It was announced several weeks ago that a number of London old master paintings dealers will band together for a joint selling exhibition to run a couple of weeks after the conclusion of the Grosvenor House fair. While a couple of the dealers will exhibit at the fair, others, including some Grosvenor House stalwarts, will not. Everybody is making nice, of course, with the fair organizers saying something to the effect that Grosvenor House will be unaffected.
Perhaps, but a look at the exhibitors of both Grosvenor and Olympia show an absence of some significant names, besides old master paintings dealers. The fact of the matter is, these are extremely expensive shows to do, and, times being the way they are, not everyone has enough of the ready to participate. Yes, of course one wants to be in front of clients who one may only see at shows, but, at the end of the day, the upfront costs associated with a show while always tremendous may now be onerous.
What the old master dealers have done begs the question of the merits of show participation, which participation Keith and I weigh, invariably, before we sign any show contract. First, of course, is the wisdom of doing a show in a particular geographic location. We’ve found that show participation is an expensive and more importantly an ineffective way to break into a market. When we started this business, we began with the wrongheaded notion that our markets were in large cities that favored traditional decorative material. What we failed to realize was that certain cities, San Francisco being one of them, have long established traditions of buying their material not locally but elsewhere. We used to do shows in the southeast- no longer- only to find that the buyers were buying in New York. While the notion of purchasing in New York makes some sense- with New York, London, and Paris continuing their well-established traditions of art market hegemony- there exist some significant markets in other cities where private clients and interior designers purchase locally. Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles are the cities we’ve found that will support the fine art and antiques trade, 
with the Merchandise Mart in Chicago the host to two excellent fairs a year. As my 20 or so devoted readers will know, we participate in fairs in all three cities.
The second factor we use to determine participation is time of the year. Our busiest season in our galleries is the first half of the year. We do not, therefore, want our better material on the road during the time of year when it has the best chance of selling in-house. There are also times of the year when there exists a dearth of activity, as well- June and July are notoriously slow months, with graduations, weddings, and a few vacations due to beginning school holidays creating a ripple effect through the antiques trade. Our buyers- both private and design- are not shopping for our material then. At one time, the Olympia and Grosvenor House fairs were of such significant moment that they could counter this but, as witness some attendance problems in the last couple of years, what these fairs now experience I venture to say matches our own.
Finally, and most obviously, is the cost to do a fair. A dealer of my acquaintance, unnamed as I’ve not asked his permission to quote him, developed a financial rule of thumb to determine the success of a dealer’s show participation, and a rule that we have adopted- a good show should generate revenue equal to 10 times the cost of the booth. If we pay booth rental of $10,000, including costs directly associated including décor, catalog advertising and lighting, we would not consider the show a success unless we sold $100,000 worth of material. Mind you, we don’t expect to assess the success of a show as we are packing up the truck to leave. We consider follow-on sales made as much as 6 months after the conclusion of the show, including initial and subsequent sales to new clients who originally contacted us but did not make a purchase at the show. If we cannot expect to have a good show using this formula, we don’t participate. You might be able to divine, we do shows that, while less expensive than some shows, are certainly not inexpensive, and all of them are vetted shows. We will not do a show where we are not amongst peers. 
The Antique Dealers Association of California is the organizer of the Los Angeles Antiques Show and, with its mix of both knowledgeable dealers and outside experts involved in vetting, is an excellent model for a vetted show.
As much of a dice roll as it is to do a show, we nevertheless appreciate their existence. In certain markets, if there were no show for us to participate in, we would have to do a trunk show to stay in front of clients. In fact, the notion of a trunk show is something of a financial yardstick by which we keep antiques and art show organizers honest. If the overall cost of show participation begins to approach the cost of a trunk show, we generally have a word with the show organizer about costs. At least obliquely, this may be the thinking of the dealers who are planning Master Paintings Week in London. Times being the way they are, Grosvenor House, for all that it might promise, may just be too expensive.