Art Fairs Are Built for a Market That No Longer Exists

The contemporary art market is going through one of its most turbulent moments in decades. Pace Gallery's decision to reduce its roster by around 50 artists and cut 50 staff members, Templon's decision to scale back its New York presence, Goodman Gallery's announcement that it will significantly reduce its participation in art fairs because of rising costs, the closure of long-established galleries such as Blum, Sperone Westwater and Stephen Friedman, and Art Basel's launch of the Basel Exclusive initiative all point to a market searching for a new equilibrium. Even as the leading fairs continue to attract collectors and record attendance, questions are increasingly being raised about whether the model itself is still fit for today's market. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters Dealers, fair directors and art critics have offered different explanations for the current moment. Art market specialist Melanie Gerlis argued that 'the industry remains volatile and an increased appetite for spectacle presents new challenges for exhibitors this year' in the Financial Times. Former Art Basel global director Marc Spiegler has observed that 'the art world expanded wildly, but the art market did not,' adding that 'participating in fairs has built in costs that don't always pay off' in an interview with the New York Times. Art critic Barbara Pollack has gone further, arguing that 'Spiegler writes about the current demise of the gallery ecosystem as if he were just an observer, not one of its chief architects' in Hyperallergic. Mega-gallerist Marc Glimcher, meanwhile, admitted that 'the whole art gallery art system became too big, too commercial, too impersonal and too corporate' in an interview with the New York Times. Even Art Basel itself now acknowledges that Basel Exclusive seeks to 'reassert the primacy of the live fair moment at a time when market activity increasingly begins earlier and across multiple channels' (Art Basel). As early as 2018, Jerry Saltz concluded in a Vulture article titled 'Break the Art Fair' that 'As a system, art fairs are like America: They're broken and no one knows how to fix them.' Each of these diagnoses identifies an important symptom. Yet they remain at the level of symptoms rather than underlying causes. The problem, I would argue, is structural: the world has radically changed, but the infrastructures of the art fair have remained the same. As I stated in my earlier Observer piece, 'Inside the Global Art Fair Wars,' what I have termed the Contemporary Art Fair (CAF)—the model that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with fairs such as ART COLOGNE and Art Basel—gradually evolved into the Global Art Fair (GAF) from the mid-1990s, driven by globalization, the liberalization of capital and the transnationalization of the art market. Yet while the world became global, the infrastructures of the art fair remained largely those of the Contemporary Art Fair. This article therefore examines that structural mismatch through four interrelated dimensions: sales, exhibition, collectors and domestic space. Are sales still mainly concluded at the fair? Has the exhibition model evolved with respect to the past? Have collectors changed? And has domestic space remained unchanged over the last 50 years? Sales from marketplace to showroom Historically, art fairs emerged to compete with the sales office of the Venice Biennale, which between 1942 and 1972 commercialized works on behalf of participating galleries and artists. The Contemporary Art Fair (CAF), inaugurated by ART COLOGNE (1967) and later consolidated by Art Basel (1970), offered a more efficient and concentrated marketplace connecting galleries, collectors and artists. Organized around what I have termed the dealer-booth-and-alley model, the fair was conceived by dealers above all as a commercial infrastructure: a simple grid of booths and aisles designed to facilitate transactions. With the rise of neoliberal globalization, the CAF gradually evolved into the Global Art Fair (GAF). From the mid-1990s onward, it ceased to be merely a marketplace and became a hybrid platform that integrated commerce, spectacle, sociability and art history into a single device. I first characterized the omnipresent nature of this phenomenon in The Art Fair Age (2008). Later, in From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-Liberal Biennial: On the 'Biennialization' of Art Fairs and the 'Fairization' of Biennials (2020), I analyzed its spatial and curatorial transformation through what I termed the curator-open-space model: curated sections led by internationally recognized curators such as Jan Hoet, Nicolas Bourriaud, Chus Martínez and Dan Cameron; conference programs featuring figures including Ute Meta Bauer, Okwui Enwezor, Gerardo Mosquera and Hou Hanru; alongside publications, prizes, performances and an expanding range of activities were designed to confer cultural legitimacy on what remained, at its core, a commercial platform. Yet despite these curatorial and experiential innovations—whose latest expression is Art Basel's Basel Exclusive—the fair gradually ceased to function as the primary place where art is sold. So what changed? In today's GAF, the chronology of the sale has fundamentally mutated. From the mid-1990s onward, works have increasingly been discovered, discussed, reserved and sold through JPEGs, PDFs, preview exhibitions, WhatsApp conversations and private transactions long before a fair even opens. The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated this transformation during the 2020s, as Online Viewing Rooms and other digital platforms normalized remote looking, advance sales and direct transactions before the fair itself. This transformation was enthusiastically embraced by both galleries and art fairs. It not only enabled galleries to reach collectors across the globe and conclude sales remotely, often on the basis of low-resolution images, but also dramatically simplified the laborious administrative infrastructure of the fair itself. Applications, floor plans, price lists, catalogs and image files that had previously been exchanged by post could now be uploaded to digital platforms or sent instantly by email, making the entire process faster, cheaper and considerably more efficient. This shift has not gone unnoticed. For more than a decade, dealers, collectors, sociologists, journalists and market observers have examined the gradual displacement of the sale from the fair itself to the period preceding its opening. But the structural consequences of this transformation are only now becoming fully visible. Writing from a sociological perspective, French sociologist Alain Quemin argues that the recent restructuring of Pace Gallery merely exposed a problem that had existed for years, describing 'the hiatus between the costs of an oversized model and the relative weakness of its represented artists.' In other words, what appears to be a sudden crisis has long been developing beneath the surface. As early as 2014, German collector Giovanni Springmeier told Marta Gnyp in The Shift: Art and the Rise to Power of Contemporary Collectors (2015) that 'The people who collect know in advance which works are available, which works will be offered and get the offer beforehand. They might confirm something during the fair. But the rule is that the important collectors buy before the fair begins.' In retrospect, it anticipated one of the defining characteristics of today's Global Art Fair. The same book also captured how this shift was already reshaping gallery practice and collector behavior. Hanna Schouwink, then a partner at David Zwirner, confirmed the growing importance of advance sales, noting that 'many works from their gallery exhibitions are sold before the show even starts.' Likewise, American collectors Zoë and Joel Dictrow admitted that 'we use art fairs more for education than for acquisition, because you can see so much art at art fairs.' Also in the ethnological and sociological study When Art Meets Money: Encounters at Art Basel (2015), Franz Schultheis, Erwin Single, Stephan Egger and Thomas Mazzurana observed that while 'business is 'excellent'' and success stories dominate the public narrative, 'insiders know that the galleries inform 'important' collectors in advance of their offers, that many works are reserved or even sold before the fair opens and that the original work is hardly relevant any longer.' In other words, the commercial transaction had become increasingly detached from the physical encounter with the artwork. London gallerist Kate MacGarry has also documented the dramatic decline in the commercial importance of art fairs. Reflecting on the evolution of her own gallery, she told the Financial Times's Melanie Gerlis that while art fair sales 'once accounted for about 50 percent of [our] business (before the 2008 art market and economic crash),' they are 'nearer 5 to 10 percent now.' According to Clare McAndrew in the 2026 Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report, direct gallery sales, both in person and online, rose from 48 percent of dealers' sales in pre-pandemic 2019 to 60 percent in 2025, while the share generated through art fairs fell from 42 percent to 35 percent over the same period. This shift is further illustrated by Brett Gorvy, who told Nate Freeman in Vanity Fair back in 2021 that he had already 'set up a private viewing room in New York before shipping works to Switzerland,' letting collectors preview the works before Art Basel even opened. Writing in 2025, art market specialist and Sotheby's Institute of Art faculty member María Sancho-Arroyo observed that Pace Gallery's Picasso Homme à la pipe assis et amour (1969) had already been sold privately before the fair opened. She concluded that 'This reinforces the trend of galleries pre-selling top-tier works to established clients, bringing them to the fair more for visibility and positioning than for direct sales—raising the question of whether such high-value presentations still serve their original commercial purpose.' The picture is naturally more nuanced. For many regional and mid-sized galleries, art fairs continue to play a far more significant commercial role than they do for the largest international dealers. Diego Suárez, director of ATM in Gijón, Asturias, estimates that 'while art fairs account for roughly 25-30 percent of the gallery's annual revenue, they generate around 40 percent of its total sales by volume.' He further concedes that 'due to a very incipient art market structure and the modest purchasing power of local institutions, art fairs remain essential for my gallery, both for sales and for meeting new collectors face to face.' According to a survey by First Thursday, a sales intelligence platform specializing in dealer performance and market analytics, as reported by Elisa Carollo in Observer, 71 respondents said they valued exposure to new audiences and potential buyers more than immediate sales. The findings suggest that many gallerists have internalized the idea of art fairs less as places of immediate commercial exchange than as platforms for visibility, branding and the cultivation of future clients. Seasoned collectors Fernando López and Marshall Coburn, who divide their time between Miami, Barcelona and Ibiza, confirmed that art fairs are no longer their primary venue for acquiring art. 'Yes, we attend art fairs and occasionally buy works there. But for us, fairs are primarily a way of seeing what is happening in the art world. Our collecting process is different. If a gallery sends us a PDF with an artist that interests us, we begin by researching the artist. We visit the gallery, speak with the gallerist, try to learn as much as we can about the work, and, whenever possible, visit the artist's studio. Our collecting process is slow. We only decide to acquire a work after a significant period of research and careful consideration.' Art Basel has effectively acknowledged this transformation with the new Basel Exclusive initiative, which seeks to 'reassert the primacy of the live fair moment at a time when market activity increasingly begins earlier and across multiple channels,' while creating 'a concentrated moment of first access' and strengthening 'the value of first access.' Announcing the initiative, Vincenzo de Bellis, chief artistic officer and global director of Art Basel fairs, argued that Basel Exclusive reflects 'how collecting habits and sales cycles are evolving today' by creating 'a concentrated moment of first access at the opening of the fair.' Hauser & Wirth President Iwan Wirth likewise welcomed the initiative, arguing that it 'will act like an anticipation injection, placing a spirit of discovery back at the center of the art fair experience,' adding that 'there is no substitute for being in person with a masterpiece.' The significance of these statements lies less in the initiative itself than in what they implicitly acknowledge: that discovery, first access and increasingly the commercial transaction no longer originate at the fair itself. If the 'spirit of discovery' has to be placed back at the center of the art fair experience, it is because it has progressively migrated elsewhere. Basel Exclusive should therefore be understood less as a technological innovation than as an institutional attempt to restore a commercial function that the art market itself gradually displaced through its own enthusiastic embrace of digital circulation. If the fair functions as a theater of visibility, reputation and symbolic capital, then it is unsurprising that the public narrative surrounding it also privileges visibility, reputation and symbolic capital over aggregate sales data. In both cases, attention shifts from measurable outcomes to symbolic performance. The discourse surrounding art fairs mirrors the structure of the fair itself: highly visible, intensely branded and symbolically powerful, yet remarkably opaque when it comes to aggregate market performance. This evolution followed a clear historical trajectory. During the era of the Contemporary Art Fair (CAF), the fair progressively displaced the gallery as the principal site of commercial exchange by concentrating collectors, galleries and artworks in a single temporary marketplace. With the emergence of the Global Art Fair (GAF), however, the very digital tools enthusiastically adopted by galleries and fairs—PDFs, JPEGs, previews, WhatsApp conversations and Online Viewing Rooms—gradually displaced both the gallery and the fair as the preferred interface for discovery, negotiation and sales. Are art fairs still useful? Certainly—but increasingly as devices for information compression, networking, branding and relationship-building rather than as the primary sites of sales and discovery. Once discovery, negotiation and sales have largely migrated to the digital sphere, there is little reason to believe they will permanently return to the fair itself. The real challenge is no longer how to restore the Contemporary Art Fair, but how to reinvent the Global Art Fair for a market whose commercial logic has fundamentally changed. The question, therefore, is straightforward: If sales have changed, how should the fair change? Exhibitions from curatorial innovation to museological repetition If the commercial function of the art fair has fundamentally changed, has its exhibition model evolved accordingly? Surprisingly little. Over the past three decades, art fairs have increasingly presented themselves as curated events, incorporating curated sections, talk programs, performances, prizes and increasingly sophisticated visitor experiences. Yet beneath this rhetoric of innovation, the exhibition grammar of the fair has remained remarkably stable. Most discussions about art fairs focus on attendance, sales, VIP programs, costs, geography or market trends. Far less attention has been paid to the exhibition itself: booth morphology, spatial organization, museography or exhibition narrative. The result is a curious paradox. While fairs increasingly claim cultural legitimacy through curatorship, remarkably little attention has been devoted to how exhibitions actually function as exhibitions. A successful exhibition requires two complementary forms of orientation. The first is intellectual (curatorial): what ideas are developed, what relationships are established between the works, and what argument the exhibition proposes. The second is spatial (museological and museographical): how those ideas are translated into space, how the visitor moves through the exhibition, what is encountered first, what follows and how architecture, color, lighting, distance, rhythm and perspective construct meaning. A great exhibition emerges from the careful articulation of both dimensions. The first limitation concerns the fair booth itself, reproduced across the general sections of fairs ranging from Art Basel and Frieze to Liste, ART SG and Art Dubai. As participation costs have risen dramatically—through booth rental, transport, insurance, production, travel, dinners and staffing—galleries have become increasingly reluctant to assume the financial risk of highly specialized presentations. Instead, many present a carefully calculated mixture of established and emerging artists, different media and multiple price ranges capable of attracting diverse categories of buyers. As German collector Giovanni Springmeier observed in The Shift, 'A fair is primarily a sale event. The booths are difficult, not curated, made only to sell.' The consequence is not simply less curatorial ambition but a structural transformation of the booth itself: it ceases to behave as an exhibition and increasingly resembles a commercial display designed to diversify financial risk, often expressed through visually saturated booths designed to maximize commercial appeal. Even the sections presented as the fair's curatorial innovations—such as Kabinett, Focus section, Opening or similar formats—rarely escape this underlying morphology. Although they promise more focused presentations, they continue to reproduce the same dealer-booth-and-alley logic that has characterized the art fair since the 1970s. They are booths before they become exhibitions. The clearest example is Art Basel's Unlimited section. It was conceived by Lorenzo A. Rudolf in 2000 as a response to what he described as a Venice Biennale that had 'turned into a market event,' where 'next to each artwork you would find the dealer and he was selling it.' Since its creation under Simon Lamunière and through the subsequent editions curated by Gianni Jetzer, Giovanni Carmine and, more recently, Ruba Katrib, Unlimited has undoubtedly expanded the physical scale of the art fair. Yet it has largely monumentalized the booth instead of transcending its underlying logic, remaining an unresolved hybrid between the art fair booth and the white cube—an exhibition model ill-suited to such a monumental open space. Despite the quality of many individual works, Unlimited once again demonstrated in its 2026 edition, curated by Ruba Katrib, a lack of both an articulated curatorial vision and a coherent museological orientation. To begin with, the exhibition lacked an overarching title or curatorial thesis capable of explaining why these particular works belonged together. Yet the works themselves possessed all the qualities required for an ambitious museum—or even biennial-scale—exhibition capable of critically engaging with the major questions of our time. Upon entering the vast exhibition space, visitors encountered Goshka Macuga's performative installation Chair for Guerrilla Girls while suddenly being confronted with dozens of competing visual stimuli, without a clearly articulated beginning, development, conclusion or thematic nuclei capable of structuring the experience. The outer perimeter largely reproduced oversized art fair booths, while additional booths were arbitrarily inserted into the center of the hall without a coherent spatial sequence. Artists such as Theaster Gates, Luc Tuymans and Junko Oki were unnecessarily confined within booths. In the case of Tuymans's monumental history-format paintings, this prevented the long viewing distances required for works conceived to be experienced from multiple perspectives. The architecture, reproducing the booth logic on a monumental scale, functioned primarily to separate works rather than to construct relationships between them. Freedom of movement was confused with the absence of curatorial and spatial structure. Rather than organizing the visitor's experience through a carefully articulated promenade, thematic clusters and spatial rhythm, the exhibition abandoned one of the essential functions of curatorship: organizing space as an argument rather than as an accumulation of works. As large as a soccer field, Unlimited poses an ambitious challenge to the curator. Such a space demands a sophisticated combination of curatorial, museological and museographical expertise—qualities still uncommon in today's predominantly white cube displays. Only an inventive exhibition grammar, based on a clear conceptual structure and materialized through exhibition design (the strategic use of color, lighting, architecture, scenography, visual axes, rhythm, symmetry and asymmetry, perspective and textual dispositifs such as introductory panels, wall texts and labels), can transform this vast hall into a museum-quality exhibition rather than a mere succession of largely unrelated monumental installations. In short, Unlimited requires a genuinely non-white-cube philosophy. If art fairs increasingly seek to justify themselves not only as marketplaces but also as exhibitions, then the question is no longer how large the booths should become, but what kind of exhibition the GAF should actually produce? The dealer-booth-and-alley model inherited from the CAF—even in supposedly curated sections—must give way to a genuinely museological exhibition model in which each work is installed according to its own spatial, perceptual and conceptual requirements. The question, again, is straightforward: If exhibitions have changed, how should the fair change? Collectors, from knowledge to information There is broad agreement that the traditional collector-connoisseur is becoming an endangered species. Elisa Carollo noted in Observer that there are 'fewer new buyers entering the market' and that 'the pool of active collectors is shrinking.' Today's NextGen collectors differ markedly from their boomer parents, not only in their taste but also in how they discover, learn about and ultimately buy art. Georgina Adam, in NextGen Collectors and the Market (2026), has questioned whether NextGen collectors will support the art market in the same way previous generations did, while numerous advisors and dealers point to changing collecting habits and declining loyalty to traditional intermediaries. Recent years have also witnessed the dispersal of some of the most emblematic private collections, including those of Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Samuel Irving Newhouse and Anita and Poju Zabludowicz. The spirit of collecting has definitively changed. But have art fairs changed accordingly? Have they been able to attract the NextGen collector? Have they understood what this new collector buys, how they buy and, perhaps more importantly, why they buy? Before addressing these questions, it is first necessary to examine how the figure of the collector has evolved over the past six decades. Although these profiles continue to coexist today, each period can be characterized by the predominance of a different collecting logic. During the 1960s and 1970s, the dominant profile was what might be termed the 'collector-connoisseur.' Exemplified by figures such as Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, Emily Tremaine, Peter Ludwig and Bob Scull, these collectors devoted considerable time to visiting galleries, museums, artists' studios and exhibitions. They read extensively, cultivated close relationships with artists, curators, critics and dealers, and acquired works primarily through prolonged aesthetic judgment and intellectual engagement. Yet even within this generation, Bob Scull already anticipated a speculative dimension of collecting that would later become increasingly common. In the 1980s and 1990s, the profile of the collector gradually shifted toward what might be called the 'collector-entrepreneur.' The traditional aristocratic and bourgeois collector increasingly gave way to self-made businessmen whose collecting activities were closely intertwined with their entrepreneurial identities. Figures such as Charles Saatchi, François Pinault, Bernard Arnault and Eli Broad exemplified this new model, in which collecting became inseparable from branding, institutional influence, philanthropy and the construction of cultural capital. Private museums, foundations and large-scale cultural projects increasingly became extensions of entrepreneurial success. Globalization and financial capitalism accelerated this transformation still further. Since the early 2000s, the dominant profile has increasingly become the 'collector-financier.' Collectors such as Steven A. Cohen, Stefan Simchowitz, Adam Lindemann and the Mugrabi family increasingly approached art through the logic of portfolios, liquidity, asset management and strategic market positioning. The distinction between collecting, investing and trading became progressively more fluid as art itself became increasingly integrated into global financial culture. At the same time, more traditional collectors such as Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo continue to demonstrate that connoisseurship, long-term commitment and intellectual engagement remain important collecting values, even if they no longer define the dominant profile of today's collector. The emergence of the NextGen buyer represents the latest stage in this historical evolution. Reports such as The Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 by Clare McAndrew and A Changing of the Guard by Avant Arte, led by Mazdak Sanii, describe a younger generation of buyers that is more diverse, more global, more digitally connected and increasingly motivated by participation, identity and experience. They discover artists through Instagram, TikTok, digital platforms, online communities and algorithmically curated content, while remaining remarkably confident navigating an increasingly interconnected art world. One of the blind spots shared by many of these reports concerns the concept of knowledge itself. Avant Arte, for example, concludes that younger buyers are more 'knowledgeable.' Yet this assertion remains largely anecdotal. Neither the Avant Arte survey nor The Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting includes questions that would allow such a conclusion to be empirically verified. Respondents are not asked about their knowledge of art history, collecting history, exhibition history, curatorial practice or the institutional structures of the art world. What these reports successfully document is a generation with unprecedented access to information rather than demonstrably greater knowledge. Georgina Adam has observed that 'for the coming two decades, while estimates vary, it could be as much as $84 trillion and is, say economists, the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history.' Yet this so-called Great Wealth Transfer does not necessarily imply a Great Taste Transfer. The NextGen buyer has inherited wealth, but not necessarily the cultural habitus of their boomer parents. As James Stourton has argued, 'the old-specialist collector began to go out of fashion, because a new generation came up, and it's partly a matter of culture and education; the new generation simply didn't share the same cultural baggage as the older generation.' Likewise, Magnus Resch observes that 'the younger generation is looking for an investment, while an older generation were art lovers.' From the perspective of the primary market, John Kennedy of Unit Gallery points to 'a sort of herd mentality, amplified through social media, among young collectors.' This changing of the collector's guard can perhaps best be illustrated by what has become known as the 'Miami Model': the collecting ecosystem built by Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Martin Margulies and Mera and Don Rubell. For decades, these collectors embodied the figure of the collector-connoisseur through an extraordinary combination of connoisseurship, long-term commitment, institutional philanthropy and almost obsessive engagement with contemporary art. Yet their trajectories also reveal that the Great Wealth Transfer does not necessarily imply a Great Taste Transfer. Following the deaths of Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, their collection and museum building were rapidly dispersed. Martin Margulies has stated in The New York Times that, rather than preserving the collection intact, its sale will ultimately benefit his children and charitable causes. The Rubells represent a different scenario. Although Jason and Jennifer Rubell remain actively involved in the family collection, they belong to a different generation with different priorities and patterns of engagement. When I encountered Don and Mera Rubell—aged 85 and 82—walking the aisles of Art Basel only a few weeks ago, they still displayed the relentless curiosity and commitment that defined the collector-connoisseur. Whether that same intensity will characterize the next generation remains an open question. Yet this transformation reveals two fundamental contradictions. The first is epistemic. Contemporary art has become progressively more specialized, theoretically demanding and historically complex. At the very moment when understanding contemporary art arguably requires greater contextual knowledge than ever before, the mechanisms through which many buyers discover artists have become faster, more fragmented and increasingly mediated by digital platforms. Access to information has never been greater. Transforming that information into knowledge, however, remains as demanding as ever. One of the art fair's original functions—bringing together artists, dealers and collectors within a single commercial ecosystem—has been progressively eroded. A second contradiction concerns the language through which the art world understands collecting. Over the past two decades, the language of connoisseurship, aesthetic judgment, visual literacy and art history has progressively given way to that of wealth management, investment strategy, market performance, portfolio diversification and return on investment. Annual reports such as Clare McAndrew's, together with market analyses produced by ArtTactic, Deloitte and numerous advisory firms, have undoubtedly contributed to legitimizing this financial vocabulary. Figures such as Amy Cappellazzo, Peter Loukas and Magnus Resch exemplify different facets of this broader transformation, in which collectors are increasingly addressed as investors and advisors increasingly resemble wealth managers rather than cultural intermediaries. The irony is difficult to ignore. Today the art world nostalgically laments the disappearance of the collector-connoisseur. Yet it was the art world itself that progressively replaced the language of culture with the language of finance, enthusiastically promoted art as an investment, embraced digital technologies and helped produce precisely the type of buyer it now struggles to understand. The question, once again, is straightforward: If collectors have changed, how should the fair change? From the aristocratic palace to the open-plan apartment If sales, exhibitions and collectors have all changed profoundly over the past half century, what about the domestic space for which art is ultimately acquired? Surprisingly, this question has received almost no attention. Yet the history of collecting has always been inseparable from the history of domestic architecture. Indeed, the domestic interior not only conditioned collecting itself but also served as the historical model from which the public art museum eventually emerged. From the aristocratic palace to the 19th-century Rothschild apartment, from the modernist Bauhaus apartment to today's open-plan apartment, each domestic typology has shaped both how art was displayed and what kinds of works were collected. As domestic interiors have progressively become smaller, more open and increasingly defined by glass rather than walls, they have also transformed—both physically and psychologically—the conditions under which artworks are acquired, displayed and experienced. Royal interiors such as the Louvre Palace before its transformation into a museum, Versailles or Fontainebleau were characterized by gilded boiseries, carved plasterwork, ornamented ceilings, mirrors, crystal chandeliers and paintings hung from floor to ceiling within elaborately framed architectural settings. The arrangement was equally characteristic: furniture was placed against the walls, leaving the center of the room open for circulation. Marie Antoinette's private apartments or the Doria Pamphilj Palace in Rome exemplify this domestic aesthetic. When the Louvre Palace was transformed from a royal residence into a public museum on August 10, 1793, following the French Revolution, it largely preserved these interiors, making the former palace the template for the Universal Survey Museum. The Parisian Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, built in 1830 at 9 Rue de Peletier, represented the domestic interior of the rising bourgeoisie: a historicist, opulent, overcrowded, heterogeneous and anachronistic mix of styles. The salons of le goût or the Rothschild style mixed Louis XIV and Louis XV furniture with Neo-Renaissance elements: densely carved wood paneling, gilded surfaces, mirrors in gilded frames of every size, ornamental motifs such as sphinxes, heavy drapery, luxurious curtains, Gobelins tapestries, upholstered Dutch Colonial dining chairs, immense circular sofas and paintings by Velázquez, Rembrandt, Rubens and Hals. Barnard College professor Lisa Tiersten argues that 'Eclecticism, or the ability to absorb and recontextualize elements of the past, stood as the signifier of individual sensibility and, at the same time, of bourgeois modernity.' This bourgeois domestic interior, still heavily indebted to the aristocratic lifestyle yet occupying even the center of the room and every available space, was literally transposed into the museum by Wilhelm von Bode in Berlin between the 1880s and 1904 through his Epochenraum, or 'period room.' The full emancipation of the bourgeoisie from aristocratic influence finally occurred with the advent of the 'modern period room,' or the bourgeois Bauhaus apartment, in the 1920s and 1930s, exemplified by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Haus Lange (1927) in Krefeld and Marcel Breuer's Haus von der Heydt (1929) in Berlin. The typical white Bauhaus apartment, with its clearly compartmentalized spaces, introduced a more restrained and less claustrophobic interior, with fewer objects displayed on the walls. In her influential Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900-1933 (2018), Courtauld Institute of Art professor Robin Schuldenfrei argues that, in terms of domestic life, these houses were 'bolstered by conventional gendered room divisions such as separate bedrooms for the husband and the wife, sitting rooms for the ladies of the house, and studies for the men.' According to Humboldt University professor Charlotte Klonk, Haus Lange and Haus von der Heydt—whose owners were supporters of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin—served as the template for director Ludwig Justi's white cube displays in the early 1930s. Haus Lange itself became a contemporary art museum in 1955, completing a historical circle that had begun with the Louvre: the domestic interior first became the template for the museum before itself becoming a museum. Since the late 20th Century, the dominant model of domestic architecture has progressively shifted toward the open-plan apartment. Inspired by the industrial lofts first occupied by New York artists, such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, during the 1950s and 1960s, kitchens, dining rooms and living rooms have increasingly merged into a single multifunctional space, while bedrooms and bathrooms remain the only enclosed rooms. The result has been fewer walls, larger windows, longer sightlines and interiors designed to maximize openness, flexibility and natural light. This architectural transformation has had consequences that the art world has largely ignored. Collectors Fernando López and Marshall Coburn provide an interesting perspective when they argue that 'Space is extremely important. Our house in Miami quickly filled up and we eventually had to rent a storage facility. That was the moment we felt our way of collecting changed forever. It lost the romantic dimension of living with the works in our home. We believe the issue of space is much more important than people realize because once works are sent to storage, it fundamentally changes the experience of collecting. We suspect that many collectors have stopped collecting for precisely that reason.' For art dealer Diego Suárez, 'Fewer walls inevitably mean fewer opportunities to live with art on a daily basis, while consigning works to storage is, in my experience, hardly a satisfactory solution for most collectors. Traditionally, a collector was considered a true collector once they had run out of wall space. Today, however, this has become an increasingly pressing issue that often determines how much art collectors are willing to acquire.' In other words, domestic architecture itself has become an often overlooked variable whose implications are not merely physical but also psychological. The question remains straightforward: If domestic interiors have changed, how should the fair change? Art fairs and institutional anachronism As this essay has argued, the art fair gradually mutated from marketplace to showroom as sales shifted to the digital realm; while increasingly promoted as highly curated events, its exhibitionary infrastructure remained largely unchanged; collectors gained unprecedented access to information even as the profile of the collector-connoisseur steadily disappeared; and domestic interiors evolved toward open-plan layouts offering progressively less wall space for displaying art. What happens when an experience-based art fair continues to operate through infrastructures inherited from a sales-based art fair? The art fair crisis is therefore not primarily economic but institutional. Its infrastructures continue to operate according to the logic of the Contemporary Art Fair, even though the Global Art Fair now functions under entirely different commercial, exhibitionary, epistemological and spatial conditions. Today's art fair model no longer produces the forms of knowledge required by the Global Art System. The name for this growing mismatch is 'institutional anachronism.' As I have argued in previous Observer pieces, the same diagnosis applies to biennials and museums. All three continue to operate through institutional frameworks designed for a different art world, increasingly unable to accommodate the friction generated by global expansion. Perhaps Chilean novelist Benjamín Labatut, author of the intriguing When We Cease to Understand the World, best captured the broader condition when he wrote of the 'horrifying need for change in the world. Yet at a global level, there's a growing impulse to retreat into the past, to a supposed era of stability.' Fairs will remain essential to the functioning of the art world. The question is whether they are prepared to embrace change rather than continue operating through the comforting certainties of the past. More in art fairs, biennials and triennials