Over the last few years, I’ve covered dozens of art fairs. The TEFAF fair in Maastricht was my last, and, I believe, the Western world’s last, live fair, for now. I wrote about it here in early March. It closed a few days later, after a dealer was hit with COVID-19, and within a few days after that, an axis of panicky politicians and lifer health bureaucrats closed the world’s economy. The news business goaded them with their “grandma’s gonna die unless” headlines.
Not that the art world figured in anyone’s analysis of costs and benefits. Nobody in public authority seems to have thought about any of the costs of a reckless, never-been-done quarantine of billions of healthy people. On my art-world beat, every arts venue was shut and the art market was paralyzed for the first time in history. I hate trying things that have never been done by anyone, anywhere before.
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