Usually, They Build Art Fairs in the Hamptons. Now Max Fishko’s Glossy Event Company Is Speed-Building Emergency Hospital Tents Instead

For the past decade, Max Fishko has been one of the art market’s
go-to creators of regional contemporary art fairs. A welcome
presence on the circuit, he’s a wheel-greaser nonpareil, and has
helped build and maintain contemporary art expos in places such as
Seattle, Texas, Manhattan’s West Side, and the Hamptons, where he
directs the tony vacation district’s leading fair, set in a tent
near the Bridgehampton Museum.

His firm, Art Market Productions, which he founded alongside
partner Jeffrey Wainhause, is the connector that liaises with not
just exhibitors and VIP attendees, but also the people who build
the tents and set up the walls.

Of course, all such fairs are on hold for the moment, which is
why Fishko was a little surprised last week when he received a call
from his tent guy.

“We got contacted by a vendor of ours who was involved in the
construction of the drive-through facilities for coronavirus
testing,” Fishko said on the phone this week. “And a number of the
state agencies had shown him what they were thinking about in terms
of getting pop-up hospitals set up.”

“When he looked at what they were planning, he said, ‘This looks
like an art fair,” Fishko said. “He showed us a drawing and we
couldn’t agree more.”

After years of building abodes to shelter the mega-rich as they
barter with art dealers over paintings and sculptures, Fishko has
now pivoted his entire operation to build hospitals to coronavirus
patients. The exact locations of the hospitals are still to be
determined, but they will be similar to the field hospital set up in New York’s Central
Park.

Art Market Productions is now partnering with a team of McKinsey
consultants working pro-bono to source materials.

“We’re in contact with different agencies in different states.
The general idea is we’re one of the few who are able to manifest
this as quickly at this price,” Fishko said, adding that he’s doing
it all at cost, meaning that there will be no profits to his
production company.

Others have already made the mental leap between art fairs and
the new hospitals being set up in New York, which has quickly
become the global epicenter of the disease. The Jacob Javits
Center, which is due to be the home of the 2021 Armory Show, is now
a temporary 1,200-bed hospital set up by the Army
Corps of Engineers.

“It’s like the same thing, it’s crazy,” Fishko said. “I was
driving with my business partner over by route 17 in New Jersey,
and we saw one of the tented structures, and we knew what the
structure was—we knew the place it came from.”

Fishko is now liaising with his suppliers and using the
logistics expertise of the McKinsey crew to get a nationwide
inventory of all the materials necessary to assemble what he called
an “art-fair kit.”

“We needed to figure out where everything is, and how long it
will take to get,” he said. “We’re reaching out to our partners to
source anything that we can lend to these facilities.”

He’s also partnering with the non-profit RxArt and the
communications consultancy Cultural Counsel to get design elements
and artworks installed near the hospital beds. “There was a
lot of research around the presence of art in the facilities, and
they reported less pain,” he said of patients.

There may also be a push to activate art-shipping networks to
deliver medical supplies and machinery. If such systems can be
responsible for getting extremely valuable paintings or complex
mechanical art installations to far-out locales, why can’t they
handle ventilators?

The first signs of construction will hopefully come in the next
few weeks, depending on funding. And after the coronavirus has
subsided, Fishko thinks his company can go back to producing art
fairs. A big dollop of optimism certainly doesn’t hurt.

“We’re going to see market behavior, even if there’s going to be
a prevailing overall distancing,” he said. “I think people are
going to decide they want to live outside of cities. But I think
they’re going to want the cultural engagement of a single
standalone event.”

The post Usually, They Build Art Fairs in the Hamptons. Now
Max Fishko’s Glossy Event Company Is Speed-Building Emergency
Hospital Tents Instead appeared first on artnet
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