on data sourced from 61 fairs covered by Artsy in 2015, focusing on the prevalence of artwork medium (painting, sculpture, photo, works on a paper, print, video and design) at each fair. Medium distribution can reflect and shape the public profile and ideal collector base of a fair and highlight regional trends in the global art landscape. Medium-specific fairs cater to video, prints, or photography, bringing together a niche community of dealers and collectors with a common focus and passion. In contrast, multi-medium fairs highlight the growing diversity of artwork created today.
With a wealth of available data, we created the interactive graph below, which allows you to explore artwork medium distribution across each fair. Note that this data is based on 55,000 artworks uploaded to Artsy by partner galleries exhibiting at these fairs.
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Interactive Graph
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These insights are based on data compiled from over 100,000 artworks—approximately 94% of all works at these fairs. Artsy has the most comprehensive art fair coverage available anywhere, having covered over 100 fairs to date. As more exhibiting galleries continue to participate in Artsy’s online coverage of art fairs, the data we share will become even more representative of the global fair landscape. We are excited to continue to share our insights with you.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series, where we will take a closer look at geography of fairs, galleries and collectors. If you’d like to receive upcoming editions of Gallery Insights via email, you can join here. We have also enriched Part 1 of Artsy’s Fair Insights series with more comprehensive data, and recommend taking a look. Meanwhile, you can learn more about Artsy’s gallery partnerships and our fair coverage.
Please see a note on our methodology below.
Ernesto Burgos, Bic, 2015, and Blush, 2015, at GRANPALAZZO 2015. Courtesy of the artist and The Goma, Madrid.
A NOTE ON METHODOLOGY
These findings and graphs are based on an aggregation of artwork metadata (such as artwork medium) that fair exhibitors have uploaded for inclusion in Artsy’s art fair coverage over the past year. The categories represent the interpretation of artwork mediums by the exhibiting galleries. We chose not to comment on mixed-media works, which can represent a broad array of materials and media and are most open to subjective interpretation. Artsy has covered 100+ fairs over the last three years. On average, 80% of fair exhibitors elect to participate in Artsy’s fair coverage. Of the 17,000+ artists that have been featured in fairs on Artsy, 50% had publicly available biographical data, such as date of birth, which we were able to use in our analysis.
A NOTE ON ART FAIRS REPORT PART 1
In the first part of our Art Fairs series, we presented data on artist age at fairs. In order to provide a more accurate picture of artist age breakdown, we have gathered additional artist biological information and increased our sample size. Click here to see the updated visualization of artist age.
