THE GALLERIST IN THE BOOTH

It is black-ticket time at the Toronto International Art Fair. The city’s wealthiest art lovers are crawling methodically through the booths in Exhibit Hall E of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre like weevils through a magnificent granary. None of the frantic racing down aisles—décolletage straining and Canali suit tails flapping—that marks the preview period at such hot U.S. art fairs as Miami Basel; here the pace is measured, the mood festive. Rows of red martinis jostle white wines at the bar for the right of first tipple. At a central table laden with food, David Mirvish weathers the small talk of a large man whose daughter may choose Princeton but has nixed Yale. And a few canvases away, a smiling investment banker in pinstriped Italian considers la vita quite dolce, thank you. “It’s a huge floating cocktail party,” he says, with a wave of his champagne flute.

But there is business being done here, too. And in one spacious corner booth, gallery owner Nicholas Metivier appears to be working harder than anyone in the hall. He greets art consultants, those paid experts, with efficient courtesy; he introduces clients to the artists whose work they own; he hoists massive framed paintings out of storage to give would-be buyers another option; he reaches for books featuring his artists so that he can present their work in context; he assures a trio of women admiring a just-sold Robert Polidori photograph that, “we can get another copy…let me introduce you to Sarah.” Sarah, like the rest of his gorgeous staffers, is freshly dolled up and looking slightly aquiver; Metivier is already working up a sweat.

He has goals in mind, and he has imperatives. Though Metivier has been part of this city’s art scene for more than two decades, his gallery is young, only open since 2004, and he is working as if he’s making up for lost time. How he came to emerge as a player in his own right is a story of some controversy—“Do not stir this up,” one fair-goer warns me. “There were so many hurt feelings”—but already his stable includes some of the most sought-after artists in North America, including photographers Edward Burtynsky and The New Yorker’s Robert Polidori, and painter John Hartman. To present them well at the fair, he has constructed a booth that takes up the space of eight regular booths and will cost him roughly $40,000 for four days. His ambitious plans call for booths in four art fairs in the coming year, taking his artists’ work to Miami, Chicago and Madrid, for a total cost of $200,000. And he intends to make every minute, dollar and square foot count.

At roughly 6 p.m., three-quarters of the way through the Toronto Art Fair’s preview, he hitches his pants around his ample middle and gives a progress report in the vestiges of a British accent: “We’ve sold the tree [a large, luminous painting by James Lahey]; we’ve sold a couple of Eddie works [huge photographs by Burtynsky]; we’ve sold some Polidori; we’ve sold the Michael Thompson I wanted to sell. We’ve sold another Lahey that’s in the closet; a Hartman; a hold on the Hopkins”—altogether upwards of $100,000 worth of new art—“and we’ve been here for an hour and a half.”

THE GALLERIST AGAINST A BACKDROP

These are good times in the world of contemporary art. Says Miriam Shiell, a Yorkville art dealer, “The market is fatter and richer than it’s been in many years.” The worldwide lather of enthusiasm that has seen Wall Street investment firms using contemporary art as the basis for hedge funds has led, in this city, to an explosion in commercial galleries. Where once the Toronto art scene was restricted to the money pillow of Yorkville, spaces are now multiplying in the Distillery District, on Queen West and beyond. As with the great galleries of New York’s past, when such dealers as Leo Castelli nurtured the likes of Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, the best of these new commercial galleries are run not like stores but like literary publishing houses. They treat the artist as a treasured member of a stable, promising not just to sell the work but to support the career, to stick with the artist through tough times and good, and to promote the work and its creator beyond the immediate benefit of the gallery or, using the term now in vogue, the gallerist.

The question becomes not whether the talented painter, photographer or new media visionary will find a gallery to exhibit and promote the work he or she creates, but which gallerist will do the job best. “It’s sort of a question,” says painter John Hartman, “of who you want standing in front of the work, talking about it to the people who are going to be interested in collecting it.”