‘Non-fair’ Minor Attractions hopes to be enjoyable for visitors and exhibitors alike

Minor Attractions, a selling event for emerging contemporary art, which bills itself as “not an art fair”, returns for its second edition this month. While the inaugural event took place across two sites, including a bar in London Bridge, this year will see the fair concentrate and shift to the plusher surroundings of the Mandrake Hotel in Fitzrovia.

Exhibitors will share eight hotel rooms upstairs (average participation price: £4,500) to present work, in a style resembling the Los Angeles fair Felix. Sharing rooms will encourage “a sense of collaboration between colleagues”, says Jonny Tanna, the fair’s co-founder. His London gallery, Harlesden High Street, is one of the 30-odd participants, and will show alongside established dealerships like TJ Boulting (London), younger ones such as Double V (Marseille/Paris) and Gallery Artbeat (Tbilisi), and businesses barely in their second year, including Palmer (London).

Meanwhile a more free-form exhibition will be staged downstairs in the lounge area of the hotel. The format of this section will take some of its cues from another non-traditional art fair, Basel Social Club, where galleries and project spaces are invited to show work outside of a booth. Works on display here will include a seed installation by Beverley Duckworth, brought by SLQS gallery, that will continue growing during the event. Some works in this exhibition will likely not be for sale if they are brought by project spaces whose business models are non-commercial.

Tanna and his co-founder Jacob Barnes hope Minor Attractions will re-enliven a “dwindling gallery and art scene in London” by tapping into the city’s strong reputation for nightlife and music to help generate a fun atmosphere and pleasurable visitor experience. An underground room will act as a screening room during the day and a nightclub in the evenings, while the hotel will provide plenty of comfortable places to convene, and mood lighting will make a welcome change from the bright overhead lights of most other art fairs. The aim is to “provide an energy that is waning at Frieze”, the organisers say, though they are keen to stress they are “grateful for Frieze’s support and infrastructure” and are “eager to grow together”.

Sell-side support

Minor Attractions hopes to be an equally pleasurable experience for its exhibitors. Tanna and Barnes have both participated in and attended dozens of fairs over the years and have cherrypicked their best aspects to finetune Minor Attractions. One thing Tanna wants to adopt from Independent in New York is a proactive approach to ensuring all participants have a successful fair: multiple gallery liaisons will be available and the fair will work to bring collectors and press to any exhibitor who expresses disappointment. “Many fairs are like shopping centres in which you have to sink or swim,” Barnes says. “We want to provide more care.”

While many players have expressed concerns of a market downturn, Tanna points out this is not true for everyone. He says the past few years have been successful for him because he has “carved out a clear identity for [his] gallery”. He believes confidence can be built back if galleries maintain high quality and believe in the artists they are signing: “Many gallerists in the past few years have signed artists who aren’t good but who they believe will save them from bankruptcy.”

• Minor Attractions, Mandrake Hotel, London, 8-13 October