Despite world-churning disasters and stock-market gyrations, the 24th edition of the European Fine Art Fair, aka TEFAF, opened to a deluxe crowd of VIP guests at noon today with confident expectations and evidence of multimillion-dollar transactions. Visitors -- such as Chicago plastics barron Stefan Edlis and wife (shown here) -- sipped champagne and ate freshly shucked oysters dispensed by a well-orchestrated cadre of "oyster girls," clad in white leather vests and armed with sharp knives and steel mesh gloves.
ARTKABINETT art collector social network has many members attending the fair, and eagerly awaits their blogs and uploads.
The fair, after all, is a marriage of blue chip and blue blood, catering to such nobs as Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Qatari royal and onetime black sheep who was spotted poshly attired in a double-breasted pearl-colored suit by the stand of London's Littleton & Hennessy Asian Art Ltd.
TEFAF is a huge affair, with 260 exhibitors from 16 countries offering some 30,000 rigorously vetted artworks from throughout history, with nine specially focused sections ranging from antiquities to modern. This year's modern section, though boasting 46 galleries — the same number as last year — looked weaker due to blue-chip dropouts that included deluxe international gallery Hauser & Wirth, Daniella Luxembourg of London and New York, New York's L&M Arts, and Michael Werner Gallery of New York and Berlin. 
Unlike its vaunted Old Master painting division, it seems that TEFAF's most up-to-date section can't retain some of the bigger modern and contemporary art galleries that have tried out the fair and quit after one or two seasons. Past exhibitors who have not returned include Acquavella Galleries, Gagosian, PaceWildenstein (now the Pace Gallery), and Richard Gray.
Part of that reason may be the length of the fair, which runs for ten days (all the way to the 27th), and the slower decision-making pace of mostly older European collectors who weren't trained by the lightning-fast market ballet of Art Basel or Frieze Art Fair during boom years.
"Collectors come out here once a year, and keep their money under the bed," said Morgan Long, the director of art investments for the London based Fine Art Fund. "These are old-school buyers who know what they want and buy one thing, so it tends to be a more conservative breed of buyer that comes here."
The demographic in general trends "a bit older, and they go home and do their homework," added London and Hong Kong exhibitor Ben Brown, posing by Pablo Picasso's "Minotaure" oil-on-canvas from 1958, which is priced at his booth at $5 million. "It's not for the young hedge-fund types, because there are no sexy parties. These are people who will die with their pictures on the wall that they bought here."
