The Fair That Refuses to Call Itself One: Minor Attractions Grows Up Without Selling Out

London’s art fair week is a strange piece of civic theatre. For five days in October the city fills with dealers, advisors and collectors, and a great deal of money changes hands inside a temporary structure that is dismantled the moment it is over. Around that centre orbits a ring of satellite fairs, each trying to catch some of the attention Frieze London generates. Most look and behave like smaller versions of the main event.

Minor Attractions has always looked like something else. Founded in 2023 by Jonny Tanna of Harlesden High Street and Jacob Barnes of GROVE, it began life describing itself as a “non-fair” — an art-selling event held in the bedrooms and corridors of a Fitzrovia hotel, free to enter, with a programme of readings, screenings and performances wrapped around the sales. Last week it announced its fourth edition, and the news is that it is getting considerably bigger without, as far as one can tell, becoming any more conventional.

What is actually changing

The fair runs from 13 to 17 October and moves out of the Mandrake Hotel, its home for two years, into the nearby Newman, where it will take over sixteen rooms on the first floor. More than seventy-five exhibitors are currently listed, a modest increase on last year, and Barnes has said the number may yet climb. The roster mixes London names such as Cedric Bardawil with galleries from further afield including LAILA in Sydney and Tatjana Pieters in Ghent, alongside things that are not commercial galleries at all — film screenings, a bookshop, and presentations from itinerant project spaces of the kind that rarely appear at fairs because they have no stock to shift.

The events programme also spreads across the city, with partnerships taking Minor Attractions into Electrowerkz, the cavernous Islington warehouse and club, and The Horse Hospital, the independent Bloomsbury arts venue. There is also a tie-up with Stück, the Dalston multi-use space that has drawn attention for positioning itself somewhere between a home, an office and a Berlin nightclub.

The economics are the interesting part

It would be easy to read all this as atmosphere and miss the two details that matter most to any small gallery weighing up whether to take part. The first is that galleries at the Newman can share a bedroom rather than committing to a whole space of their own. The second is that Minor Attractions has pledged to freeze its exhibitor fees, explicitly in defiance of rising costs elsewhere in the industry.

Anyone who has watched independent galleries do the arithmetic on fair participation will understand why that carries weight. A booth at a major fair, once you have added shipping, insurance, staff accommodation and the fee itself, routinely runs into five figures. For a gallery with two or three employees and a programme of emerging artists, that is not a marketing expense; it is a bet that can decide whether the year ends in profit or loss. Splitting a hotel room with a like-minded gallery from another city lowers the stake to something a small business can absorb if the week goes badly.

The hotel-room format is not new, and Minor Attractions has never pretended otherwise. The Armory Show, now one of New York’s grandest fairs, began in the rooms of the Gramercy Park Hotel, and Felix in Los Angeles has built a following on much the same premise. The reason the model keeps resurfacing is not nostalgia. It is that domestic-scale spaces are cheap, and cheapness is what allows a wider range of galleries through the door.

Why this matters beyond one week in October

There is a broader argument buried in the announcement. The art market’s problem is not a shortage of good galleries. It is a shortage of buyers relative to the number of galleries competing for them, and a concentration of what buying there is around a small pool of very wealthy collectors and a small pool of established names. Every satellite fair that simply replicates the main fair’s format is fishing in the same shrinking pool with the same tackle.

Minor Attractions is trying instead to reach people who did not come to London for the art. Putting programming in a club in Islington and a multi-use space in Dalston is a way of meeting an audience that reads music listings rather than gallery guides. Some of them will buy nothing. A few will buy something small, and fewer still will become the collectors who sustain independent galleries a decade from now. That is a slow strategy, and it is the right one.

For gallery-goers the takeaway is simpler. During the busiest week of the London art calendar there will be sixteen hotel rooms in Fitzrovia holding work from seventy-five-odd galleries, much of it by artists not yet priced out of reach, in a setting where nobody is trying to make you feel underdressed. That has been the appeal of Minor Attractions from the start, and it is encouraging to see it scale up without losing it.