(Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac)

Last night, art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, stood before a white architectural model on the top floor of the French Institute Alliance Française on East 60th Street, and presented his gallery's sprawling new space in Pantin, in the northeast of Paris. The compound, which formerly housed a 19th-century factory for heating systems, will consist of eight buildings with a total of 55,000 square feet. The main exhibition space, 22,000 square feet of space in four light-filled galleries, will be divided by convertible walls, which can be moved to transform the space. Anselm Kiefer will be the first artist to present work there in October. There will also be a multimedia space dedicated to performance, which will be inaugurated with work by Joseph Beuys that same month. The gallery will also have our buildings for private viewings, offices and archives.

Though he has galleries in Salzburg and Paris, Mr. Ropac decided that, with the entirety of the international art world in town for the Frieze Art Fair, and with post-war and contemporary auctions on tap here this week, "New York is the right place to announce a project like this."

In the light-filled Skyroom of FIAF, as guests nibbled on bacon-wrapped dates and shrimp cocktail and swilled wine and sparkling water, the dealer detailed the three new exhibitions he has planned for the fall.

First up is a large new body of work by Anselm Kiefer, "Die Ungeborenen (The Unborn)," an exhibition that deals with the Jewish mythical figures of the 15th and 16th centuries. Mr. Kiefer, who is known to work on a grand scale, provided an inspiration for the dealer's decision to build such a large new space.

"It was beautiful and we were very proud and happy to host him," said Mr. Ropac's, about Mr. Kiefer's show at the gallery in the Marais, "but we saw the limits because we couldn't show so many of his incredible monumental works." Mr. Kiefer's installation will consist of huge paintings, collages, books and sculpture, and it will be the first time he has dedicated a large body of work to the theme of the unborn, according to the dealer.

The building dedicated to performance art will open with an exhibition in honor of Beuys's legendary 1969 work Iphigenia, during which the artist walked around a stage with a horse, banging a cymbal and playing recorded excerpts of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. The exhibition, which will "baptize the space for future performances," will attempt to recreate all the vitrines, sculptures, drawings and manuscripts from that legendary performance. Simultaneous with this opening, the gallery in the Marais district will present another Beuys show, this one curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal, director of the Royal Academy in London, on the theme of "materiality."

The gallery is also in talks with some of its artists, including Terence Koh and Robert Longo, about staging performances in an effort to forge "interesting synergies" between the worlds of visual arts and performance. (Interestingly, the tony La Villette park, a hub for performances, dance and music, is just next door to the new space.)

"The ceiling height is 7 to 12 meters," said Mr. Ropac halting to estimate the conversion into feet. "Forty feet," someone in the audience called out. Mr. Ropac smiled, "So you can imagine," he said, "what we are able to do."

Mr. Ropac (Photo courtesy of Le Figaro)

In case you missed it in our story about the new edition of the VIP Art Fair, Paris and Salzburg dealer Thaddaeus Ropac mentioned in our conversation about the fair that he will soon reveal details about a new 30,000 square-foot gallery he's opening in the northeast of Paris.

Mr. Ropac didn't want to say much about the real-estate deal, but said his acquisition of the space has been an open secret in France for some time. Well it's news to us!

Make sure you swing by his booth at the VIP Art Fair 2.0, which will feature an opening day performance by Terence Koh.

A screen capture from VIP 1.0.

Let’s assume for a moment that Amazon.com is the best way to sell something to someone else online, the Platonic ideal of website retail. Imagine a version of Amazon.com that exists for just one week a year and requires you to have a little instant message conversation with a salesman as the first step to any transaction. If he likes you, or you’re known to him, he might take you to a “private room,” identical to any other inventory page, but where they keep the really good thriller novels. Fair warning! This version of Amazon.com has a reputation for being a little quirky technically as well. The chat function isn’t reliable, and the whole site once had to be taken offline for several hours, during that week of its existence.

This, in a nutshell, is the VIP Art Fair, a online endeavor that resembles no other online marketplace—and why should it? They’re selling works of art for up-to-seven figures, not thrillers—and whose very name seems antithetical to the professed egalitarianism of the Internet (though it stands for Viewing In Private). VIP was founded two years ago by New York dealer James Cohan, Internet entrepreneur Jonas Almgren, and their wives Jane Cohan and Allesandra Almgren, and earned many blue-chip supporters through its fidelity to the model of the art fair with private viewing rooms and constant on-hand gallery representatives. A debut fair last January that attracted top galleries like Gagosian, Pace and David Zwirner saw technical errors and frustration, and now, gearing up for its second edition this February, the site has embraced its technology side with a new staff and $1 million in angel funding from investors and collectors Selmo Nissenbaum, and Philip Keir.

The investment, Ms. Cohan said, represents a confidence in the company’s ability to change the way people buy art online, and in a marketplace that’s since seen new competitors like Art.sy and Paddle 8.

“There’s a journalist that I met who teaches at the Stamford MBA school who once told me that change rarely happens from within an industry, usually it comes from the outside,” Ms. Cohan told The Observer. “So he found us, as a case study, very unusual and very interesting. And I think what he’s saying is both true and untrue in terms of galleries and art fairs.”

Galleries often establish art fairs, Ms. Cohan said, pointing to David Zwirner’s father Rudolph Zwirner having started Art Cologne in 1968, Ernst Beyeler helping establish Art Basel in 1970, and Matthew Marks, Paul Morris and others banding together in the early ‘90s to start New York’s Gramercy International Art Fair in the Gramercy Hotel, which eventually became The Armory Show.

“This one obviously is pushing the boundaries,” she said of VIP, “and it’s a totally different delivery system for that art fair, but it’s the fundamental concepts of the fair we’re working with.”

The technical failings of VIP’s inaugural edition are infamous among a segment of the art world, but the main issue was the instant messaging system—one of the fair’s big selling points, since dealer-buyer interaction was touted as equivalent to that of a real-life encounter one might have at an art fair. Sometimes it didn’t work at all, sometimes it would cut out 30 minutes into a conversation. One dealer said a message intended for one client was sent to another. Eventually it was temporarily disabled, and dealer interaction went to the phones, email, or Skype—a route that dealers pursue on their own anyway.

The chat function was the source of all of the site's problems, said VIP’s vice president of engineering Severin Andrieu-Delille, who joined the company after the first fair and built a revamped site based on the model pioneered by the outside firm Supermetric for the 2011 edition. The chat system was overwhelmed by too many users--in a way, the fair was a victim of its own success, with advance marketing bringing in not just interested collectors, but many gawkers and others who’d somehow wrangled access on the first day--and poorly structured so that if it failed it took the entire site down with it. Mr. Andrieu-Delille has since broken out the chat program, using an open-source, already established chat function not tied to any other part of the system. Asked about the ceiling for how many users might use the new system at any given time — VIP has 50,000 prospective buyers this year, up from 40,000 last year—Mr. Andrieu-Delille said there was none.

“Each of the servers is built on its own auto-scaling server, based on load or demand,” Mr. Andrieu-Delille said. “It’s all built to scale and we’re set for very, very high traffic.”

Last year’s hiccups didn’t go over well with some participating galleries. A group of them rallied together for a partial refund, which they received. A number of prominent galleries that participated last year declined to sign on for a second round, among them L&M, Gladstone, Cheim & Read, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Michael Werner, Sean Kelly and Metro Pictures. Most of those galleries declined to comment for this article, or cited other business obligations as their reason for not participating in VIP 2012. This was the case with Gavin Brown.

“We’ll definitely be watching,” said sales associate Hannah Hoffman, who handled the gallery’s involvement in the fair last year, “and seeing how it goes this year, but last year we poured a lot into it and felt like we did what we could do. Now we think that it’s the time to watch what everybody else is doing and then maybe we could see for 2013.”

Those who returned from last year were given a discount for their loyalty, some with personal reassurances from fair honchos. Laura Pinello, director at the Peter Blum gallery, spoke with VIP’s director Noah Horowitz, who has since left the company to become a managing director of the Armory Fair.

“He explained a lot of the upgrades to the website, so we decided we’ll give it another shot out of respect to James and the idea,” Ms. Pinello said.

VIP is not a hard sell for most galleries. With booths priced between $3,000 and $20,000, it’s still significantly cheaper than any other in-person fair, and minus the cost of schlepping works. In an article about the first VIP, Mr. Cohan compared the price to that of an ad in Artforum.

This year VIP will host four fairs—the main one, and three smaller ones focused on print, photo and contemporary works—but with the new technology, the limit to how many fairs VIP may hold lies only with how many collectors are willing to attend.

If all goes according to plan, by 2013 VIP hopes to hold a number in “the low double digits,” according to Lisa Kennedy, the fair’s new CEO, who came to the company this year from Amazon subsidiary Quidsi Inc. The goal, Ms. Kennedy said, is to make sure their clients are not overwhelmed by too many events.

“There are tons of flash sites in the world; most of them email their audience every day and then over-email their audience,” Ms. Kennedy said. “Our objective is to create really incredible events. We want our users to open emails from us because they will know that when they hear from us it will be with something worthy of their attention.”

This year’s main fair sees around 115 participating galleries, some 25 percent of them new, scoring a total nearly equal to last year’s number, just over 130. One addition is New York secondary market dealer Christophe Van de Weghe, who was aware of last year’s technical snafus, but signed on without any sort of inquiries about the updated site.

“I think that they know if they would have these kinds of problems a second year, then their business is going to be finished,” he said.

“I don't have any expectations—what I really want is to meet new clients because that's what we art dealers like, creating new contacts,” he added, saying he hopes to reach buyers in countries where he’s never done business before. “It's more of an exciting adventure for me.”

Last year, many dealers chalked their participation up to the ability to reach potential clients from new markets like China. Demographic information from VIP said that its visitors in 2011 came from 196 countries, with only 28.1 percent of those users based in the U.S.

Paris and Salzburg dealer Thaddaeus Ropac was frustrated by the first fair’s problems, but has embraced the online format as a platform to attract new clients. His booth will host one-artist shows each day of the fair, and on opening day of VIP 2.0 the booth will offer a live webcam performance by Terence Koh.

Mr. Ropac is not a proponent of online buying—speaking of favoring the brick-and-mortar gallery model over anything else, he mentioned that he is set to open a massive new 30,000 square-foot space in the northeast section Paris in the near future—but he sees the fair as an innovative way to reach a new audience. In fact he’d actually rather people didn’t buy from him through VIP-- or at least, not immediately.

“People do it all the time,” Mr. Ropac said. “They get the catalogue from Sotheby’s and bid without ever seeing the work in person, and then they’re not happy with the piece because the color isn’t right or something. I don’t want to encourage these sales because I want to encourage the physical experience.”

The way ahead for VIP still lies in navigating the expectations for an art fair and the modern art market, said Ms. Kennedy, the fair’s CEO.

“What we are doing is changing the behavior in how art is experienced,” she said. “The shift in the way in which collectors and dealers communicate—passing JPEGs back and forth—is happening already day-to-day, week-to-week.”