 COPE was founded by its president Alexis Hubshman in 2002 and has since grown into the largest and most global art fair in the world. Recognized for presenting cutting edge contemporary art featuring emerging dealers, curators and artists within 7 markets worldwide and networking them with Patrons through their unique programs. Solo and thematic group shows are presented alongside museum-quality exhibitions, collector tours, screenings, and special events. With sales of over $100 million and attendance of over 300,000 visitors, SCOPE Art Shows continue to be a steady force in the global art market.
Alexis Hubshman: I was born in San Francisco but moved to New York City when I was very young. I consider New York to be my hometown - I had my first drink there, my first girlfriend and all the other crazy experiences that go along with living in a big city. I went to public school and went on to study Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. I completed the first few years of my Architecture degree but during one summer I dropped out because I had started my first business, Wedgee LLC, with some investors. I used to play ice hockey and I had invented a scrape-cover for my rollerblades so I could go indoors with them (Patent number: 5833270). That is where my story really starts.
The son of one of the investors was an art collector and in 1995 we started to go around galleries together searching for emerging artists. This was before there were many young galleries out there and consequently, the established galleries held the majority of art. At some point we became bored of searching the back rooms of established galleries in order to find emerging artists. So a partner and I opened a large space on 14th Street in the meat packing district. We were the first gallery to open in that area. We focused on young emerging artists. Previously it had been necessary to have money and connections in order to get noticed in the art world - but things seemed to be working for us without either.
It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to rent a hotel and allow galleries like ours to have an intimate showing of work and few auctions. It turned out to be a big success. Many galleries from all over America and abroad participated and all of the dealers were keen to try it in their hometowns. That was the origin of what is today known as SCOPE.
Art Interview: What motivated you to connect with other emerging galleries?
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Stefano Bombardieri
Icaro transport
2007
Iron and resin
Natural size
Galleria Della Pina Arte Contemporanea |
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Alexis Hubshman: Well around 2000 it was hard to get into the bigger art fairs if you were unknown. So I was thinking about how small galleries could create business and what was necessary in order to do this. The answer was that they needed collectors but after the Twin Towers were destroyed, business really slowed down. If collectors were too scared of terrorism to come to town then there had to be something really unique and special to draw them. We were able to attract collectors with the renting of hotels and the auctions. The important thing was to have camaraderie - almost like the NADA Art Fair (New Art Dealers Alliance) in Miami Beach. NADA grew out of a similar sensibility. I was involved very early with NADA as well and the concept was to generate opportunity for a group of galleries that have bonded together in order to survive during hard economic times.
Art Interview: Did your past entrepreneurial experience help you in building SCOPE into a major international art event?
Alexis Hubshman: Should I tell you the truth or should I lie? The truth is if there's any entrepreneur that can find something like this, it's God blessed! I mean, who can find a project that has its own organic merits? I would like to say that I planned to build this big franchise, but what really happened was it had the right heart and the right timing. Those two things just came together to create a momentum that was outside of any calculated business approach I may have had. So I would really like to give the credit for success of the fair to its own momentum. The interests of the exhibitors who participate, the projects we do, to the institutions we work with have made SCOPE what it is.
I have done thirty fairs in a row and you can imagine it becomes fairly exhausting. In a situation like that; either you are A: making billions of dollars, or B: You've got a lot of love from people who keep telling you we need this, this is special, keep it going. My point is in order to survive we had to do several fairs a year. It's very simple - if you did one a year, it would have been a hobby but if you do many a year, it turns into a business. It was never calculated to become a global franchise - it was really just following the hearts of our exhibitors. Somebody from Germany says come to Berlin; somebody from LA says we should do one in LA. So I give credit to a collective genius that I was fortunate enough to be open to. I really just help facilitate it.
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Antony Crossfield
WarDance1 Ed.3
2008
Lamba print
90 x 149cm
Mito Gallery |
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Art Interview: SCOPE art fairs are now in Miami, New York, Basel, the Hamptons and London. And you expect to be in Madrid and Dubai soon - how did you go about expanding internationally?
Alexis Hubshman: It has a lot to do with really believing that you have something special. Inevitably the collectors that watch and buy at SCOPE help me build bridges into other cities. I take a diplomatic approach with this; in essence you become invited - we were invited to Dubai for example. But I don't know whether we will do that or not, because we have already been invited to do something in Turkey in 2010. We have always had a large crew of curators, collectors, friends and institutions that have helped us guide our ship. We always knew there were certain markets we wanted to be involved in. Now people are sending us proposals and this has been wonderful.
Art Interview: What is required for you to manage art fairs internationally?
Alexis Hubshman: Well I'm fortunate in that I have a core group that's broken into different departments: operations, marketing and communications, exhibitor relations and finance. They work all year round. We are not just doing advertising for one fair; we're doing it for five! This allows us to cut costs, plan and execute our fairs very efficiently. So we have been able to really create forward planning like the layers of a cake. The only real difference between the different cities is that we try to include different galleries in our non-profit programme. Our non-profit foundation always presents a different programme. For example at one fair we focused on China, which Saatchi curated. The Miami fair focused on Latin American artists - that was done by the CIFO - Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. We always try to change the program of the fairs, but the core planning remains the same.
Art Interview: I understand that SCOPE Basel this year is focusing on the Berlin contemporary art market. Why have you chosen to highlight Berlin at this point?
Alexis Hubshman: Actually, we have chosen two places - Berlin and Asia. We chose Berlin because the Berlin Senate approached us and asked if we would be interested in having them create selection committee to pick ten Berlin galleries to join us. Berlin is important - a lot of artists I know have been moving to Berlin - there may not be a great collector population there yet, but there's certainly a great artist population. First and foremost, we care about the artist so a specific section of the fair is focused on Berlin. Similarly we also will have a section focused on Asia. We also have a solo project section that new to the fair where young galleries have one person shows. In this manner I can show 120 galleries without it becoming overwhelming.
As we grow larger its important for our visitors to be able to break down the number of galleries and be able to enjoy certain curated selections. The visitors know they can come in one day and focus on Berlin, Asia the next and the solo projects the next day. We are breaking the fair down into various elements.
Art Interview: How do you select the galleries that will participate?
Alexis Hubshman: We work in a variety of ways: the Berlin gallery senate choosing and working with the Berlin selection of galleries; a group of my older galleries helping me pick younger galleries to be in the solo projects; and Asia has a group of collectors, artists, institutes and curators that choose from there. I'm intimately involved because I like to present galleries that haven't been heard of before - that's always interesting in the hallmark of SCOPE. Its one thing to pull together all the galleries you've heard of, but it is another thing to take a chance and sort of build momentum for unknown galleries. We have galleries from Latvia, China, Turkey - from all over - that nobody has heard of. I'm very intimately involved in the selection process - I travel all over the world looking at galleries.
Art Interview: How many visitors do you expect this year at SCOPE Basel?
Alexis Hubshman: There's has been a lot of PR. Our hope is somewhere around 20,000 visitors. That seems to be a realistic number. You need to put it in perspective - in Miami last year we took in 35,000 visitors, which was wonderful. But we tend to hover between 16,000 and 20,000.
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Javier Velasco
Strangers in Paradise
2007
Neon
95 x 195 cm
Mito Gallery |
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Art Interview: How much of your work personally is focused on marketing?
Alexis Hubshman: Very little - we have a department who does that, as well as a PR company - Camron Pr - whose job it is to market the information. What I do is produce the project. If you call the projects, the focuses and the special museum programming ‘marketing', then I spend a lot of time doing that - but I prefer to call it curatorship. I spend a lot of time on curation and the elements of the fair that give it gravity and make it interesting. That of course goes to the communication department and the PR firm who then spin it out to people who can wrap their head around it and understand what we're doing.
Art Interview: What is an average day like for you?
Alexis Hubshman: I get up in the morning, and answer tons of emails, look at loads of projects being proposed for the fair, then I do press interviews, I proof read all of the written catalogues, have meetings with my PR company, get daily updates with my office, and work on production planning - each department checks in with me in the morning, and then individually, they break off into smaller pods to go over outstanding issues. We have really found some very wonderful systems on how to operate that are based on military problem solving. We break off into small groups where no group has more power than the other. Its really just about figuring out the answer to major issues and letting each department brainstorm. There's a lot of that going on in our office - we use a collective genius to quench the numbers, break things down and figure stuff out. So, that's a typical day for me.
Art Interview: Has SCOPE Basel always been a satellite of the Art Basel Fair ?
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Anthony Gayton
Boys will be boys - Graffiti Ed.
2008
Digital Photo print
76 x 95 cm
Mito Gallery |
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Alexis Hubshman: Is SCOPE a satellite fair? No, I like to think of it as a “little brother” fair. You can't be a satellite fair, if you are in more market cities than the other fairs. But SCOPE Basel has always taken place during the same period as Art Basel.
Art Interview: I understand that you are creating a new pavilion that offers over 8,000 square metres for the fair. There was a bit of resistance over this issue locally- The Financial Times alluded to Art Basel somehow being the driving force behind this resistance. Do you give any merit to that?
Alexis Hubshman: Diplomatically, I will say that Art Basel has been decent with us - we're in all of their VIP programming. Messe Schweiz, which owns Art Basel is such a big company that they are not interested or disinterested in us. They just don't want any competition near them. Frankly that attitude is starting to spin into quite a problem for them because a lot of things are coming out that I think were meant to stay behind closed doors. The fact is, we have a real contract and we've already been to court and won. We are still battling to this day to assure we are at the Landhof stadium and we feel very convinced that we will be there. The public outcry has been amazingly huge - It has been on the radio, on the news, and people are walking into government offices and giving oral reports on why they think SCOPE should be there. The support we have had is incredible. But it has been very exhausting.
Art Interview: Have you attempted to develop a special relationship with the organisers of Art Basel?
Alexis Hubshman: Of course, and I have been doing that for years. It's a company that has its own agenda and I don't know if any other art fair really fits into that agenda. They seem to have a provincial outlook where "the more the merrier" doesn't really work. If they really want to get into the world stage as the Olympics of the art world it is important to sew complimentary transjunctional events like our own into the event. We focus on a different market - emerging contemporary art. It only brings more collectors and a larger energy to Basel. But the organisers of Art Basel have never really seemed to have the same opinion.
Art Interview: What steps have you taken to attract collectors to your fair?
This oral history transcript is the result of a digitally recorded interview with Alexis Hubshman on May 18, 2009. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany and New York, New York, USA and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.
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