This week, tens of thousands of creative connoisseurs, collectors, and art enthusiasts descended on Los Angeles for fairs, gallery dinners, and other Art Week events. It’s a true art-for-the-art-scene festival, anchored by Frieze LA and Felix Art Fair.
In recent years, lower-cost fairs like The Other Art Fair and Post-Fair, launched in 2025, have offered galleries and consumers new ways to get involved in the action. This year, new fairs like the photography-focused Show LA, Butter Fine Art Fair and Enzo are joining the mix, expanding further across the city. As the week grows, and more brands get involved, can it stay that way?
The demographic is more art focused and high value than other art events, which are increasingly faced with an oversaturation of brand activations and parties, experts say. In LA, brands can get in front of the right people. “It’s very much an art crowd [in LA],” says Casey Lesser, chief curator and editorial director at online art marketplace Artsy. Other art fairs like Art Basel Miami and Frieze London have grown well beyond their initial intent and purpose: to sell art. This has brought with it crowds from outside the art world, complicating what the events are all about for those who have long been on the ground. “LA has this cool factor.”
The sales this year are indicative of this dynamic. At Frieze, there were multiple seven-figure transactions and ambitious mid-market placements, the fair reported on Sunday. Gallerists reported strong sales, and many noted the strength of enthusiasm of collectors in the LA art community, with the fair having welcomed over 32,000 visitors throughout the weekend.
In Frieze’s case, chief commercial officer Emily Glazebrook notes that a large portion of their ticket-buying audience are culturally curious above all. They may have never collected a piece of art before, but they’re eager to learn about it. “They’re interested in culture, and there is a very strong crossover between that audience and the audience that fashion brands are looking to speak to,” she says. “It gives our partners the opportunity to reach quite a wide ranging audience, in age, in wealth, in interests.”
As LA Art Week continues to grow, it’s one worth watching. But brands must tread carefully; hosting dinners and parties won’t cut it. How can they best tap in?
Keeping the art at the center
Stone Island offers a blueprint. Now in its third year as an official Frieze LA partner, the Italian brand is a supporter of Focus, a section of the fair dedicated to showcasing LA’s emerging art scene. The collaboration is more than a logo badging exercise, CEO Robert Triefus says. “In a way, we take a little bit of a backstage presence, because really it’s the galleries themselves and the artists in the galleries that are front and center,” he says.