The Scoop on -scope – Edward Rubin

Alexis Hubshman of —scope.

Alexis Hubshman, -scope’s 35 year old president and the sole owner of -scope Art Fairs, is ecstatic and why shouldn’t he be. Just this past March, -scope New York, with its 14,000 visitors and sales of over seven million dollars, shattered all alternative art fairs sales and attendance records. And if that isn’t enough, the -scope Hamptons (July 14-16), -scope London (October 13-16), -scope Miami (December 7-10) and a -scope Basel in 2007 Art Fairs are all in the works. Yes, if you think that there is no stopping this new kid on the block you just might be one hundred per cent right.

Edward Rubin: Is -scope taking over the world? Is that your plan?

Alexis Hubshman: Well, I’d like to think humbly that we are making our best efforts to grow. I will say that 2007 Basel is definitely a target. It’s a big part of our European effort. I don’t want to use the word expansion as it sounds so grand. We’re such a mom-and-pop kind of humble business. Yeah, we have big ideas. San Moritz and Monaco are other markets that we’re looking at. They are not the most obvious markets. I could be saying Madrid and Cologne. Those would be much more obvious markets but we found a lot of success in markets like the Hamptons where we’re actually the big dog and we’re not playing off somebody else. We want to go where the wealth is, where the culture is, where people are relaxing but surprisingly excited to spend money on art.

ER: How old is -scope Hamptons?

AH: This will be our second year.

ER: You said that you are moving this July to a new Hamptons location. What location were you in last time and where are you moving to?

AH: Last time it was the old Polish Hall in South Hampton which is a really modest venue. It’s about 9,000 square feet at the most and I think I am being generous when I say that. We did booths. It was our first booth fair. This year we are moving to the East Hampton Studio’s which is right off of the East Hampton airport. It’s a huge high tech airplane hanger. To put it in perspective it’s about 20,000 square feet with 40 foot ceilings. It’s a beautiful space. We have made a five year deal with the Hampton venue which includes being able to pitch a 30,000 square foot tent and put containers in it. We are hoping to generate a Basel Miami kind of energy.

ER: Is -scope New York going back to the same space next year?

AH: We are choosing a new space and we are playing with a couple of ideas. We like the idea of a non-traditional space. Even though we moved out of the hotel there’s certain seductiveness to these unusual spaces. By that I mean we are not going to go to Javits. We’re not going to find a convention center. We’re not going to go to an Armory. We are not going to go to the piers. For example there’s a soccer field that we are looking at. It is about a block long. We are talking about pitching a tent there. We’re looking at a lot of different options but the real idea for us is keeping it fresh, keeping it intimate. There is something really wonderful about having a space in which people have to interact, to explore and discover. All I want to throw out there is that that same excitement will be kept intact for New York next year.

ER: What about -scope London. Where is that going to be held?

AH: We are at the old Truman Brewery which is right off brick Lane. It is in the East End of London where White Cube is, where all of the new galleries are. It is a hip, crazy, funky space. It is near the Tea building where everybody goes to network. We decided to try and keep the same energy. It is a bit of a risk. But a lot of the galleries are very interested in this risk we’re taking. We’ve been very fortunate with the response from Zoo and Nada Galleries.

ER: Is this your first -scope London?

AH: This will be our third London -scope. To be fair about it, -scope New York was my fifth -scope New York but frankly I felt like it is my first -scope New York. I feel the same about -scope London. It’s like it’s my first. Everything has been a learning lesson, an incubator, a way of pulling together different ideas, as well as making mistakes and learning from them. We’re taking 30,000 square feet. We’re doing all kinds of wonderful projects with St. Martins, Goldsmiths, with all the different schools. It goes on and on and on. We’re really are exploring what an art fair can be. It really is exciting to know that there are a lot of people that have always supported us. We’ve always had that underdog mentality. Maybe that’s part of our attraction.

ER: Well, you are sort of like the new guy on the block. Still!

AH: Exactly! Absolutely! And how cool would it be if ten years from now I could say that? It is important to remain young, energized. That is where our heart is. It’s not an easy place to play. Frankly, financially it is very difficult, emotionally it’s tough. But there’s a certain excitement for all of us because if you’re generating four fairs a year and it is the same mold, the same system, the same game, at what point do you put a bullet in your head. So we’re trying to keep it very fresh.

ER: You said that -scope gives money to both curators and artists? Are these grants or awards?

AH: Yes, all of the above. This year at -scope New York we gave out seventy-five or eighty thousand dollars in grants, proposals, requests and artist awards. We’ve done various things in the past which have included the Best in Show. Not many people are aware of this.

ER: Is this mentioned in your press kit or your catalogue? I didn’t notice it.

AH: Yes, we do list our awards and grants in our catalogues. Still, somehow I almost feel that people glaze over it and others take it for granted or not.

You know what’s interesting, what I find exciting is that in the old days the auction houses really ruled a certain barometer of what the market value of art work was. What’s happened and what I feel very excited by and it’s the position that we found ourselves in by default, but boy it’s a pleasure is that we’re getting to the point as an art fair where there is this real time barometer market judgment where in three days you see artworks sell. We are seeing everything from a Jeff Sonhouse sell, which is an emerging artist and we are also starting to see secondary market work taper into our art fair because some of the bigger galleries like Jack Shainman and Kustera Tilton are involved.

There is an interesting shift, I don’t want to say power play, but there is an interesting shift in market judgment from an auction house having its measure of artwork value to now an art fair having a real time survey of what the real time measure of what artwork value is. I do not want to say market judgment. Shift of information is a better term. It is just an interesting shift of information with all of these art fairs and it is not just us. The consumer and the collector are really getting a great opportunity to find a real time market value for the work that they’re buying. And they see it in three days.

ER: You mean all of the art fairs?

AH: All of the art fairs. I certainly don’t mean to suggest just us.

ER: Would you consider Art Expo an art fair?

AH: Which one?

ER: Art Expo. The one held at the Javits Center.

AH: Look, who am I to judge what the level of art is. Do I think that the Affordable Art Fair is the lowest common denominator? Yes. Do I actually take issue with someone like Pulse because they’re in my humble opinion taking advantage of a high point in the market; you know all boats rise on a high tide. But I have to give a lot of respect for their intuitive business mercantility [sic] that they knew to take advantage of a market shift. And I only mention that because I look at the Armory who started in a hotel and it was breed and born of a certain soul and need and I feel very much about -scope that way. And I also see a certain familiarity breeds contempt with people getting bored of art fairs. I don’t even know what my fine point on that is except that at a certain point just like in 1997 when I opened my gallery I never called myself a dealer. I called myself a gallerist. So many of us youngsters opened up gallery spaces because the market bred it.

ER: What was the name of the gallery?

AH: I opened Rare Gallery in the Meatpacking District. It was me and my partners Peter Surace and Gavin Brown. We opened up the first gallery in the Meatpacking District because basically it was all we could afford. Gotta love it. It looked like we were smart but it was all that we could actually afford.

ER: Your press release said that -scope New York took in some 7.5 million dollars. How did you arrive at that sales figure?

AH: We actually go gallery to gallery to gallery and ask them to write down who sold what to when, where, why and how.

ER: Do the galleries really let you know?

AH: Well, some do. Some don’t tell you who they sold to. Some want to keep that private.

But I’ll give you an example. I had people that did half a million dollars. Just to put in perspective. Quite a few galleries out of eighty did half a million dollars in sales. So that number is a conservative estimate and it does not include the collectors who came in the end of the day on Sunday or Monday because we did that calculation up until Saturday and we were genuinely surprised at how much money each exhibitor made.

We did not expect to do that well in New York. It was kind of unbelievable. And those sales figures are not final. They don’t include the sales that are pending. It doesn’t include the sales that we track for a month after the fair. So we are expecting another million in sales.<

ER: Why didn’t you expect to do that well in New York? Is that because you thought that there’s so much art in New York that they didn’t need -scope?

AH: I think because Miami is clearly the Olympic of the Artworld. So New York is a triathlon, Miami, New York, the Hamptons. Let’s be clear. It’s important. It’s special. It’s definitely an event. But I didn’t expect people to put money down like they did. We had one collector come in and buy 30 pieces in the first 15 minutes of the opening of our fair. That’s unbelievable. I cannot even relate to it because I don’t come from money. So, it’s real exciting for me when I have a gallery from Germany and they’re in tears. They can’t fucking believe that for $6,000 in our smallest booth that they just made a half a million dollars. They couldn’t believe it. It’s an incredible thing to experience. I’ve never made money like that. And I knew the person that never did either. We were just looking at each other like "can you believe this?" I don’t really know what all that means except that is was a surprise to all of us somehow.

ER: I know that the galleries rent space from you. What does that actually cost?

AH: Per square foot we are the cheapest art fair out there. Per dollar of effort we put into marketing and collector efforts, various projects to draw audience, we’re ridiculously inexpensive. We probably spend too much money and in fact if I really analyzed it like a business man it’s probably a losing model and at a certain point we’re going to have to start charging more. But then again, that’s part of growing and you do what’s appropriate so you can keep everyone happy and grow with them.

ER: Do you charge per foot or do you have a set fee?

AH: What we do, well, I’ll give you an example. The Armory, for about 200 square feet, probably charges close to, somewhere between fourteen and seventeen thousand dollars. And for about 200 square feet we charge about six thousand dollars. So we keep it really equitable and by the way we also have a whole host of grants for exhibitors where we might knock prices down from free to $3500, all this to cover costs. So depending upon the gallery, which we call, and it is probably not an appropriate word for a young woman dealer, we call them breeder galleries, we give all sorts of abatements. We let them pay over a year. We give them free art fair deals. We bring them on board as a poverty case. So we are sort of an unusual system because frankly I am an artist and I own the company.

ER: Are you the sole owner of -scope?

AH: Yes?

ER: In other words, you head everything? You oversee the whole thing? You OK everything? I suppose that you have a financial person?

AH: Not really.

ER: You do it all?

AH: I went to school doing architecture. I dropped out and made an invention for Roller Blade. So math is the easy side for me. Other than my tax attorney I do all the numbers. I have a great 22 year old treasurer, a young woman who is brilliant. Michael Sellinger, my Executive Producer, represents the carry through side of the business, the expediting. Then there’s Daniel Lechner who is also an amazing project manager and Sadie Weis who does a great job at getting the information into the right hands. What I really want to be clear about, and I wrote this email right before our fair started and I said "Oh My God! Does everybody feel it?" And I got emails back "What do you mean?" And I said "collective genius." "We’ve all finally plugged in together." So I have a team of characters who all fill in my gaps. It’s like we have this big huge many marbled brain of individuals, whether it’s Michael, whether it’s Daniel, whether it’s Sadie or Helen, and it goes on and on and on.

ER: So you have a permanent staff all year round.

AH: Yes, a lot of hungry mouths to feed.

ER: I loved your -scope New York catalogue. Do all of your -scope Art Fairs have their own catalogue?

AH: Yes! But frankly we are getting to a point where we really don’t need a catalogue as we will be putting them on our website. But in the end I always feel that I need an artifact of what I did. It’s so quick and easy to forget what you did. You climb the hill. You get to the top and the next moment you’re walking down the other side. So there’s nothing like that artifactual element of having a catalogue. Pulse doesn’t do one. I don’t know that Diva does but we’re very proud that we waste our money in that way.

AH: What I am suggesting is that even though we are getting to a point where we can have a digital online catalogue we are still going to continue to waste our money making the paper catalogue. You have it in your hand, and you feel it and you see it. It just means something.

But people keep saying to me, "Hey save $20,000 dollars. Don’t go through the headache." Putting a catalogue together is a complete nightmare. And we do four a year. People keep advising me not to do it but I have to admit that I’m going to keep doing it against my better judgment.

ER: Did I ask you about your projected -scope Basel venue?

AH: I didn’t mention it for a specific reason. We are having a pretty huge sponsor coming on board which is making Basel a new European office, a sort of expansion from London into Europe and actually including China and Asia possibly.

ER: What do you mean including China and Asia? They’re in your sites for future -scopes.

AH: Oh! Quite specifically!

China is the biggest most powerful economy in the world. It is a no-brainer. I mean Hong Kong does twice the business that New York City does. Just to put it in perspective. So it’s a no-brainer. Obviously if you have any business savvy or any interest in expanding or any care in cultural exploration you gotta think about China. But we’re trying to do it in a very focused manner. You start with getting to London which is our gateway to Europe, Europe being our gateway to Asia. It’s a slow steady flow. The upshot being that Basel will represent a new level for us. We have done almost 15 fairs over the past four years with no sponsorship money. We’ve done this all on our own dime which sometimes people do not put that in perspective. It’s pretty intense and I must admit that for me personally it’s quite a rollercoaster.

ER: In other words you never had an outside sponsor. All of your support comes from ticket admissions?

AH: Ticket admissions and gallery space rentals finance -scope fairs. It’s a big mutual fund of exhibitors, to put it in some sort of financial perspective. At this point it’s what they would call a penny fund. We are not charging the big dollars yet and we don’t want to because then you start to estrange the young galleries and that is what is most interesting to us, finding new young galleries. We showed Daniel Reich Gallery and John Connolly when they were both showing out of apartments or working as directors of galleries. And Peres Projects, well, we were the first art fair that he showed with. He didn’t even have a gallery then. We like that. We liked the idea of finding people young and launching them, being part of their career. Sometimes they forget about us. That’s OK. We don’t forget about them. And we use them in all of our press releases at the appropriate time.

ER: I did notice that. What about the galleries that aren’t happy.

AH: I’ll give you an example the Annina Nosei gallery didn’t sell one piece of artwork but the networking for them was great and she directed her clients to buy some $50,000 worth of other galleries’ work. She’s going to do our next three fairs if she gets through the selection committee. That is a real exhibitor, someone who knows the payoff is not always immediate.

ER: Does she know why she didn’t sell? Was it the wrong work, the wrong art?

AH: I didn’t ask her. Look, Black and White Gallery who is a gallery that has showed with us many times and is consistently sold out completely, wholly and to unbelievable can’t believe it levels. And they sold very little work this art fair. And she was in my office yesterday and I said to her we’re sending out invite letters now, inviting galleries, who passed the selection committee to join us. We’re basically saying come join us. We love you. We think you’re great. Let’s forget about the art fair headaches and applications process.

So I sent Annina an invite. When she came into my office she said, "Oh my god, I didn’t sell anything. Why are you sending me this invitation?" I gave her a big hug and said "Are you fucking kidding me. I’ve known you for so long. You’ve been with me since day one. You’ve always sold well and you’ve introduced me to so many other galleries." Some people do well at some fairs some don’t do well at other fairs. Frankly most people are pretty happy with this fair. Even if they didn’t get big sales they met great collectors that they would never have known, they found new artists, a new gallery that they didn’t know about. These happenstances are a very important part of our fair.

ER: Do you invite the galleries or is it a combination of both?

AH: It is a combination on various levels. There is a selection committee which is very important. You need emissaries that are involved in your business respectfully keeping a good eye on what kind of work you are showing. Yet at the same time I do trust my own good heart an ideas. I do believe that I have the right to invite galleries to say, hey, let’s jump the hurdles. You’re a young, let make give you an example. Keith Talent.

ER: Yes, I met him at -scope New York.

AH: They’re characters.

ER: How old is he. I think that I met him in London.

AH: Actually, there’s two of them. There’s Andrew and Simon. Keith Talent is a fake name. I mention them because there is another gallery Seventeen who when I did the art fair last year during Freize, this kid–this artist–did a show at Gagosian and I was just blown away by the work and it turns out that he opened a gallery. So, I take chances on people and I invite them. Red Dot from Miami, that’s Anthony Spinello, or however you pronounce his last name, a young kid from Miami, probably 22 years old. I said hey, join us. Let’s do this together. Don’t worry about getting your act together. Just be smart, show up, bring good work and surprise us.

ER: And you gave him a space?

AH: I gave him a space. And I gave it to him at a reduced rate. And he blew us away. And it’s often these young characters when you give them these invites they feel so honored. You know everybody works so hard. You know how it is yourself. You work just so hard. To have somebody invite you and give you a little of that respect and honor goes a long way. And they show up and they blow you away.

ER: Tell me about the space in -scope New York. What was the range of size? From how many feet to how many square feet?

AH: Out smallest space was maybe 100 square feet; our largest space was over 500, almost 600 square feet.

ER: And what are the price ranges?

AH: From free to sixteen thousand dollars.

ER: What about the range of prices that the art sold for?

AH: I bought a piece for $250. I saw a piece go for eighty thousand dollars and I saw a piece sell for one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The sky was sort of the limit on this fair. This is a new thing for us. Taking out of that hotel has changed the scale and amount of money that can be sold.

ER: So it’s a kind of anarchy, controlled anarchy.

AH: I always explain these fairs and the whole process as dropping your most favorite family heirloom, like a beautiful vase, and dropping it to the ground. At the last moment, it settles and finally shakes to a stop on the floor. But in the meantime you’re stressed, freaking out and think you are about to break the most precious thing in the world. So controlled anarchy is a good way to put it.