ASPEN, COLO.- A down art market? Depressed dealers? Fatigued buyers?

None of that matters in Aspen, Colorado. At least that is the theory behind a new art fair in the city when the global arts industry is in a slump. Aspen is both rich and spendy, with one of the highest concentrations of ultrawealthy homeowners in the country.

Even the worst of times is not all that bad here, said Doug Leibinger, a longtime real estate agent in Aspen, who represented the seller in a $77 million cash deal for an eight-bedroom home in April, setting a Colorado sales record during a downturn in the U.S. housing market. The record was broken again with another Aspen deal just a week later.

“Our marketplace is anomalous to the rest of the planet,” Leibinger said. “There are people who find Aspen desirable regardless of what happens in the greater economy. “

All those bursting wallets and bare walls add up to a consistent demand for paintings and sculpture, enough for Rebecca Hoffman, co-founder of the Aspen Art Fair, to plunge ahead confidently with her event, even when trade reports show international art spending down more than 10% in 2023.

The inaugural fair, staged at the Hotel Jerome, a 135-year-old resort, ended Friday. Visitors were elbow to elbow during Monday’s opening preview, and there were bustling crowds the first few days; many of the 22 galleries reported multiple sales by Wednesday. Prices varied, with a number of offerings in the $12,000 to $40,000 range, in line with the leading fairs of comparable size. (Art Basel Miami Beach in 2023, with nearly 300 exhibitors, still dwarfed this fair.)

Hoffman, in an interview late Tuesday, said that was a good start. She had spent much of the day coddling collectors, coaching dealers and extinguishing the fires that break out with any startup.

“My jobs this week are house mom, shrink, punching bag, puppeteer and cheerleader,” she said.

Those are roles she is familiar with, and Aspen is a place she knows well. Hoffman, who lives in New York, consults with art fairs internationally, and spent the last three years as director of Intersect Art and Design, Aspen’s other art fair, which is taking place simultaneously. Both fairs run during Aspen Arts Week, a series of lectures, exhibitions and parties hosted by the Aspen Art Museum.

When Hoffman ventured out on her own this year, departing from Intersect and producing her own fair in partnership with Bob Chase, an Aspen dealer, several exhibitors followed along, including the French gallery Perrotin; Miles McEnery Gallery, whose headquarters are in Manhattan; and K Contemporary, a gallery in Denver.

Newcomers signed on as well, including Galerie Gmurzynska, from Zurich, a secondary-market specialist that featured a Pablo Picasso painting in its booth priced at $3.5 million. Another, Southern Guild, a gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, brought along South African photographer Zanele Muholi, who currently has solo shows at Tate Modern in London and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and who was one of the fair’s artists in residence.

That leap of faith in the new venture came with risk. Booth rentals ranged from $12,000 to $18,000, and dealers who wanted to set up shop in one of the Hotel Jerome’s elegant guest rooms paid up to $30,000 for the five-day run.

The hotel setting was a lure to some exhibitors. The Jerome is an enduring treasure, an 1889 red-brick landmark that has been welcoming guests since Colorado’s silver rush and today trades in a style that is part Wild West hokum, with wall-mounted bison heads and bellhops in cowboy hats, and part luxury inn, with a swank cocktail bar in the lobby and rooms priced at $1,200 a night.

Most art fairs unfold in drab convention centers and resemble trade shows, of any sort, with booths lined up in perfect, endless rows. The Intersect fair, for example, takes place in the Aspen Ice Garden; it is dressed up for the event and has a luxury aura that draws well-heeled customers, but there is no mistaking that it is a hockey rink.

“We were on board because it sounded cool to try something new and to do it in a place that so many people are already coming to intuitively,” said Matthew McCardwell, associate director of Perrotin, whose booth in the Aspen Art Fair’s main hall featured work by Paola Pivi, GaHee Park and Josh Sperling.

K Contemporary made the most of its hotel room space, stacking work on dressers and desks, in closets and even in the bathroom. The gallery turned a wall piece by textile artist Anne von Freyburg into a bedspread, stationed two humanlike sculptures by Viktor Freso on the terrace, and hung a painting by Marc Dennis over the toilet. It was unusual but playful.

“I love taking artwork out of that idea of the white cube,” gallery owner Doug Kacena said. “Taking over a space like this feels more authentic.”

A few doors down, Rusha & Co., a Los Angeles gallery, had a piece by Sienna Shields. It consists of dozens of long, stringy tentacles covered in blue beads and is meant to be hung from the ceiling, though in the hotel room it took over an entire king-size bed. Gallery owner Guy Rusha was actually staying in the room and said he simply pushed the work to one side when he went to sleep.

On the fair’s first day, he sold a few vintage drawings of Aspen by LeRoy Neiman that were installed over a sofa. There was more work for sale on side tables and next to the shower.

“At the gallery, I’m always thinking less is more,” he said. “But here it’s like more is more because these are beautiful rooms and you are competing against a lot of design and style.”

Many of the collectors at the fair were Aspen regulars who live in the city part time but come for Art Week. The Aspen Art Museum’s annual Art Crush gala — to many, the social event of the summer — with its art-star auction raised $3.8 million last year.

Barbara and Bruce Berger, who are philanthropists and collectors, were at the new fair for Monday’s preview. They spent some time browsing the booths with their dog, Brooklyn Berger. Christine Mack, founder of the Mack Art Foundation — a nonprofit in New York that collects art and sponsors artist residencies — was there early, too, and quickly bought an acrylic painting by Rodrigo Valenzuela from Hexton Gallery, one of the fair’s busier sellers.

On the second day, Sharon and John Hoffman showed up. The couple (who are not related to the fair’s organizer) live mostly in Kansas City, Missouri, and have been collecting for 55 years, with a recent focus on Black artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley and Nick Cave. They were not sure if they were buying at the Jerome, but they wanted to support the fair.

They welcome a second art fair in Aspen because it makes the city more of a summer destination for cultural tourists, they said. With the Aspen Art Museum at full speed and additional summer programming at the nearby Anderson Ranch Art Center, “there is really a reason now to come and stay for a week,” Sharon Hoffman said.

The Hoffmans also said they want to support the fair director, whom they have known for many years. Rebecca Hoffman grew up in the art business; her mother, Nancy Hoffman, has operated a gallery in Manhattan since 1972.

Rebecca Hoffman makes the most of the personal and professional connections she has cultivated but said she is building her business model on creating a fair with wide, and lasting, appeal. For her event to succeed beyond this year, however, the galleries have to make money.

She is optimistic that will happen.

“Aspen is not suffering,” she said. “Aspen is blossoming and blooming, and in a space where it is a playground for engaged and informed individuals from around the world.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.