Amid a tempestuous art market, Ella Slater asks whether event programming could mean more to the industry’s emerging players than just a good night out.
Gone are the days of damp weeknights spent sipping tepid beer in clinically lit rooms. Caught in the rainy throes of January, I decided to forgo showing face at five different private views in one evening and turn up only to art world events that sparked my genuine interest. This was a surprisingly seamless change: take last Thursday, another rainy evening, yet one during which I found myself happily trekking from washing oysters down with champagne under the high ceilings of West London to a candlelit poetry reading in a Hackney project space. I’d visited the latter venue before, but this event was a finissage, marking the closure of a month-long group exhibition. When I arrived, the crowd was spilling onto the pavement. It was busier than its opening night.
More and more galleries are catching on to the benefits of event programming. After all, in a sea of 6-8 p.m. openings, what sets you apart?
The overlap between art and experience is not a new phenomenon: think sixties Happenings, or–in a more explicitly commercial manner–the forays of major art players like Hauser & Wirth or Frieze’s Matthew Slotover into hospitality. Yet amongst an art market disillusioned with speculation and volatile financial returns, community-building takes on a more urgent form. Contemporary art can no longer afford to be mediocre; once again, it needs to provide access to something magical and intellectual. Experiences, enriched as they are by their facilitation of interpersonal connection and sustained engagement, can help achieve this.
Cedric Bardawil’s eponymous space is one example of a gallery centring events programming within its wider business model. Bardawil’s Old Compton Street setting opened in 2022 as a permanent home, consolidating its founder’s experience in the music industry and his interest in visual art. Alongside its regular exhibitions, the gallery has a record label, produces publications, and emphasises cross-industry collaborations. Last month, Bardawil hosted the trombonist Peter Zummo and writer Matthew Holman with Soho Reading Series for a performance inspired by Vito Acconci’s Step Piece. Events like these, he tells me, have “allowed me to bring people from different worlds together and for interesting conversations to happen. Things can be a bit light online, but I also want a proper conversation and something tangible”.
Now Bardawil is collaborating with Charlie Mellor, the former operatic tenor behind Hackney Road’s now-closed The Laughing Heart, who opened a buzzing old-school Italian on Greek Street last weekend, titled Osteria Vibrato. Bardawil will be curating a rotating, for-sale art programme at the restaurant, spotlighting gallery artists in a late-night, fine dining context. It isn’t a totally novel phenomenon, but it is certainly one which has been popping up more and more on my radar with regard to emerging spaces. “The white cube is a thing of the twentieth century”, Bardawil proclaims when I ask him about the collaboration. “There are other ways of showing paintings, and this is one of them: a museum-quality display in a restaurant.”
There has also been a recent spattering of itinerant exhibition programmes with events as their USP, one of which is Gigi Surel’s Teaspoon Projects. Surel, a curator and patron known for her support of emerging–even unrepresented–practices, stages shows which pop up every few months with intensive weeks-long programs of events, before sinking into the background for another period of behind-the-scenes planning. “Events sit at the centre of Teaspoon Projects because they’re how I entered the art world,” she says, “through patronage, and through the kinds of gatherings around art that let you stay–not just glance, nod, and move on.”
They also draw in a new audience, increasing access to spaces–commercial galleries–that are notoriously intimidating to those unacquainted with their social quirks (yes, the gallery is open, no, the receptionist doesn’t hate you, they are just overworked). Surel leans into this method of expanding reach rather than square footage through a wide range of collaborations, from scent-based dating nights to food installations. “It’s not outsourcing, it’s co-authorship,” she explains of her partnerships. “It means the programme is richer, the labour is shared, and I can focus my attention where I’m most useful.” She also emphasises the long-term commercial benefits: “events support the project financially in ways that feel practical rather than forced. They help build an audience that returns. When people come back, bring friends, and spend real time with the work, that attention can translate into sales, commissions, and future invitations.”
Amid a sea of gallery closures making the traditional goal of expansion slightly less appealing (see the recent closure of Stephen Friedman), as well as a landscape of rising rents and gentrification across traditional art centres worldwide, the cultivation of excitement and sustained engagement around a programme can provide a crucial lifeline. Art isn’t the most reliable financial investment; it makes sense that twenty committed collectors, buying regularly and loyally, could provide a more sustainable business model than one hundred unattached speculators. Tapping into the experiential, then, can mean more than a good night out: the art world, after all, has always been where work and play collide.
