Big Prices, Big Pieces, Big Promises: An Art Basel Diary
If the art world has one genericide—think Chapstick, Hoover, or even Photoshop—the title undoubtedly belongs to Art Basel, an extravaganza of art fairs that annually takes over Miami, Hong Kong, and, most importantly, the eponymous Swiss city of Basel.
Not unlike other brands that have eventually become the definers of their products, the industry’s largest commercial bonanza today speaks for a phenomenon of consuming top-notch art through socially exhilarating week-long experiences. Every first week of December, glitzy fashion parties and ambitious art projects stretch over the South Beach while the fair occupies Miami Beach Convention Center; in the actual Basel edition, the bar at the city’s historic hotel Les Trois Rois is filled every mid-June to its brim with industry fixtures who sip away the day-long fair fatigue at Messeplatz. Collectors may still be the primary target, but today Art Basel encapsulates much more than just sales.
The fair’s inaugural edition took place in the German-speaking town over a half-century ago with 90 galleries that attracted around 16,000 visitors. Decades of market growth, multiple international outposts, countless parties, and many celebrity attendees later, the trade show—where ever it may be in the world is now a global brand.
Art Basel wrapped its 2023 edition last week in its mother city with 82,000 attendees. The week-long affair did not lack bottles of Champagne, catch-ups between intercontinental colleagues, or big-ticket sales—the top of which was a $22.5 million dollar Louise Bourgeois sculpture sold by Hauser & Wirth in the VIP day’s first hours. “Art Basel is a proof that fairs are no longer trades but full experiences also for people who are not necessarily interested in buying art,” the fair’s recently hired director, Vincenzo de Bellis, said to me in the collectors’ lounge. For the former curator of Walker Art Center, fairs like his are “similar to the initial promise of the art biennials which have now become fantastic temporary museums.” This growing beast of course comes with its own responsibilities: “We have to provide that exchange of art and maintain its flourishing while making sure the city offers more.”
This year, indeed, the city of Basel was more equipped to pull in the fairgoers than ever. Every ticket-buyer at the fair received a free pass for public transformation and local restaurants extended their usual midnight closures until 2 am. “If the fair’s venue is the center of gravity for a week, the energy spreads with 15-minute tram rides to two different museums on each side, Fondation Beyeler and the Schaulager,” said de Bellis. Add to this hit list the lobby bar at the Trois (as the regulars call it) and the Campari Bar at Kunsthalle restaurant, and you are welcome to roam—ideally lubed by Ticino-sourced Merlot—through a phalanx of Loewe pursues, iPad-clutching dealers, and questions about what city is next on your calendar: Paris or Zurich?
Monday’s preview of Unlimited—a section dedicated to installations too large to fit into fair booths—saw curious crowds huddled at Messeplatz. Inside, bigger (in scale and often ambition) was better. New Yorker Tanya Bonakdar Gallery partnered with Galerie Peter Kilchmann and Galerie Krinzinger to present Monica Bonvicini’s kinky installation Never Again (2005). The Italian artist had blended the engineering of playgrounds with the carnal thrill of bondage, orchestrating a network of steel pipe, black leather, and chain swings, suspended from a steel frame. The public was invited for a free ride on single or two-person leather cushions, soundtracked by the sounds of shackles.
A similarly corporal power-play was in full performance at Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas’s sporty presentation Čiurlionis Gym (2023). A blue-carpeted gym setting had the crowd circling and Instagramming as performers flexed their muscles with plaster Greek God busts in lieu of dumbbells, while metaphorically sweating out Serapinas’s arduous fine art education.
Another kind of obsession was satirized in Upper East Sider Meredith Rosen Gallery’s co-presentation of Guillaume Bijl’s mattress store installation, Matratzenland (Mattress Store), with Galerie Nagel Draxler. After the Belgian artist initially created this humorously spot-on generic mattress store—note the cutout of a hospitable store manager—in 2003, two galleries joined forces to reenact the springy orchestration of mediocre domestic consumption for visitors who shop buy their own mattresses from Hästens. “Bijl’s placement of the consumption of home within the locus of an art fair sheds light on the capitalist nature of value ascription to basic human needs and symbolic beliefs via art,” Rosen said at the dinner she and Draxler co-hosted later in the evening at Restaurant zum Rebhaus.
The fete was preceded by Hauser & Wirth’s Campari-soaked aperitivo hour at Campari Bar and Marianne Boesky’s toast for Suzanne McClelland at the private club Club de Bâle. The Brooklyn-based painter’s display of 26 small scale chrome-hued abstract paintings—overall titled Mute—stood out as a bold move amidst towering sculptures and larger-than-life installations. “Unlimited is an amazing opportunity for Suzanne because she is a painter with big ideas,” Boesky told me about the paintings’ exploration of the Latin alphabet letters. "Art Basel understands that some works demand their own space to share their full impact.”
By Wednesday morning, updates on million-dollar sales were coming fast and furious: London's legendary White Cube sold Mark Bradford’s mixed media on canvas painting from 2014 to $4.5 million USD; Almine Rech’s Picasso painting found its collector for an undisclosed price in the range of $3 to $3.5 million; Salzburg-born gallery Thaddaeus Ropac sold a 1985-dated silkscreen by Robert Rauschenberg for $2.8 million; bicoastal David Kordansky Gallery sold a 2022 Jonas Wood painting for $2.5 million; and Di Donna placed a Henry Moore sculpture for $2 million, a figure which was echoed by Hauser & Wirth’s sale of a brand new mixed media work by Glenn Ligon and a Noah Davis painting dealt by David Zwirner.
While the fair ended its first public day on Thursday evening, Trois saw another group gathering inside its ballroom, this time to celebrate the launch of Art Newspaper Turkey with a dinner co-hosted by Contemporary Istanbul art fair and Turkish Airlines. The group, which included curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, digital artist Refik Anadol, and a gaggle of collectors, kicked off the fourth night’s marathon at the hotel’s bar where—like every other night of the week—the day time’s zealous dealers and buyers alike were all still up despite their early morning flights. They all agreed on another Aperol spritz and, of course, to return next year.
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