Scope Art Fair "freefall" continues?

A while back I noted the various artblogsphere posts describing the various issues surrounding the once mighty Scope Art Fair and describing what's happening to Scope as a "freefall."

Scope had to cancel its Hamptons fair this summer, doing so at the very last minute possible and getting a lot of irate grumbling from the scheduled exhibitors.

And there's something odd going on now with the exhibitor selection process for Scope's Miami version.

Initially, the deadline for announcing the final set of exhibitors for Miami was supposed to be in early October. When that didn't happen I called Scope to find out why and I was told that the date was "October 14 all along."

This is not what I had been told (and what I had in my notes) earlier on, but I said OK and waited.

When October 14 came and went, and no exhibitors had been notified, I called them again and after being put on hold for a bit, I was told that the new date was November 1st.

When fairs keep extending deadlines for applications and/or notifications of exhibitors there are usually a few things that drive this train wreck:

1. Not enough applicants (and thus not enough application fees and deposits gathering interest in bank accounts)

2. Not enough "good" applicants, at least from the self described "cutting-edge contemporary art from around the world" art fair. Judging from the Miami Scopes of the last two years, this fair has been slow in deciphering that because of the drastic economic slowdown, both galleries and collectors are becoming a little more grounded in the plebeian realities of selling artwork than in trying to get attention through the often salesless avenues of cutting-edge art tricks.

3. Not enough cash at hand to actually make the fair happen

I don't know if any of the above applies to Scope and its reason for once again delaying notifying applicants of their acceptance status, and I think that Scope Miami will take place one way or the other (after all, they have a shiny new 80,000 square foot pavilion next to Art Asia and Red Dot and across the street from Art Miami; all of them centrally located in the center of the Wynwood Arts District).

But I do know that this continuing delay in notifying applicants of their acceptance or rejection status is not only highly unprofessional, but it is also creating havoc with galleries' art fair schedules as alarmed artists keep putting pressure to know if their particular dealer is in Scope or not.

Why? Because in the complex chess game that is Art Basel week in Miami, any artist worth his or her artsy business cards must be in an art fair somewhere from the 25 or so art fairs that surround Art Basel Miami Beach. In the 21st century visual arts games, you gotta be in Miami somewhere or you're still so 20th century.

But fairs like Scope demand that galleries, if showing in Scope, can't show in any other fairs.

And art dealers/gallerists, being the over-protecting cabal that we are, usually demand that only one dealer show the artist in Miami (I've always thought the opposite - that is, that the more dealers that show the same artist in various fairs, the better for both the artist and the various dealers - but in that line of thought I am alone in the art dealer universe). And thus one can have the case where an artist has said to his "other" dealers: "Look, my New York gallery has applied to Scope, and if they get in, only they can show my work in Miami during Art Basel week."

In the past, when Scope actually stuck to its timetables, if a dealer got rejected from Scope, they could always (and usually) did, apply to another art fair, and another, until accepted in one of them. But with about six weeks left before Art Basel Week, and Scope still delaying the process, by the time November 1st comes along, there are only four weeks left to find hotels, ship artwork (imagine this nightmare if you're an overseas gallery trying to ship artwork from your location in Europe or Asia to Miami in four weeks), etc. It's a train wreck in the making for the selected exhibitors and a train wreck already in process for those who will be rejected, and scrambling - with four weeks to go - to find another art fair with some booth space still available.

All of this maelstrom because a once mighty art fair appears to be scratching its ass trying to figure out what to do next, not realizing that they've already thrown a huge wrench in the gear works of a couple of hundred galleries and a couple of thousand artists.