I Survived EXPO and All I Got Is This Lousy $20,000 Painting

By Heather Higgins |

For the first time in my life I attended Expo Chicago, a yearly ritual so vast and opulent that people from across the globe come to bask in its glory. It was a fascinating journey in which I uncovered a unique polytheistic culture dominated by twin gods, art and money. 

For those unfamiliar, Expo is the largest contemporary art fair in the midwest. A beautiful weekend when our city of a mere 2.5 million people gets to experience the kind of glamorous art market usually reserved for coastal elites. It takes place in a warehouse-like building on Navy pier, with white-walled cubicles filling almost every inch of available space.

The offerings are plentiful, from Birkin bag sightings, a champagne bar with prices starting at $27, and more art than any single person could ever hope to see. In an era when the arts stand firmly with an egalitarian “art is for everyone” ethos, Expo boldly pushes back and reminds us what art really is; an asset one acquires in hopes that the value will appreciate over time. Of course I’m being a tad facetious but with entry prices starting at $40, it's hard to pretend like everyone is invited to the party.

The first day I attended was Thursday, opening day. I arrived during the closing hours of preview, the critical period when galleries hustle to make their sales. It’s a time when many gallerists will actively avoid eye contact if your outfit or age exposes a lack of available net worth. You’ll hear things like “the small ones are 22 and the big ones are 34” casually thrown out as if discussing the price of tomatoes at the grocery store. 

At this point the pitches were tightly rehearsed, exactly long enough to tell me about the artist, the work and to make me believe that it’s worth every penny. Usually galleries are decorous enough to pretend like they aren’t storefronts, but at a fair that carefully constructed artifice disappears. 

During preview, you will see gallerists set up command centers, small tables in their booths, which they crowd around while furiously typing emails. What these emails contain I do not know, but they are executed with an intensity of focus usually reserved for open heart surgery. 

Here the big dogs and the little pups all mingle and compete. You have small local galleries run by a scrappy group of two or three people next to some of the most successful fine arts dealers in the world. Paris, New York, Seoul, Miami, and Los Angeles are the most represented cities, because of course they are. In this arena it’s amazingly refreshing to come across a gallery from some humble backwater like Madison, Wisconsin or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

Towards the end of my first day I was misdirected to the bathroom and ended up at the top of a staircase leading to a breakroom. As I stood on the platform looking down, the endless booths turned into a maze. All of these very important people in their beautiful clothing became scurrying ants, comprising a bizarre ecosystem the rules of which I still had not figured out.

On Friday evening I returned and found the vibe to be entirely altered. People could relax now that the stress of preview had passed and most galleries had made the bulk of their sales. It also seemed that at least a few people had hit the champagne bar. Now the gallerists were happy to chat, not just about the art but about anything, the fair, the city, life.

This was the moment that I remembered something the moneyed frenzy of the evening before has caused me to forget. These people love art, they just also need money. To work in the arts is to be eternally balancing this truth, we must constantly soil art’s divine nature with our need to pay rent and buy groceries. 

It’s a hard act to square. When I look at art, I am seeking transcendence—a quality that will remove me from my own consciousness. I want to fall into a work, uncover its unique logic and discover the many paths it traces within itself. This moment of bliss, fleeting as it is, comes to a sudden crushing halt when I see a price. Before my eyes the work transforms into a product and I am immediately forced to appraise it through the lens I would usually apply to a nice sweater in a clothing store. 

The whole experience was an exercise in cognitive dissonance, as I stepped outside for air I was reminded of the world as it is. I watched a server clean off a table and thought about how I needed to apply to that waitressing job my friend told me about. Then I walked back inside and stared at my reflection in a box made of mirrors, on sale for $108,000. I wondered, will I ever feel like I belong here? Do I even want to feel like I belong?

I don’t have answers to those questions, but what I can offer is advice for those looking to brave future Expos and maximize their enjoyment. Imagine you have one million dollars and no student loans or credit card debt. For this purpose I created a character for myself, the undercover billionaire’s daughter. Now casually walk through the booths and decide what you want to blow this money on, maybe this $65,000 painting would look good above your couch? 

The art market and the way we assign monetary value to art are nonsensical illusions. I found the best way to navigate them is to concoct an illusion of my own and give myself completely to the fantasy.