According to Artsy Marketplace’s vice president, Dustyn Kim, last year there were over 80,000 attendees at Art Basel Miami Beach, including more than 200 leading international museums, cultural institutions and art patrons.

“Galleries can gain access to a suite of collectors and art world insiders at the kind of level and scale that they cannot elsewhere,” she said, “so it really gives these galleries unrivaled access to the top end of the market that can be important in terms of the next stage of developing their artists’ careers.”

While it may be the right time for a newer or smaller gallery to try to get into the bigger fairs like FIAC, Frieze and Art Basel, the costs can be almost prohibitive. Kacha Kastner, the co- founder of Hunt Kastner, said that considering flights, hotels, the shipping of art plus paying for and installing the booth, the cost can run upward of 60,000 euros (roughly $66,500).

“Galleries like us from emerging markets where the art market is still not well established, these fairs are sort of problematic because stands are so expensive,” she said. “Our artists do not command prices that can really make it financially viable for us to just go there every year, and it is really kind of a risk for us.”

For Marta Kolakowska, the founder of Warsaw’s Leto Gallery who took two of her Polish artists to Frieze New York in 2012, that wager did not pay off and she now focuses on niche or smaller fairs like the Material Art Fair in Mexico City in February.

“Frieze was an adventure and we had a lot of expectation,” she said, adding that even smaller fairs can cost a gallery between €8,000 and €16,000. “It was fantastic to be in this crowd of huge galleries and big names, but in the end we spent a fortune to do this and there were not many results for us.”

That is something that some premier fairs are trying to remedy in order to continue drawing smaller and younger galleries. Art Basel in June this year introduced a sliding scale pricing model that they have also adopted for Art Basel Miami Beach.

Unlike previous fairs, at which all galleries in the main sector paid the same square-meter price, now the square-meter price changes with the size of the booth. Also, contemporary galleries that are showing for the first time in the main sector of the fair are receiving a 20 percent discount this year, and if they go a second time they receive a 10 percent discount.

“That was recognition of the fact that the transition from being in one of the project-specific sectors to the main sector was very difficult often for galleries, and even if you are going into a relatively small booth in the fair you are suddenly paying 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000 more for your booth then you had previously,” said Marc Spiegler, the global director of Art Basel. “So we said, ‘Let’s give people a couple of years to find their footing and find out how to do the sort of booth we would hope for and make the finances add up.’”

Brendan Dugan, founder of Karma, said “smaller and mid-tier galleries are at a disadvantage” but added that in the end it is, after all, a commercial endeavor.

“Sales are obviously important because it is quite expensive to do fairs, but that moment to connect with people, talk about the artists and the programs, for me that is an important part of doing fairs,” he said. “Obviously Basel is the highest level of that, so you are getting dialogue with the people that you want.”

While that dialogue may not turn into sales, attending can prove to be a good long-term investment for galleries. Ms. Kastner said that though they did not get great sales during FIAC in October, once they were back in Prague they sold works from their inventory from the artists they showed in Paris to people they had met at the fair.