The home page of VIP 2.0.

The second edition of the VIP art fair came to an end late last night. Dealers, collectors and art fans have finished their online chats, and logged out for the last time. The art world has returned to its normal Internet browsing. After the technical debacles of VIP 1.0, and with three more fairs scheduled this year, this was the make-or-break moment for the fair. Did the organizers succeed?

Many dealers that Gallerist spoke with, who had paid between $5,000 and $20,000 for their booths, were, at best, guardedly positive about the experience. At worst, they were sorely disappointed.

“From our perspective, unfortunately it was a waste of time,” New York dealer David Zwirner said in an email. “[O]ur expectations were quite low going into this year's fair, and frankly, even those expectations were not met. The site worked fine this year, but we didn't sense any real interest from collectors, nor did we have any real exchanges of any consequence, which makes me doubtful of this platform moving ahead.”

Though many dealers reported selling a few pieces and making new contacts, the competition and energy of real-life art fairs, to say nothing of the parties, were largely absent. (Our colleague Michael H. Miller wrote a bit about the experience of navigating the fair, last week.)

Augusto Arbizo, of the Lower East Side’s Eleven Rivington gallery, said that he received only about a dozen and a half chats over the course of the six-day fair, but closed four sales. “It’s pretty good as a batting average,” he pointed out. His highest-priced sale was a Michael DeLucia piece, marked at $10,000, which many people agreed was the upper limit for most purchases.

“It was alright,” Cristobal Riestra, of Mexico City’s OMR gallery, said, when asked about the fair. “We have lots of emails and lots of names.” OMR sold two works to new collectors, one at that magic $10,000 price point. “I think that, with art fairs, you win some, and you lose some,” Mr. Riestra said. If he had to decide now whether to participate for a VIP 3.0, he said that he’d probably re-up.

One dealer from a mid-sized New York gallery, who asked not to be named, citing ongoing business relationships with the VIP organizers, said he was unlikely to return. “It was more work than we had planned,” he said. “The functions could have been better. There was an automatic time-out in chat... and if I just had the window open, it would automatically log you out after fifteen or so minutes.” As of late yesterday, he had made no sales.

Some have floated the notion that VIP is essentially an advertising program with a few high-tech additions. “Before a fair starts, any art dealer will say that it’s all for advertising,” said Jay Grimm, sales director for Winkleman Gallery, “but when the fair is over, if they haven't sold anything, they're pretty crabby. The effort is so high that to make no sales, it's really dispiriting.” Winkleman, though, had made some sales.

Greenpoint's Rawson Projects, the youngest gallery in the fair, had also approached the fair as an opportunity to share its program with new collectors. "It wasn't cheap," Chris Rawson told us, "but we were thinking about it more from a marketing point of view, and it was the right decision." Though the gallery had not made any sales, they met new collectors, and were able to show a substantial selection of work, including large geometric paintings by David Malek and sculptures by Davina Semo.

Though most purchases hovered comfortably in the four-figure range, a few dealers did come up big, moving pieces in the $100,000 range, as Blouin Artinfo reported yesterday.

Dealers said that collectors were widely spread across the U.S. and Europe, though some reported new contacts from other areas, and VIP just sent out a news release trumpeting the jump in clients signing up from emerging contemporary art powerhouses like Mexico (319 percent over last year), Chile (456 percent) and Brazil (288 percent). According to VIP, 73,000 people registered for the event, and there were 160,000 total visits. VIP has three more online fairs planned for this year.

By far, the most enthusiastic dealers seemed to be from cities outside the main art capitals. Kourosh Nori of Dubai’s Carbon 12 gallery said via email: “For us it was mission accomplished, since our artists received a very warm welcome... Considering the exposure for a gallery located in a geographic area with a limited number of collectors, we didn't really go for hunting sales, rather acquiring potential collectors. It felt mainly that collectors are interested in discovering new artists, in price ranges below 10K.”

Carbon 12 attracted mostly American and European fair goers, with over 5,000 visitors to its booth--far outstripping, for instance, the 3,000 total that another small New York gallery told us they had. “Absolutely, without a shadow of doubt, we will take part again,” Mr. Nori gushed. “It’s great exposure for the gallery and the artists... Just picture that the work of Olaf Breuning from our booth was clicked over 19,000 times!”

An administrator for a small, well-respected New York Gallery emphasized that VIP allows dealers to “promote new media.” True enough: dealers that had video in their booths—the type of art that one never stands around to watch at a normal fair—seemed happiest about VIP. And the dealer pointed out, “It was the type of experience that will be more and more frequent, adapting content to fit different forms."

Indeed, with online sales sites proliferating in recent years, it’s clear that these digital affairs are not going anywhere soon. It's easy to balk at the lackluster experience of viewing art in digital form (as The New York Times' Martha Schwendener said in her review of VIP: "It's another reminder that most objects made in real space are best experienced there"). One thinks of that old David Lynch comment about watching movies on cell phones: “It's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your fucking telephone, get real.”

But Mr. Riestra argued that VIP had served its purpose. “It's a fantastic tool,” he said, noting all of the new contacts OMR had made, and the fact that it had allowed people to see new work from far-flung galleries. Nevertheless, he said, the unique intensity of a real art fair was absent. “The sense of immediacy is lost when buying art online," Mr. Riestra continued. "On the Internet, in two clicks you're in another place. You’re on Wikipedia.”

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.”