FAIR PRICE

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FAIR PRICE

Will Ramsay’s Affordable Art Fair is revolutionising the way we buy art. But just don’t call it an investment.

ACCORDING TO WILL RAMSAY, there are three types of people in the world. “First, there’s the one-off person, who buys but has no ambition to fill their walls. Then there’s the sort of person who keeps buying until their walls are filled. And the third type is the person who buys and just keeps on buying… but you don’t know when you start which of those three you’re going to be.”

We may not know what type of buyers we’re going to be, but as the founder of the hugely successful Affordable Art Fair, Ramsay has made a career from helping people to find out. Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, London’s biannual Affordable Art Fair is going from strength to strength, with sister events running in Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, Bristol and New York, and affiliate events held in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Hong Kong. This year’s spring event in London attracted 22,500 visitors and sold £5m (€6m) worth of art, testament to the simple appeal of Ramsay’s pioneering approach.

“It’s all about trying to make art more accessible and break down the fear factor,” he says, explaining that people tend to think they need lots of money and experience before they can even consider buying art. “My approach has always been the Oddbins approach, which was not to cater for people who know about art, but for those people who feel they want to know about it.”

And when it comes to making art accessible, Ramsay knows that price is key. Everything on sale at the fair costs less than £3,000 (€3,500), with prices starting from £50 (€58) and an average of around £650 (€760). All prices are clearly displayed so that buyers don’t get any nasty surprises. It’s convenient, too. With up to 120 galleries taking work to each fair it’s a brilliant opportunity for casual buyers to see a huge amount of art, which, Ramsay points out, “would otherwise take you a lot of weekends of traipsing around galleries all over the world.”

Ramsay’s first steps into the art world came when he opened his own gallery, Will’s Art Warehouse. As the name suggests, his idea even then was to break down the formal barriers that can exist in conventional art galleries, and it was a natural progression from running the gallery to organising the first of the art fairs. But it wasn’t just an understanding of his customers that led him to start the fair. Running his own gallery, he saw first hand the potential that existed for reaching a wider audience, if only gallery owners could work together to reach customers. Making it easier for people to buy art and easier for gallery owners to sell it, Ramsay created a win-win situation that has spawned its fair share of imitators, but, he says, none can be counted as rivals just yet.

“People have tried to copy the format and so far it hasn’t really come off. What often happens is that you get people trying to run art fairs who don’t have the marketing or business skills. At the other extreme there are people who are good at business but don’t understand the art world. As an art fair organiser you need to have that balance between the two.”

Listening to Ramsay enthusing about the fairs, it’s clear that while he may be a good businessman, he’s first and foremost a lover of art. He’s emphatic that people should only ever buy art because they love it, and scorns the idea of buying art as an investment. That, he says, is a nice excuse to justify spending money, but he insists that even the biggest collectors buy art because they love it and think it’s good quality, not because they think it’s going to soar in value.

That’s not to say that the Affordable Art Fair hasn’t seen its fair share of nice surprises over the years. Antony Micallef, for example, showed his work at the fair shortly after he graduated, and now his works are being snapped up by the likes of Brad Pitt and Christina Aguilera for hundreds of times what they sold for back then. It’s not surprising, though, that Ramsay the art lover advises against buying with those sorts of gains in mind.

“You might strike it lucky and discover you’ve got a gold mine sitting on your wall,” he says, “but that shouldn’t be your reason for buying it!”

The Affordable Art Fair runs from 22-25 October in Battersea Park, London www.affordableartfair.com

WORDS BY STEVEN WATSON