Inside the Global Art Fair Wars
Today’s art fairs have become far more than cultural and commercial events; they operate as platforms of visibility, machines of global branding and instruments of geopolitical power. The rivalry between the mega fairs exemplifies the newest phase of art’s globalization, but this system—in which fairs shape where capital circulates, where legitimacy is produced and which cities become cultural nodes—did not emerge naturally. It emerged from a broader transformation inseparable from the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, reaching its symbolic apex with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The globalization of capital, the liberalization of markets and the rapid expansion of cross-border financial flows reshaped not only economies but also the cultural sphere, accelerating the transnationalization of the art market. The art fair became the perfect platform for this new regime: a flexible, mobile, instantly deployable structure capable of producing visibility, attracting investment and activating cities as temporary cultural markets.
The experiential art fair was born in Madrid
When we look back at the evolution of the Global Art Fair, or GAF, in the 1990s, the real rupture did not occur in Basel or in Cologne, where the first European fairs emerged, but in Madrid. Under the direction of Rosina Gómez-Baeza, ARCOmadrid introduced a format that, at the time, seemed anomalous: part art fair, part biennial, part urban cultural festival.
By the early 1990s, Art Basel was entering what Lukas Gloor, former director of the Swiss Emil Bührle Foundation and one of the most knowledgeable analysts of Basel’s institutional history, has described as a period of structural fatigue: declining revenues, an outdated selection system, inadequate exhibition formats and growing competition from new fairs in Paris, Chicago and, increasingly, Madrid. FIAC, Art Chicago and ARCOmadrid began to challenge Basel’s long-standing dominance by offering fresher formats, stronger curatorial voices and a more dynamic engagement with artists and institutions.
In 1989, Ernst Beyeler and Trudl Bruckner—two of the founding gallerists who had shaped the early Basel ethos—stepped back from the selection committee, marking not only a generational transition but the recognition that Basel could no longer rely solely on modernist authority in a rapidly globalizing art market. When Lorenzo Rudolf took over in 1991, he inherited a fair that urgently needed reinvention—while in Madrid, a new model was already taking shape. But why was Madrid able to invent a new format when Paris, Chicago or New York could not?
Spain, emerging in the early 1980s from four decades of dictatorship, was culturally starved and eager to reconnect with contemporary art. When Rosina Gómez-Baeza took over ARCOmadrid in 1986, she inherited a publicly funded fair supported by the City of Madrid, the Regional Government and the Chamber of Commerce, and championed unreservedly by the national press and the political establishment. At a time when Spain had almost no contemporary art museums—the Museo Reina Sofía would not open until 1992—ARCOmadrid became the country’s principal gateway to international art.
Within a few years, it was attracting more than 100,000 visitors, driven by an unusually young audience whose enthusiasm transformed the fair into a cultural event of national significance. Spain’s determination to reinsert itself into the global cultural circuit allowed Gómez-Baeza to build what other fairs could not: high-level theoretical panels that brought figures such as Glenn D. Lowry, Hou Hanru, Barry Schwabsky, Ute Meta Bauer, Okwui Enwezor and Alanna Heiss to Madrid; alongside curated sections and guest-country programs led by documenta and biennial curators such as Jan Hoet, Nicolas Bourriaud, Chus Martínez and Dan Cameron. All of this was accompanied by parallel exhibitions across the city’s institutions and an ecosystem of openings, receptions, parties and after-hours that turned the fair into a week-long urban experience.
Yet ARCOmadrid could only operate at this scale because it devoted around one million euros every year to promotion, invited guests and international collectors—a figure unmatched by any other fair, and something neither Art Basel nor Frieze has ever had at its disposal. In a country with no established market, no gallery system of scale and hardly any museums of contemporary art, ARCOmadrid ended up catalyzing the very infrastructure it lacked—precisely because nothing comparable existed. It endowed the emerging Global Art Fair with what I have termed the curator–open–space model. At ARCOmadrid, curators were not an accessory but a structural presence: curated sections, project rooms and guest-country pavilions broke with the classical dealer-booth-and-alley grid and replaced it with open formats that operated more like biennial zones than commercial corridors. The fair also began to expand physically beyond its own architecture—into museums, public institutions and the city itself—anticipating later developments such as Art Basel Unlimited or Frieze Projects, where the fair spills outward into large-scale commissions, performances and site-specific works. In Madrid, this spatial and conceptual opening was not an add-on but the core of a new model: the art fair as a curated, urban, experiential infrastructure.
Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Lorenzo Rudolf—supported closely by influential dealers such as Pierre Huber, Gianfranco Verna and Felix Buchmann—was radically restructuring Art Basel. Together they replaced the traditional dealer-driven logic with a project-based selection system that aligned with the new neoliberal ethos of the 1990s; what mattered was no longer a gallery’s pedigree but the strength and ambition of its proposal. At the same time, Sam Keller, then the fair’s young and hyperactive director of communications, traveled to Spain and spent a full week embedded with the ARCOmadrid team. He observed not only the curated sections and the guest-country programs but also the entire ecosystem of theoretical panels, museum openings, receptions, parties and the unmistakable Madrid rhythm that culminated every night—without fail, and I can attest to this—with the art crowd ending up at the legendary after-hours Bar Cock at Calle de la Reina 16.
The contrast with Basel’s earlier experiments was stark. ARCOmadrid had made curatorial input the core of its identity. It introduced ARCO Videoarte as early as 1987, while Art Basel’s Bankverein Video Kunstpreis would only follow in 1994; it launched Cutting Edge in 1996, with Art Basel’s Statements section appearing later that same year; it created the Project Rooms in 1998, two years before Unlimited in 2000; and from 1994 onwards its Guest Country programs—Germany, France, Korea and others—installed national pavilions inside the fair as a central device.
ARCOmadrid, in other words, had already embraced the curator as the central agent of the fair, creating what would become the first fully articulated curated art fair. Its yearly Guest Country structure reproduced with unexpected clarity the logic of the Venice Biennale. It was this conceptual leap—turning the fair into a curatorial platform rather than a mere corridor of booths—that Keller saw unfolding in Madrid, and that Basel was only just beginning to realize it needed to emulate.
This transformation was evident to observers at the time. The Madrid model produced a cultural intensity that exceeded anything seen in Basel, Chicago or Paris. As cultural journalist Miguel Mora wrote in the leading newspaper El País on Sunday, February 16, 1997: “They are all well dressed; the gentlemen with expensive shoes and the ladies in high fashion clothes; but the shadows under their eyes give away the exhaustion caused by an overloaded program: performances, parties, museum, art fairs, conferences and after-hours, then they begin all over again.” Few descriptions capture more vividly how ARCOmadrid had already evolved into a full-scale urban event—a precursor to the experiential model that would later become standard across the Global Art Fair ecosystem.
And although Sam Keller would subsequently argue that Art Basel itself had pioneered this fair-as-event structure, his own words reveal that Basel was adapting to a broader paradigm. As he told Cristina Ruiz and Melanie Gerlis in a 2007 interview for the Art Newspaper: “Art Basel has developed as an event which combines commercial and cultural goals. We don’t even use the term ‘fair’ anymore to describe Art Basel; we call it an art ‘show’, which is more appropriate.” What he didn’t mention was that the experiential framework he celebrated had already been fully articulated in Madrid a decade earlier.
The GAF origin story, the Miami turn and the London response
If ARCOmadrid invented the experiential art fair, it was in Miami in 2002—when Art Basel exported its brand to the United States—that the model finally became global. What emerged there was not an American imitation of Basel, but the first fully realized prototype of the Global Art Fair: the ARCOmadrid model pushed to its most festive and immersive extreme, amplified by a city with beaches, warm weather, a thriving club scene crowned by the nightly pop-up of Le Baron and a backdrop of kitsch Art Deco hotels such as The Betsy and the Leslie Hotel that transformed the fair into a cultural and social spectacle unlike anything Europe had ever produced. At the same time, Miami’s status as a tax haven and its year-round good weather drew wealthy collectors from Latin America and the United States to the fair each December, turning it into a magnet for capital, visibility and elite sociability.
What took shape in Miami was the operational birth of the Global Art Fair, something I witnessed first-hand as the Basel team translated lessons absorbed in Madrid into a new continental scale. The fair ceased to be a self-contained commercial hall and re-emerged as a city-wide machine: more than 20 satellite fairs—including Art Miami, Photo Miami, PULSE Miami, NADA Miami, SCOPE Miami, Aqua Art Miami, CONTEXT Art Miami and Untitled Art Miami Beach; the public opening of major private collections such as the Rubell Museum, the de la Cruz Collection, the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, the Craig Robins Collection and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO); and the creation or consolidation of new museums including the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami), together with the relaunch of The Bass, all of which collectively rewired Miami Beach into a temporary cultural metropolis.
One of Miami’s historical dealers, Bernice Steinbaum, is of the opinion that “Miami became very trendy because, unlike other U.S. cities, it attracted many affluent individuals or celebrities, spawning a series of other parallel art fairs.” However, she also says that “the arrival of Art Basel Miami Beach reshaped the ecosystem by creating a dynamic where the focus shifted increasingly toward global players and less toward the local gallery community.” Additionally, the proliferation of parallel fairs raised another question—one that has often come up in my conversations with Julián Navarro, director of CONTEXT Art Miami. Aware of the competition, Navarro suggested that “Before 2002, Miami had an active but relatively local ecosystem. The arrival of Art Basel Miami Beach forced fairs like Art Miami and CONTEXT to redefine their identity within the broader week. Rather than competing with Basel, our strategy has focused on complementing it—offering a platform for mid-career galleries, strong regional programs and collectors interested in a different price segment. In that sense, Basel’s arrival was a challenge but also an opportunity, showing that the city could sustain multiple fairs as long as each articulated a clear, differentiated vision.”
Art Basel Miami Beach did not simply expand the fair; it mutated it. It created the first true fair week, fused curatorial content with lifestyle spectacle and elevated the role of the fair director beyond the managerial expectations inherited from the traditional 1960s/70s art-fair model. A new profile emerged, closer to an art critic, curator or institutional strategist—think of figures such as Amanda Coulson; Francesco Manacorda; the Frieze co-founders Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover; or more recently Marc Spiegler, Noah Horowitz and Vincenzo De Bellis. In Miami—where I have been returning since my first visit in 2004—the experiential model I had traced back to ARCOmadrid ceased to be an anomaly and became a global template.
Within a year of Art Basel’s breakthrough in the United States, Frieze London emerged not as a rupture from this new experiential logic but as its most metropolitan and editorially refined iteration. Founded by art publishers Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover—the team behind Frieze magazine—the fair arrived with a degree of critical authority and cultural legitimacy unprecedented for a new art fair. Under the curatorial direction of Neville Wakefield, Frieze Projects embedded a strong curatorial identity at the core of the event, while the fair’s proximity to London’s fashion industry, publishing houses and creative-class networks gave it a tone of effortless sophistication: a mix of institutional credibility, cultural cool and metropolitan glamour. As the Guardian fashion writer Lauren Cochrane has observed, “the relevance of fashion at Frieze has grown over the last decade,” with brands such as Dunhill, Stone Island, Loewe and Nanushka appearing as official partners—evidence that fashion’s presence was structural rather than cosmetic.
Art Basel thus arrived at the experiential logic of the new Global Art Fair through crisis, reinvention and progressive adaptation, whereas Frieze was born directly into that paradigm, unburdened by comparable legacy constraints. London provided conditions that Basel could never match: mega-galleries such as White Cube, Lisson and the legacy of Anthony d’Offay; influential collectors including Charles Saatchi and Anita Zabludowicz; and a dense institutional matrix comprising Tate Modern, the ICA and the Serpentine. The fair also benefited from explicit political support. As then Culture Secretary James Purnell stated in an interview quoted in The Art Newspaper/Frieze Art Fair Daily in 2007, “Frieze Art Fair raises public awareness of contemporary art, provides opportunities for artists, stimulates the U.K.’s contemporary art market and makes a significant contribution to London’s economy.” In this environment, Frieze did not imitate Miami’s exuberance; it translated the experiential-curatorial model into the idiom of London’s editorial sophistication, cultural visibility and creative-industrial glamour.
The four fronts of the art fair war
The rivalry between Art Basel and Frieze does not unfold chronologically but territorially, across a set of differentiated battlefields where each region imposes its own conditions of victory. The fair war is not a linear march from Europe to the United States and on to Asia; it is a multi-front conflict in which saturation, acceleration, symbolism and geopolitics determine who can dominate visibility, institutional legitimacy and cultural capital. Rather than advancing in sequence, Art Basel and Frieze Art Fair confront a landscape of uneven terrains: the structurally oversaturated United States, the accelerated markets of Asia, the symbolic battleground of Europe where cultural history itself is contested, and the geopolitical velocity of the Gulf, where state-backed ambition has rewritten the tempo of global culture. Each front exposes a different vulnerability—and a different limit—in the aspirations of the GAF.
Frieze New York, launched in 2012, attempted to anchor itself in the post-1945 capital of contemporary art—a city that, as French art historian Serge Guilbaut argued in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, became the dominant locus of artistic authority after Abstract Expressionism ended the “Parisian dealers’ firm control of the American market.” Nonetheless, New York already functions as a permanent art fair, with year-round auctions, gallery programs and a dense constellation of competing events—Independent, NADA New York, TEFAF New York and 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, all taking place during Frieze Week and the city’s extended spring art calendar—dispersing attention and leaving Frieze New York a relatively small fair within a saturated ecosystem.
Frieze Los Angeles, inaugurated in 2019 on the Paramount Studios lot and later acquired by Endeavor, pursued Hollywood visibility but encountered what Tim Schneider identified in Artnet News as the city’s structural limits: extreme spatial dispersion, a modest collector base and hype unsupported by a self-sustaining market. Los Angeles absorbs the fair without allowing it to reorganize its rhythm. Art Basel Miami Beach remains the only fair capable of reprogramming a U.S. city, generating a dense ecosystem of satellite events, private collections and institutional activity. In the United States, Art Basel holds the strategic advantage, while Frieze’s expansions in New York and Los Angeles reveal the limits of its platform logic within a terrain either too saturated—or too dispersed—to be territorialized.
As Alain Servais, the collector and financial broker whom I met again recently in Doha and now at ARCOmadrid, remarked: “I am as happy to see a competition between Art Basel and Frieze as I am happy to see a competition in phones between Apple and Samsung. In art fairs and phones, the four are offering alternatives to each other, necessary competition and potential experimentation. They are not directly comparable as Art Basel has fairs which serve 200+ galleries, whereas Frieze can be considered more boutique art fairs with mostly around 100 participants except in London. Frieze has clearly attempted to appeal to a younger and more ‘socializing’ public, which forced Art Basel to think about its ‘classic art blue chip’ public. Frieze has a more U.S.A.-centered portfolio of fairs until the interesting and opportunistic Abu Dhabi initiative, when Art Basel is now solidly global.”
Asia emerged as the most strategically consolidated front once Art Basel acquired Art HK in 2011 and relaunched it as Art Basel Hong Kong (ABHK) in 2013, establishing the city as the region’s undisputed financial and institutional hub. The concentration of mega-galleries, auction houses and new cultural infrastructures such as Tai Kwun and M+ has given Hong Kong a degree of capital density and liquidity unmatched elsewhere in Asia. Last year, during Art Basel Hong Kong, I visited with Hong Kong architect and collector William Lim the collection he donated to M+, and he offered a clear assessment of why the city remains the region’s dominant fair hub: “Art SG 26 had 105 participating galleries. Frieze Seoul 25 had 120 galleries. Art Basel Hong Kong 26 will have 240 international galleries, more than the other two combined. Art Basel Hong Kong creates a truly international art experience in Hong Kong, concurrently with Art Central, as well as major auction events and major international galleries having their flagship exhibitions opening in the same week, which turn Hong Kong into an amazing art city for that week. You get the excitement of an international event, the excitement of being in Hong Kong, which is not easy for other places in Asia to even come close to.”
David Zwirner’s presence in Asia underscores this structural consolidation and highlights the importance of having robust institutional and market infrastructures already in place. As James Green, senior director and head of London at David Zwirner, explains: “Art fairs and galleries share a symbiotic relationship within the cities they share, mutually propelling positive momentum alongside institutions and regional and international collectors, which benefits all. A major fair can significantly elevate an art ecosystem, but strong foundations– established galleries, institutions, committed collectors and a dynamic network of market players–must already be in place or strengthening for that impact to be sustained.” At the same time, the infrastructural weight of Art Basel Hong Kong extends beyond scale alone. As Vincenzo De Bellis, global director of fairs and exhibition platforms at Art Basel, has noted, fairs operate with a temporal velocity that sharply contrasts with the slower institutional timelines that structure museum practice: “Fairs have the drive to put things into the world that others then pick up and reinterpret. We are faster than museums because we don’t have the same timelines or layers of approval. Museums need years; we work in months or even weeks. That doesn’t mean fairs replace institutions, but it does mean we often start conversations or bring visibility to artists and ideas that institutions later develop. We fill that gap naturally.”
It is precisely this speed, scale and infrastructural density that Frieze Seoul cannot replicate. Against this backdrop, Frieze Seoul, launched in 2022 alongside Frieze Masters in collaboration with KIAF, operates within a very different framework. As Patrick Lee, director of Frieze Seoul, explained to Observer’s Elisa Carollo last year, “Frieze has undeniably accelerated the internationalization of Seoul Art Week and elevated the city’s profile as a global art destination—not just for regional collectors but also for those flying in from across the world. At the same time, it has helped coordinate and amplify the existing energy of a rich local scene already in motion.” Seoul possesses a vibrant ecosystem of private museums, strong local galleries and an active collector base, and its convergence of art, fashion and celebrity culture—further amplified by the synchronization of Seoul Fashion Week—has made the fair a highly visible cultural moment.
However, visibility is not dominance: unlike Hong Kong, Seoul lacks the infrastructural concentration, auction power and regional liquidity required to redirect the continent’s flows of capital and legitimacy. In Asia, Art Basel Hong Kong remains the central node; Frieze Seoul functions as a powerful amplifier of attention rather than a competing locus of institutional or financial authority.
The European front revolves around artistic authority and historical centrality. Art Basel Paris, launched in 2022, reactivates the city’s position as the pre-war capital of artistic modernity. As art historian Robert Jensen has shown in his iconic Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, Paris was the place where modernist painting became the dominant interpretive model and where the institutional infrastructures of modern art first emerged. Art Basel’s move embeds the fair within this lineage and aligns it with the city’s exceptional institutional density, from the Musée d’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, reinforced by the cultural power of private foundations led by figures such as Bernard Arnault and François Pinault. In the post-Brexit landscape, Frieze London, founded in 2003 to consolidate London’s artistic legitimacy vis-à-vis New York, faces a renewed challenge from Paris, which can leverage historical depth, institutional mass and private–public cultural capital to reassert itself as Europe’s central art-market node. Although Frieze’s press office was unable to provide a comment in time for this article, Eva Langret, director of Frieze London, had already highlighted back in 2022 in an interview with Melanie Gerlis for the Financial Times that “London’s strength lies in the density of its museums, galleries and creative communities. That ecosystem creates a context where galleries can take risks and where audiences expect experimentation.”
And the strategic question now emerging across the European field is unavoidable: will Art Basel Paris ultimately cannibalize the original fair in Art Basel, given Paris’s glamour, institutional gravitas and the preference many American collectors already show for the cité lumière over the comparatively discreet artistic offer of the Swiss city?
In the Gulf, the rivalry between Art Basel Qatar and Frieze Abu Dhabi pivots less on innovation than on state-aligned soft power. Following the logic identified by the late American political scientist Joseph Nye, fairs here function as strategic infrastructure: instruments for projecting national narratives, attracting global audiences and consolidating geopolitical prestige. Iraqi artist Adel Abidin, with whom I discussed this during the fair and whose work was on display at Gallery Tanit from Beirut, offers a clinical reading of this dynamic: “Moving between Europe and the Gulf, I see less a cultural divide than two systems of validation. In Europe, art is often legitimized through institutions and theory. In the Gulf, work is more frequently read through the lens of immediacy and social change… Fairs like Art Basel or Frieze place both on the same stage, but real exchange depends on what continues beyond visibility and sales.” During ARCOmadrid’s opening hours, we caught up with prominent French-Algerian, Madrid-based gallerist Sabrina Amrani, who focuses on artists from the Global South and the MENASA region and who also emphasized the structural complexity of the region’s art ecosystem: “From our experience working in the region for more than fifteen years, the main challenge is often a misunderstanding of the ecosystem. The MENASA region is not a new market that suddenly appeared; it has been developing for decades through artists, institutions and collectors. What is required from galleries is not quick access but continuity—building trust, understanding the context, and committing to the region over time.”
Art Basel Qatar was conceived as a dispersed constellation of curated solo projects across Doha, an urban, curator-driven model that exceeds the traditional booth-based marketplace. As James Green of David Zwirner observed when reflecting on the fair’s curatorial direction: “Art Basel Qatar has recently made the concept of the ‘curated’ fair prominent—an approach we embraced on our booth there with a solo presentation of Marlene Dumas. However, focused, single-artist presentations or single-artist sections within a larger booth have long been integral to the David Zwirner fair strategy. When planning for a fair, we carefully consider relevant local institutional connections, alongside the interests of its collector base.” By contrast, Frieze Abu Dhabi adopts an absorptive strategy by taking over Abu Dhabi Art, itself descended from the earlier Art Paris Abu Dhabi, which withdrew after failing to gain traction; the first edition under the Frieze brand is scheduled for November 2026. Meanwhile, Art Dubai, founded in 2007, never fully stabilized as a regional hub and now faces pressure from these state-backed entrants. Amrani, whose gallery has participated in Art Dubai for years, offers a more measured interpretation of the shifting regional configuration: “As for the fair landscape, I don’t see the arrival of Art Basel Qatar and Frieze Abu Dhabi as a threat. It simply reflects the growing importance of the region within the global art conversation. Ultimately, the strength of the region will not be defined by competition between fairs, but by the depth of its collectors, institutions, and artists. What we are witnessing is the consolidation of a cultural geography that has been developing for years and is now gaining wider visibility.”
Critics such as Melanie Gerlis, who argued in her January 28, 2026, Financial Times article “The art market is betting on the Middle East—but not everyone is on board,” that the Gulf is building institutions before the market, repeat a historical misunderstanding: 19th-century France functioned in exactly this way, and the original paradigm—established under Louis XIV, Richelieu and Mazarin—placed culture at the center of statecraft long before dealers or collectors gained structural power. The Gulf is not inventing an anomaly; it is compressing this long-standing European model into a few decades. In this context, the Global Art Fair becomes an instrument of cultural diplomacy through which states compete for visibility, legitimacy and soft-power advantage.
Across these four fronts, the geography of the art fair war becomes unmistakably clear: power concentrates in a handful of hyper-dense nodes, each defined by saturation, acceleration, symbolic authority or geopolitical ambition. Beyond these battlefields lies a vast portion of the global map that remains structurally peripheral to the GAF model.
Latin America, Africa, Australia, Canada and the myth of global art
The very notion of “global art” is a textbook product of Western academic imagination—conceived far from the real hierarchies of the art system and grounded in a form of theoretical optimism that collapses under empirical scrutiny. Its most influential articulation comes from Hans Belting’s 2009 essay “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” where he insists that global art is “opposed [to] modernity’s ideals of progress and hegemony,” that its expansion after 1989 “challenged the continuity of any Eurocentric view of ‘art’,” and that it is “wishful thinking to keep it under Western guidance and within the precincts of familiar institutions.”
However, as Indian Professor Parul Dave Mukherji has argued, this vision is “caught in an insidious ethnocentrism.” The actual numbers are unforgiving. In his noted study “The Illusion of an International Contemporary Art Scene without Borders” (2006), Professor of Sociology of Art Alain Quemin demonstrated that between 2000 and 2005, nearly “80 percent of the galleries” at the flagship Art Basel came from just six Western nations he identified as structurally dominant. We contacted Quemin again to hear his current assessment. As he notes, “Art Basel tries to diversify the origin of its participating galleries; this is a general tendency, and they really strive to look more inclusive. But when it comes to proportions, the same countries are still highly represented, and much more than all other ones: Germany, the U.S., the U.K., France, Switzerland and Italy. And the share of all other countries remains very limited. So the main structure remains untouched in spite of the efforts to open the game a bit.” As a matter of fact, two decades later, nothing has shifted. At Art Basel, 80 percent of all participating galleries still come from those same six nations, and 95 percent originate from Europe and the United States, leaving the entire rest of the world with barely 5 percent. Only in the more experimental sections—Statements and Premiere—does the ratio become more balanced, with significantly higher representation from Asia, MENASA, Latin America and Africa. Even so, these sections remain structurally peripheral to the economic core of the fair, underscoring how the system’s globality appears only at the margins rather than at its center. It is true that Art Basel in Hong Kong, Miami and the Gulf applies an approximate 50 percent ratio of galleries from the region, but access to the flagship fair remains virtually impossible for non-mainstream galleries. And although Hans Belting has spent decades publishing books and academic essays based on the notion of “global art,” any connection between that theoretical construct and the hard empirical reality of the art world remains pure fiction.
What the GAF map reveals is therefore not a global system but a tightly concentrated Euro-American infrastructure with a handful of additional nodes—Hong Kong, Seoul, and soon Doha and Abu Dhabi—absorbing most of the visibility and circulation. The rhetoric of global art dissolves the moment the data appear. And it is precisely this structural concentration that we must turn to the regions the GAF system leaves behind.
Latin America hosts some of the most dynamic artistic scenes globally, but none of its fairs has achieved the institutional, financial or infrastructural density required to anchor a GAF-level event. Key platforms such as arteBA (1991), ZONAMACO (2002), ARTBO (2005), SP-Arte (2005), Ch.ACO (2009) and Art Lima (2013) have strengthened regional circulation but cannot consolidate year-round global visibility. Historically, ARCOmadrid acted as the region’s external gateway until the mid-2000s, when Art Basel Miami Beach, launched in 2002, decisively absorbed Latin America’s collectors, galleries and institutional attention. The result is a paradox: Latin American art gains visibility abroad, but its global fair is structurally located outside the region.
Against this backdrop, Pinta, founded in 2007 by Argentine gallerist, publisher and cultural entrepreneur Diego Costa Peuser, represents a different model explicitly conceived as a continental network. As Costa Peuser explains: “Pinta’s expansion follows a clear strategy: developing a multi-city network that strengthens and projects Latin American art internationally. Rather than concentrating its impact in a single venue, Pinta has built a distributed and specialized platform that creates opportunities for artists, galleries and curators across the region.” The entrepreneur further elaborates on his strategy for the near future: “Each city contributes a distinct identity and role: Miami as the global gateway; Lima and Buenos Aires as key cultural capitals through Pinta Lima and Pinta BAphoto; and Art Weeks in Asunción, Panama, and now Santo Domingo and Medellín, expanding the circuit’s reach. Together, these cities form an interconnected ecosystem that generates year-round visibility and amplifies Latin America’s cultural presence on the global stage.”
Beyond Latin America, Africa illustrates even more starkly how entire continents remain structurally excluded from the Global Art Fair’s infrastructure. The continent hosts strong artistic production but lacks the institutional density and market concentration required to anchor a GAF-level node. While South Africa sustains established galleries such as Goodman Gallery and Stevenson, their absence from the flagship Art Basel underscores how limited the global absorption of African galleries remains. Within this landscape, several fairs have attempted to create regional platforms: ART X Lagos, launched in 2016 by Nigerian entrepreneur Tokini Peterside-Schwebig; FNB Art Joburg, originally founded in 2008 as Joburg Art Fair and relaunched in 2018; and Investec Cape Town Art Fair, inaugurated in 2013 and now widely regarded as Africa’s leading fair. However, none of them has generated the infrastructural density required to reposition Africa within the global hierarchy. 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair—founded by Franco-Moroccan cultural entrepreneur Touria El Glaoui in London in 2013, expanded to New York in 2015 and to Marrakech in 2018—functions not as an African node but as a transnational bridge connecting African artists and galleries to Euro-American markets. As El Glaoui herself has put it, “my aim with 1-54 has always been to provide a sustainable platform that gives artists from Africa and its diaspora the visibility they deserve, and to ensure that this visibility leads to real opportunities.” This multi-city structure reflects a broader structural reality: for most African artists and galleries, meaningful visibility still depends on access to London and New York rather than on any continent-based consolidation.
Africa thus remains engaged with the GAF system through interfaces rather than nodes, structurally outside the gravitational centers that organize global circulation. This structural imbalance is also reflected in recent scholarship on African art markets. A useful analytical framework comes from Dr. Jonathan Adeyemi, a specialist in Arts Management and Cultural Policy and author of Contemporary Art from Nigeria in the Global Markets: Trending in the Margins, whose research shows that the limited integration of African art ecosystems into the dominant fair circuit is less about artistic quality than about structural conditions: weak institutional infrastructures, uneven market governance and persistent postcolonial validation dynamics that keep most galleries operating outside the core nodes shaped by Art Basel and Frieze.
Australia offers strong museums but structurally weak galleries and no credible fair infrastructure. Institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) and the National Gallery of Victoria provide cultural visibility, as do major periodic events such as the Biennale of Sydney (founded in 1973) and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art–APT (held in Brisbane since 1993). Few Australian artists manage to enter the global mainstream—apart from figures such as Tracey Moffatt, Ron Mueck, Patricia Piccinini and Juan Dávila—which underscores how modest Australia’s integration into the upper tiers of global circulation is. The commercial ecosystem, meanwhile, is thin, fragmented, and overwhelmingly domestic. Only a handful of galleries—among them Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Anna Schwartz Gallery and Tolarno Galleries—have participated in international art fairs, highlighting the limited projection of the country’s gallery scene. The Melbourne Art Fair, founded in 1988 and despite periodic relaunches, has never developed the scale or ambition needed to attract sustained international interest. Geography compounds these structural weaknesses: Australia is far from all major collector routes, not “on the way” to any global circuit, and its distance imposes prohibitive travel and logistical costs for galleries and collectors alike—something I know first-hand, having travelled to the country nine times over the past two decades. Australian curator Russell Storer, who worked in Brisbane from 2008-2014 at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) and is now senior curator and head of curatorial affairs at M+ in Hong Kong, noted: “I think it is due to several interlinked factors. Distance is a significant challenge in a crowded art landscape, combined with the fact that Australia’s art market is relatively small and doesn’t benefit from being part of a larger regional bloc like East Asia or Western Europe. It is therefore hard to generate the sustained international interest that Australian art deserves.” The result is an ecosystem that is culturally rich but commercially peripheral, unable to generate the density, liquidity or mobility required by the Global Art Fair model.
Finally, the last case to consider is Canada, a country that presents a paradox: a well-developed institutional landscape but no capacity to generate a global node within the Global Art Fair model. Institutions such as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, and the ambitious Nuit Blanche Toronto give the country cultural visibility. Despite this, Canada has produced several globally recognized artists—including Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Stan Douglas—yet their international visibility stems from agents and institutions outside the country rather than from any domestic mechanisms capable of projecting them globally.
Fairs such as the Toronto International Art Fair, founded in 2000 and renamed Art Toronto in 2008, have remained regional in scope and have been unable to attract sustained participation from global galleries or collectors. None of Canada’s leading galleries—from Corkin Gallery to Galerie de Bellefeuille or Cooper Cole—has secured a regular presence at the major international fairs, a revealing indicator of the country’s limited commercial projection within the Global Art Fair ecosystem. Structurally, Canada is absorbed by the United States art system: its galleries, artists, and collectors orient themselves toward New York and, increasingly, Miami, where visibility, liquidity and market hierarchy are produced. Geography reinforces this dependence. Canada sits adjacent to one of the most powerful cultural and economic nodes in the world, leaving neither the need nor the possibility for a Canadian fair to compete for international attention.
A clear internal perspective comes from respected curator and former director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MoCCA), David Liss, who underscores how structural limitations prevent Canada from establishing a globally relevant fair: “There is no significant market in Canada; an extensive contemporary art ecosystem exists, yes, but it flies under the radar and does not receive the investment or subsidies that other sectors rely upon. Most institutions cannot compete in the global market and are facing a crisis of storage capacity, aging facilities and diminishing government support. Collectors in Canada, meanwhile, tend to be followers of trends; they prefer to put their money on a winning horse, a proven investment, rather than take chances on something new or unknown. Artists follow their instincts, their ideas, and their imaginations. Markets follow the money.” While it has some outstanding institutions, it lacks solid commercial frameworks, functioning as a receiver rather than a generator of global circulation within the Global Art Fair model.
Why only some fairs become global nodes
The final pattern that emerges is the distinction that Victoria Siddall, the former global director of Frieze Fairs until 2021, articulated clearly at the Barcelona-based think tank TALKING GALLERIES in 2017: “An interesting development that I have noticed in the last couple of years is this global versus local when it comes to fairs. Some fairs are extremely global, and I would put Frieze in that category. They attract collectors from all over the world: from Asia, from Latin America and the Middle East, and of course from Europe and America. But then there is also a different model. Last week, I was in San Francisco for the FOG art fair, which is very small—only 40 galleries—and there were no collectors or curators from overseas. The galleries that were doing it were there to meet the curators and the collectors from San Francisco.” Her observation makes the divide explicit: a very small group of fairs operate globally, while most fall into what she calls the local model—what is more accurately the regional tier—serving their immediate ecosystems without generating broader circulation. An opposing view comes from Alain Servais, who notes: “In addition, those global fairs have only highlighted the specificity and attraction of well-planned local fairs, as in the larger society, ‘global’ is under pressure and more and more collectors are preferring that their galleries travel to them rather than having to travel to their galleries and their fairs. Many collectors and galleries are also appreciating the deeper contacts only possible in smaller fairs.”
Across this regional tier, we find fairs such as Art Brussels, Artissima, Untitled Art, The Armory Show, Art Chicago, ART SG and Art Dubai: strong local platforms without the liquidity, infrastructural depth or collector mobility required to shift the geography of the art-fair system. The contrast is telling. While ART COLOGNE may have been the first contemporary art fair in 1967, it was Art Basel—founded in 1970—that became the global leader, showing that origin alone does not determine destiny but rather the capacity to scale and occupy strategic market nodes.
A similar logic applies to ARCOmadrid. Although it invented the experiential fair in the 1990s, ARCOmadrid never succeeded in internationalizing its model, and a series of strategic miscalculations in the following decade would ultimately seal its long-term trajectory, making it a crucial case for understanding why some fairs consolidate as global nodes while others remain structurally regional. A decisive moment came when Rosina Gómez-Baeza explored opening an ARCOmadrid outpost in Miami in the late 1990s, supported by U.S. galleries already participating in the fair; the proposal was rejected by IFEMA, the public consortium that owns and manages ARCOmadrid. The fate of the fair would change forever. Art Basel, by contrast, launched successfully in Miami in 2002, as we saw earlier, capturing the most important Latin American collectors and art galleries. Instead of entering that strategic market, ARCOmadrid opened ARCOlisboa in 2016 under Carlos Urroz, a move that reinforced its regional positioning rather than extending its reach. Ten years later, in 2026, under its current director, Maribel López, the Portuguese edition is neither financially sustainable nor capable of creating a solid gallery structure or expanding the brand’s international prestige. Moreover, ARCOmadrid had always been, in practice, the main fair for leading Portuguese galleries such as Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Galeria Filomena Soares and Pedro Cera, making the Lisbon expansion structurally redundant rather than strategically forward-looking.
ARCOmadrid lost the Miami opportunity and, given its historical and market connections, should have opened a fair in Latin America rather than in Portugal. A Spanish museum director from one of the country’s leading institutions, who spoke to me under the condition of anonymity, recalled that “what first drew her into the art world were the ARCO talks of the late 1990s, when the Who’s Who of the international scene converged at the fair—from figures such as Gerardo Mosquera and Dan Cameron to Jérôme Sans, Ute Meta Bauer, Alanna Heiss and Shirin Neshat. ARCO produced top-level theory on art fairs, biennials, collecting and museums—at a level not even matched by documenta. That has totally disappeared. And since the 2000s, I’ve also seen that top galleries such as Lisson Gallery, Gagosian, David Zwirner or even the historically influential—but now-closed—Leo Castelli Gallery haven’t returned, let alone participated.” A different perspective is offered by Llucià Homs, art advisor and director of TALKING GALLERIES, who spoke to Observer just before the opening of the Madrid fair. In his view, “ARCOmadrid is one of the leading art fairs on the international circuit, positioned just behind the global mega-fairs such as Art Basel, Frieze and TEFAF. It has chosen not to enter the global franchise race that defines today’s major fair platforms. Instead, it has opted to consolidate its position within its Iberian region, building an identity-driven model that distinguishes it from more expansion-oriented fairs.” Homs acknowledges that “ARCO once missed the opportunity to lead the Latin American market—a space later secured by Art Basel Miami Beach—but argues that the fair’s current strategy of reinforcing Southern Europe and deepening its natural ties with Latin America through Madrid and Lisbon provides a coherent framework for the internationalisation of Spanish galleries.”
Where Art Basel has operated as a geopolitical architect—selecting, occupying and consolidating the world’s most decisive cultural nodes—Frieze has expanded largely through replication, embedding itself in places where the ecosystem was already formed. The majority of fairs worldwide, from Europe to Asia and from Latin America to the Gulf, remain locked in regional circuits. They do not scale, they do not reorganize flows of capital or legitimacy, and they do not alter the global map. Only Art Basel does that; Frieze follows its contours rather than redrawing them.
As of today, the truth about the global art-fair wars is simple: Art Basel changes cities; Frieze joins them. The rest observe from the regional margins.