This Year's Flavour is Text

Which "visitor"? I'm serious. There are three in front of the Terada, and one of them is staring at the Jungen.

Art Fairs! Where gallerists who for 361 days of the year occupy bricks and mortar storefronts do the bulk of their business in 100-hour booth rentals that cost thousands of dollars per square metre. All because those with the means to buy their wares like to a) perform their (potential) acquisitions where it pleases them (usually somewhere warm, like Miami's South Beach) and b) attempt to humiliate the seller by making the seller come to them.

Yes, yes, yes -- nothing new. Not when the market is holding. But visit enough of these fairs and note the low-level agitation "visible" to those such as myself, who do not so much see its signs but feel them. The market, like all markets bolstered by confidence and certainty, can collapse at any minute. Fortunately for these sellers and buyers, art fairs contain their own advance warning systems. This year's thermometer is a banana.