Autumn arrived behind schedule, various cultural news carried by the cool breeze, began to change our surroundings with the autumn colors though.
While Korean classical music lovers mark their calendars for visiting European top orchestras with maestros, art enthusiasts turn their attention to the dual pillars of the contemporary art world: the art fair and the biennale.
In Seoul, where September still felt more like August, two major art events unfolded at COEX Seoul. Frieze Seoul and KIAF (Korea International Art Fair) transformed the convention center into what can only be described as controlled chaos—the good kind, where approximately eighty thousand visitors descended upon galleries showcasing everything from blue-chip masters to artists whose names you’ll be dropping at dinner parties next year. Despite a sluggish art market overall, both fairs performed admirably, with Frieze in particular managing to inject a dose of champagne-and-sneaker energy into what was once a more staid, old-money affair. The Korean art scene, it seems, has discovered young-rich culture.
But art fairs aren’t the only game in this field. There are also biennales—those curious exhibitions held every two years (as the name helpfully suggests) that cater to a different breed of art lover entirely. Korea’s marquee event, the Gwangju Biennale, took place in 2024, which means 2025 is an off year. Recalling these two events prompted a question I received from an art enthusiastic friend before: “What exactly is the difference between an art fair and a biennale?”
It’s a question that may hover at the edge of many people’s minds, even if they’ve never quite articulated it. The answer reveals not just two different types of events but two fundamentally opposed philosophies about what art is for.
Two Towers, Two Origins
To understand these events, we need to dig down to the roots of their family trees, which turn out to be from entirely different soils.
Art fairs are, at their core, big markets—and they know it. Their lineage stretches back to the trading fairs of late medieval Europe, where spices, textiles, and eventually paintings and sculptures changed hands in bustling temporary marketplaces. As capitalism flourished after World War II, particularly in the western worlds, the idea of “collective exhibitions for sale” appeared. By the nineteen-sixties, recognizable art fairs had emerged, with Cologne and Basel leading the way.
The logic was simple: galleries needed to reach beyond their usual clientele, and collectors wanted access to galleries they couldn’t physically visit. Why not gather everyone in one place for a few frenzied days? Art Basel, which launched at the Basel in Switzerland in 1970, perfected this model and now operates franchises in Miami, Paris, and Hong Kong—a kind of Starbucks of the art world, as if selling million-dollar paintings.
Biennales, by contrast, have noble pretensions. The Venice Biennale, began in 1895 as a state-sponsored affair initiated by King Umberto I and his wife, who hoped to enhance Italy’s cultural reputation. It was explicitly modeled on the World’s Fairs that had swept Europe in the late nineteenth century—those grand exhibitions where nations competed to demonstrate their technological prowess and cultural superiority. Venice, already a magnet for wealthy European tourists, seemed the perfect setting for an art-focused competition.
The inaugural Venice Biennale attracted more than two hundred thousand visitors and established a format that still on today: Each country set up their own exhibition halls around a central theme, with curatorial vision taking precedence over commercial concerns. It remains the world’s oldest and most prestigious recurring art exhibition, though its original nationalistic undertones have (mostly) faded. Today, cities like Gwangju and São Paulo host their own biennales to achieve cultural cachet through art scenes.
The Players
These divergent origins have produced strikingly different casts of characters.
Walk into an art fair and you’ll encounter a specific ecosystem: sharp-eyed dealers negotiating booth locations with the strategic intensity of chess grandmasters; collectors with serious budgets hunting for acquisitions like big-game trackers; art advisors serving as matchmakers between buyers and sellers. The dress code runs toward limited-edition sneakers and whatever was buzzy at the most recent fashion week. Conversations happen against a soundtrack of popping corks, and the prevailing mood is one of delicious, dopamine-fueled competition. Everyone wants the same thing: a deal that makes them feel clever.
Supporting players abound: investment-minded newcomers trailing after advisors; curious civilians who wouldn’t tell the difference between Gerhard Richter and Rauschenberg but enjoy the spectacle; celebrity-spotters; and Instagram influencers angling for the perfect backdrop with new trend art works.
(Is the art market becoming the new luxury fashion market? We cannot answer the question easily but persistently raised)
Unsurprisingly, the works that thrive at art fairs tend to be visually striking, immediately comprehensible, and—crucially—liquid. If you want to gauge the market’s temperature, track emerging artists, or understand what’s hot, an art fair is an unbeatable real-time index.
Biennales attract a different crowd. Here, curators reign supreme, wielding the mysterious authority to interpret the zeitgeist and orchestrate exhibitions around grand themes. Artists respond with work designed to provoke thought rather than purchases. Critics analyze; audiences contemplate. The typical biennale visitor—often dressed in black, clutching a notebook—approaches each work as a philosophical proposition rather than a potential acquisition. They’re less interested in price tags than in the questions the work raises about society, politics, or the human condition.
This creates its own pathologies, of course. Biennales can become exercises in curatorial mysticism, where impenetrable concept statements and willful obscurity substitute for genuine insight. But at their best, they offer something art fairs cannot: sustained intellectual engagement with work that challenges rather than flatters.
The joke among art insiders captures the distinction perfectly: at an art fair, you ask how much; at a biennale, you ask what it means.
The Frame: Essence of the scenes
These different backgrounds decide what will be on the walls—or, increasingly, over the floor.
Paintings still dominate the art fairs. According to the annual <The Art Market – Survey-of-Global-Collecting> sponsored by The Art Basel and UBS, paintings account for over 70% of all artworks traded globally each year, although there are slight variations.
Photography and printmaking each claim roughly 10% of the market share while all other mediums such as sculpture, installation, media art, and everything else compete for the rest of the market. Market logic is ruthlessly efficient: art fairs focus on displaying what sells most (which is paintings) followed by photographs and prints.
Biennales operate under different constraints. Traditional forms like painting feel inadequate for capturing contemporary discourse, so installations—large-scale, immersive, often technologically complex—dominate. These works are not supposed to be sold since they are not suitable for decorations and that is precisely the point. Their purpose is to provoke, unsettle, and expand the definition of what art can be.
Because of these differences, a joke circulates among art enthusiasts: at an art fair asking the price while at a Biennale questioning the value.
Two Hearts, One Body
Art fairs and biennales represent the dual nature of contemporary art: one champions commerce and accessibility, the other intellectual ambition and cultural critique. They’re not enemies so much as complementary organs in the same body—one pumping commercial energy, the other producing critical discourse.
Many art lovers attend both, though they do so in distinctly different states of mind. At a fair, you’re a hunter, alert and strategic. At a biennale, you’re a student, receptive and contemplative. Both modes have value; neither is complete without the other.
As autumn settles in and these events proliferate, it’s worth experiencing both. The gap between them—that fascinating space where money meets meaning, where market forces collide with artistic vision—is where contemporary art truly lives. And understanding that gap, in all its contradictory richness, might be the most valuable insight of all.