Art London closes for its 12th year, general feeling is a poor year and a downturn in the market here.

The 2010 Art London ended this tuesday the 12th, and although the official line and figures from their press office demonstrate an excellent year, here at Disappear Here we can assure you that is not the case.

Some friends of ours here work within the art world, and many of them visited the show, they remarked how aside from the opening day the most significant thing about it was the absolute Dearth of people.  Where in past years it has been crowded, and the Websites visiting guide represents this, mentioning please arrive early to avoid dissapointment, and how crowds gather around 5.30pm, and that you may need to expect queueing at these times, and although in previous years this has indeed been the case, this year you would be hard pressed to find a single moment where a wait of more than 30 seconds was required to either enter or to purchase a ticket.

And fewer visitors to the fair mean fewer customers for the exhibitors, and fewer customers for the exhibitors mean fewer sales, and fewer sales mean . . . well you see where this is going right?  a poor show all round, some exhibitors reported selling no more than 1 or 2 works, with a couple at time of asking and in rare moments of honesty saying that they had sold NOTHING!!  considering the cost of the stands here - £10,000 and up, and the logistical costs of transport etc, this means some exhibitors were out of pocket by between £5000 and £10,000, not an amount to be sniffed at.

The general feeling was that the fair is becoming something akin to the Affordable art fair, and that those with high volumes of lower priced works will sell quickly and in quantities to justify the entry price, and may even find themselves making a few thousand pound profit, however the fairs early days when £100,000 works will literally just walk of the walls in numbers that are difficult to count, and exhibitors simply cannot get enough expensive stock to satisfy demand, have passed.

Whether this be because we are still in the tail end of a recession, or the Art London fair has lost its novelty remains to be seen, there is an argument for the latter, as exhibitors at the affordable art fair commented recently in private that in the first years of the fair there were customers queueing with money in hand and the work was selling faster than it could go up, whereas now it takes the whole fair to shift stock and some doesn't even sell then, a graphic illustration of how fairs can become stale and boring for the punters.  Anyway, lets wait till next year to see the truth of it.