26K Art Fans Visited Hamptons Virtual Art Fair Over Labor Day

Hamptons Virtual Art Fair (HVAF) hosted by Christofle, which closed at 12AM on Tuesday, September 8th, generated a total of 26,000 visitors to its site. As one of the nation's largest fairs this year, HVAF presented an unprecedented 106 gallery displays in 2D and 3D virtual technology. Due to the overwhelming success, visitors will continue to have access through October 13, 2020.

Participating galleries hailed from 13 countries and 30 different U.S. cities and showcased over 2,100 art works for sale, with ranged in price from $2,000 to $8 million. Produced by ShowHamptons, the fair was free to the public and ran from Sept. 2nd continuously through Labor Day. This sizable attendance, which exceeded expectations, was driven by an advertising and marketing campaign that delivered a targeted 13 million gross impressions.

"This fair was a focused attempt to leverage the latest and greatest in software technology to help sell art works in a digital setting," said HVAF producer Rick Friedman, a 15-year veteran producer of physical art fairs. "To do that, we went where no man has gone before, by offering two powerful integrated cutting-edge technologies to enhance the viewing and acquisition process, while providing a new level of analytics to the process. Like adopting any new technology, art collectors will become better acquainted with viewing and acquiring pieces in this 3D virtual reality video format."

Galleries are currently following up on hundreds of sales leads generated during the show. To date, recorded sales have included works from Adamar Fine Arts (Donald Sultan's "Blue and Black Poppies"), Maune Contemporary (David Salle's "Verdi and Blue Background"), artist Linjie Deng ("Teeth Falling Out #3", Teeth Falling Out #5", "Hope and Freedom"), Greg Kucera Gallery, Hollis Taggart, Off the Wall Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Modern Projects, Bluestone Gallery, and more.

An online fair presents the opportunity to track and analyze visitors' activity and since it is a website platform, the system was able to track the timing of every visitor's action, as well as develop mathematical formulas by measuring the response time and its effect on viewing activity. All data was automatically generated by third party sources, Mixpanel and Google Analytics.

In total, HVAF visitors clicked on the gallery site 41,000 times during the fair. The most viewed gallery, with 928 views, was Oeno Gallery from Ontario, Canada, which presented a brilliantly powerful display of contemporary Canadian and American artists, including the sculptor Carole Feuerman. Following in second was the Bill Hodges Gallery in New York City with 830 views, that presented displays for mid-century black artists Norman Lewis and Romaine Bearden. In addition, the gallery presented to an impactful African American artist booth that showcased the leading black artists from mid 20th - 21st centuries, from Sam Gilliam, Beauford Delaney, and Jacob Lawrence to Kiki Smith, Kerry James Marshall, and Ed Clark. The third most viewed was Contessa Gallery from Cleveland, Ohio with 734 views, which presented a wide array of Urban Art including the popular street artists Mr. Brainwash and Brenden Murphy. With 465 views, M.S. Rau from New Orleans, Louisiana introduced rare and celebrated Blue Chip works as well as many important genres of art, including European Impressionism and surrealism.

During the show fairgoers clicked a total of 14,100 times on specific art images, out of the 2,100 offered in the fair. The most viewed work (192 times) was a dramatic painting by James Kennedy "Notation 1," which was presented by the Callan Contemporary in New Orleans, Louisiana. The second most viewed art work was the recent print by Alex Katz, "Homage to Degas" (175 times) presented by Adamar Fine Art from Miami, Florida. The third most viewed piece was a large oil on canvas by Rene Romero Schuler, "Carmela," presented by Rice Polak Gallery of Provincetown, Mass.

Hamptons Virtual Art Fair was open 24-hours a day on a range of compatible devices and offered cutting edge VR technology, which created a simulated art fair environment for visitors to virtually navigate as they would a physical fair.