When more than 270 gallerists convene in Maastricht, the Netherlands, this month for the 38th edition of TEFAF, they will be greeted by a new managing director: Dominique Savelkoul, a seasoned Belgian arts administrator who took the helm in September. It’s her first time running an art fair and working in the commercial arts sector.
At the European Fine Art Foundation, she replaces Bart Drenth, who left in May 2023 after his social media posts in Dutch about “woke culture,” left-wing politics and Muslims were reported in the international press.
Savelkoul, 61, has run, or helped run, many cultural institutions in her decades-long career. In the late 1990s, she was head of marketing and development for the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which is also the resident orchestra at the Glyndebourne opera festival. As director of communications at the National Gallery in London, she was charged with improving the visitor experience in a museum with more than 2,300 paintings from the 13th to the 19th centuries.
Then came a complete change of scene: the industrial Ruhr region in northwestern Germany. There, in the early 2000s, Savelkoul was part of the team that launched the Ruhrtriennale, now one of Germany’s major festivals of performing and visual arts.
Returning to Belgium, she merged the Flemish opera and ballet companies into Opera Ballet Vlaanderen. Belgium was “famous for contemporary dance,” but “no one was talking about the Flemish ballet,” she recalled in a video interview. Savelkoul convinced the celebrated contemporary choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui to lead the organization’s ballet company, which now has an abundant contemporary program. (Cherkaoui left in 2022 to lead the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève.)
Savelkoul is best known for her recent revamp of the Mu.Zee, the museum of Belgian modern and contemporary art in Ostend, where she led the redesign and reopening during the pandemic. (The museum is now closed for a fully funded, three-year redevelopment project.)
The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Why did you accept the TEFAF job? You’ve never worked for a fair or for the commercial sector in the arts.
What was really attractive to me is that the final F in TEFAF is not for fair, but for foundation. It’s the European Fine Art Foundation. So it’s not just a commercial fair.
As a foundation, it’s a very different way of thinking. You’re talking about a community, and you want to serve the community, make things easier for them.
TEFAF is not for profit. We, of course, have to have sound finances and a buffer, as every commercial organization does. But it also means that as soon as we have money, we want to reinvest it straight away to make TEFAF the best.
As a foundation, I really think we should be sitting at every single table where important decisions are made: whether it’s The Hague for discussions around Dutch VAT, or the European Union for E.U. customs discussions, or UNESCO. We have so much knowledge and experience, and this is quite a complicated world, so let’s be generous and share this information.
What makes TEFAF so different, as a fair, from Art Basel and Frieze?
It’s this diversity that we bring; we always say 7,000 years of history are exhibited at TEFAF. More and more, people are cross collecting. We have been championing this from the very beginning. We’ve always had all of these disciplines coming together. That’s at the heart of the success of TEFAF.
TEFAF is the only international fair focusing mainly on pre-20th-century art, objects and furniture. Modern and contemporary art now represent a third of all stands. Do you not worry that TEFAF is losing its identity and specificity?
I really do believe in this variety, in this diversity, in people coming in from different angles and starting to discover things. I think we really have to make sure the balance is right and stays right.
Your predecessor left in May 2023 after the publication of controversial remarks. Do you still feel a malaise around his departure, or is that part of the past?
I think every organization has these kinds of periods. I accepted this role being fully aware that, now maybe more than ever, there was a need for stability and continuity. I knew it.
I’m here to talk about the future, and to be empathetic toward what might have gone wrong. I’m happy to listen. But let’s move forward.
The art market is in a downturn. What are your thoughts?
The beauty of TEFAF is that we can cater to everyone, and we are not that dependent on what exactly happens in the market. Those extremely high prices are all over the press, and everyone is talking about them, but I think the real market is below those price levels. That’s where everything is happening.
Even in the toughest times, quality will always be a major reason to buy or not to buy something. And there again, we at TEFAF happen to be on the right side of the story.
Museum clients and visitors are very important to TEFAF. Why?
If the Metropolitan Museum of Art is at TEFAF and buys, it gives a very strong signal to other museums and to individual collectors. Last year we had more than 650 curators visiting TEFAF Maastricht, and more than 40 groups organized by museums coming with their trustees or their collectors. That really means a lot to us.
Quality is our main aim. Having so many museums buying at the fair is just a measure that we are able to deliver this quality.
How did you transform the museum in Ostend?
I was there for five years, and came in as a kind of crisis, interim management. I arrived in the building three days before the Covid lockdown. First impressions are really important. I remember thinking, “My God, this building is a nightmare. It’s so complicated, and people are lost.”
Mu.Zee is the only museum of Belgian art of the last 150 years. But the collection wasn’t shown: It was in the cellar, because they were showing eight small exhibitions in the galleries.
We closed the museum, and with the team, we emptied it. We took out the walls, the curtains, the carpets. We did everything ourselves, with our own budget. Working with a fantastic, green and sustainable architect, we were able to strip the building, only have two big exhibitions a year, and put the museum’s own collection in the central building — so, at any stage visiting Mu.Zee, you would have a history of Belgian art.
What are the qualities that make a great arts administrator?
It helps not to have a big ego, because we work in a world full of egos. If you look back at what I did and why I was able to succeed, it was never about me. It was about putting the institution or the organization first, when there was a crisis or a challenge.
I prefer to work under the radar and take my time and prepare and listen. Also, you have to dare to question everything — the good things and the bad things. Why are we that successful? Why did that not work out?
When you start somewhere and come from another background, you can ask all of those questions — whereas if you go from one Belgian museum to another Belgian museum, you’re supposed to know what you’re talking about. You don’t have this honeymoon period where you are very free to move.
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