SCOPE Art Fair New York 09 opens today. Before you hit the fair, read the interview below, where Andrew Goldstein asks the questions that matter to Fair Director Alexis Hubshman on behalf of ArtWeLove.

ArtWeLove (AWL): Scope, the first of the satellite fairs, opened in 2002 with exhibitors showing their wares in hotel rooms and bathrooms at New York's Gershwin Hotel. Since then Scope has expanded to have a major presence alongside Art Basel Miami and has had iterations in Venice, Los Angeles, Basel, the Hamptons, and London. Since its beginning, the fair has been distinguished by a commitment to cutting edge contemporary art—a segment of the art market that soared over the past few years but now has been hit the hardest by the crash. What kind of impact has this had on your operations and planning for this year?

Alexis Hubshman (AH): We’re fortunate that because we focus on the emerging market, by nature, the price points have always been less. And furthermore what’s great about collectors in any market is that collectors are collectors, they want to buy, they want to find — it’s not always about buying, it’s about treasure hunting, it’s about being a patron, it’s about supporting a young artist and nurturing them. And our platform is very much oriented to this. A $1.5 million Damien Hirst is not something we sell, but we sell $5,000 to $50,000 pieces, so a collector who stops buying $1.5 million pieces can come to Scope and spend $50,000 buying five different artists and watch their careers develop and even have a say in how their careers develop and really support them.

AWL: One obvious indicator of Scope’s appeal is the number of similar fairs that have sprung up around it. This month there are seven satellite fairs around the Armory Show, most of them angling for the same emerging-artist niche. How does Scope stand apart from something like Volta or Pulse, or on the smaller end of the scale the Bridge or Fountain fairs.

AH: We have a whole slew of programs that builds a sort of cross section of contemporary culture, and we’re not just talking art. Our film series is coming from the Middle East, it’s coming from Russia, it’s coming from some of the most incredible filmmakers of the 70s. I think if you put our programming up against the Armory, you’ll see that ours is as if not more substantial in content. We’ve got installation, we’ve got performance, and we have a music program. Then there’s the whole “Cheap Fast and Out of Control” program, where we have 150 artists doing limited edition prints and t-shirts and lower-priced items. It’s a rounded picture instead of just trying to sidle up to another fair and be a pilot fish. We think we’ve created our own gravity, and we feel that has set us aside from the other fairs.

AWL: Is there any work that you’re especially excited about this year?

AH: Well there’s one gallery that’s new to the fair called Charest-Weinberg, they’re from Miami and they’re doing a one-person show with a Canadian artist who I think is on the verge of blowing up, his name is Marc Seguin. He’s actually doing an entrance piece for us. Maya Hayuk is doing an installation that’s on the side of the Scope Foundation. Then all the stuff happening in Cheap Fast and Out of Control and the cinema program are all on a level that’s just world class. And as you kind of pepper through the fair there are a lot of one-person shows that I’m excited about. There’s a gentleman named Amani Olu who is going to be doing a photo show of emerging photographers, and I let him do a larger survey because I think the show in its own right hangs beautifully and there are seven artists he’s showing who are all like banging young emerging photographers—I know they’re going to be the next thing. This is going to be the most curated fair we’ve doing so far.

AWL: Scope is clearly positioned as an artist-friendly fair, for instance with 70 percent of the proceeds from the auctions you hold going to artists. As an artist yourself, what else have you done to gear Scope toward artists?

AH: At the end of the day I think it’s easy to forget that it’s the artists who make the work that makes this world go round, and there are plenty of people who feed off of that. But again, I enjoy looking at the fair not just from a business model. I consider this to be my big sculpture, my big installation, my huge performance. And I like the idea that I can go from being the artist and building the space in which activity can occur and all kinds of interventions and exciting networking opportunities to being the curator and really give the artists a chance to sing as well. And that’s why we have the Scope Foundation to draw a deliberate line between what the corporation does to make money for its exhibitors and how we can be generous as a non-profit.

AWL: What percentage of Scope’s revenue goes into your grants to artists and curators and other outreach programs?

AH: Zero. That money all comes from the Scope Foundation. We generate money from things like Cheap Fast and Out of Control, where 70 percent of the money goes to the artist and the rest goes to the foundation. As much as I can rationalize to my exhibitors that the programs bring in people, still at the end of the day they don’t want to think that their money is going to people they’re not representing, supporting, or following. And I came to realize that I have to figure out a way to do this and I gradually came up with the foundation idea, and gradually through auctions, parties, events, and all sorts of programming we generate the revenue. Also through sponsorships and corporate donations. This year Scope New York will probably donate $10,000 to $20,000, just to give you an idea, which will maybe represent 10 to 20 percent of what we give out in the year.

AWL: What kind of expectations do you have for Scope this month?

AH: Well I’ll be frank, I’m a city boy from New York City, we’ve been here for eight years, this is where my company is, but the New York fair frankly does not make a profit. For me this is not a profitable fair, but that’s not necessarily what this fair is about. I wasn’t interested in trying to do five grand fairs each year, for me it’s more interesting to have each fair individually play a part in a bigger slice of cake. So New York has it’s own specific niche, which is almost like a curatorial study.

AWL: How have you adapted the fair to take account of the buying climate?

AH: I’m kind of going back to the place where a lot of the work we’re using to promote the fair is a representational piece, like a painting of a wolf or a woman. And I’ve tried to gear our galleries to go back to the basics: Great sculpture, great photography, great straight iconic imagery that has a gravity to it, because people are buying not just to have something to put over their couch, they’re looking for something that gives them solace. There was a time when you could take anything you wanted and put it on a wall and call it art, and that’s fine, but let’s go back to what people are looking for. So we have all sorts of fun, goofy things people can buy but also they’re little pears of wisdom that you can take away with you. You don’t have to drop $50,000 and you don’t have to be told that it’s art and you can start to buy with your gut.

AWL: How is Scope poised to weather the economic crisis internationally?

AH: Being global has really insulated us from the financial hurricane that’s going on, I won’t say completely, but being in five different cities, it’s great to be able to expose art sellers to so many different opportunities to meet different collectors in one year.

AWL: Are you looking to expand Scope further? What is your global outlook?

AH: The money is never saturated in one place, so in my humble opinion, with Austria possibly doing okay or Germany being in a decent position, it’s an ebb and a flow—it’s like Whack-a-Mole. Some places are going to be on the map and worth paying attention to right now, some are going to be down and not as interesting. Maybe America is less interesting for the moment, but maybe Turkey is. Istanbul is very interesting, it’s about to be the 2010 European cultural capital and we’re working on a fair in Istanbul for that year. We’re a small boat that can make quick turns. And we’re looking at Beijing now, and bringing our Art Asia fair to L.A. There’s a flexibility and a comfort factor with working internationally that I don’t think a lot of other fairs have.

AWL: What have you told dealers who were nervous about paying the expense to come to New York this year and face an uncertain market?

AH: This is a 50-booths fair for us, I have to admit it’s an easy place to fill. So for most of the galleries who are coming here it wasn’t really a game of me having to convince them. They understand that we’re at Lincoln Center, we’re right near the Armory, it’s our eighth year, we do great volume, we do good sales, so there’s sort of a built record. In general I am saying to people not to lower their expectations but to be realistic now. We’re all in this together, in for a penny in for a pound, let’s get our phone calls going, get people moving. We’ve worked very hard creating a whole VIP outreach system too, it’s really a well-orchestrated effort.

AWL: Any pullouts this year?

AH: We had one Chinese gallery that was supposed to be in the fair this year and just disappeared off the face of the earth. We had a large deposit from them and we sold the space again immediately to someone off the waiting list, but I don’t know what the happened there, it sort of concerned me. I’m not so used to having galleries pull out.

AWL: As a result of the economic crisis and the changing in the tastes of collectors that we’ve seen in Miami and the art auctions, with buyers looking for bargain prices if they buy emerging artists at all, do you think we’ll see a dwindling of satellite fairs?

AH: No doubt about it. I’ve already seen Bridge not do London, I’ve seen them almost wither on the vine in Berlin, and I think that’s just a testament to being in markets that for one thing don’t have a great collector base. And I think in London we saw the first pinch, the pinching off of how much blood can be distributed to any organ in this body being the art world. I feel a lot of people are scrambling to keep things together. I think we were able to pull off a level of dealer and a level of programming that made me want to do this fair. I’m an artist first and foremost, so as much as I’m a businessman by default at this point if I’m not inspired by it, it’s just not worth doing for me. We make enough money in other markets, and to be frank we make enough money in Miami alone for that to be the one fair we do every year.

AWL: The Armory Show has added an entire second pier devoted exclusively to Modern and secondary-market sellers. Do you ever think you’ll have secondary-market booths at Scope?

AH: Not under the Scope brand. We’re pretty particular about our agenda here. We are starting a new fair called the Contemporary, and the Contemporary will most likely be launching in the Hamptons. I think most likely Scope Hamptons will morph into the Hamptons Contemporary, which will be throwing a much broader net in frankly working with higher-end galleries that have been around much longer, showing substantially higher-end pieces. I wouldn’t say any now, we haven’t set anyone up yet, but we’re trying to go after blue-chip galleries. We’re deciding whether it will happen this summer or if we’ll do nothing in the Hamptons this summer and then just do it the following year. That’s our big work in progress.

AWL: Have there been any cutbacks at Scope New York this year?

AH: No, because we work on a global budget, so no one fair is going to suffer. And even though Scope New York brings in a very small amount of our yearly net revenue, it frankly gets as much if not more money from our budget to do a great program because it is New York City and we are at Lincoln Center. So we don’t really cut back, we still have the same size staff and we’re hustling to make this work, but I also say I built this business watching the pennies, so we run a pretty tight ship.

AWL: Anything you’re excited about in the other fairs this year?

AH: I must admit that I… it’s like I think my kid is the prettiest kid, so I can’t help you with that.