Every year, half a year after the Christ Child, the queen of art fairs descends on the city of Basel, where we humans are either collectors or gallery owners or museum directors (or journalists). At least during the first two of the six days of the Art Basel fair, when the general public is locked out and then has to pay 68 francs for admission, one franc more than last year and significantly more than in any Swiss museum.
In return, however, it will be able to see more works of art than are shown in all the museum exhibitions in Europe in a year. And it will not have to worry about the crowds that make every museum blockbuster show look like a train station during the Covid pandemic. On Tuesday, the first actual day of the fair, when first class VIPs and later, in the afternoon, second class VIPs are allowed into the hall with its current 286 exhibition stands, there is no less crowding. It’s just that the feet they step on may be a little more expensively shod.
Rejuvenate and widen
One has to be a little careful not to pay more attention to the eccentricity on display than to the spectacular art that is supposed to be the focus. The man with the red Birkin Bag over the shoulder is one of the more discreet cases. But it is certainly one that the fair management likes. It is noticeable when CEO Noah Horowitz and the new director of Art Basel in Basel, Maike Cruse, who was poached from the Berlin art scene, use exactly the same formulation to announce their claim: “To rejuvenate and diversify our show.”
Rejuvenation and diversification seem necessary after the latest “Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report” found a four percent contraction in the art market. The younger clientele targeted is to be wooed with a new fair shop run by Sarah Andelman, founder of the legendary concept store “Colette” in Paris. And with a new concept by Stefanie Hessler for the exhibition grounds. In recent years, the fair has been based in the dollhouse-beautiful old town, but this time this public (and free) part of the fair has moved to the so-called Kleinbasel side of the Rhine, to Clarastrasse: a rather unglamorous shopping street with the typical problems that inner-city retail has today, including vacancies.
© Art Basel
The certain Berlin Biennale feeling that comes with the reorientation of the exhibition course fits well with the debut of Maike Cruse, who brought the Berlin gallery Nome with her as a new addition to the Statements section (for solo projects). Not that she was part of the selection committee, which was recruited exclusively from gallery owners and in which only one Berlin-based gallery owner, Jochen Meyer, is represented. That used to be different.
In the belly of the Statue of Liberty
The Berliners in Basel: After being able to hoist Rikrit Tiravanija’s pirate flags prominently over the Middle Rhine Bridge, it is only natural that the Neugerriemschneider Gallery will also offer a corresponding motif as flatware in the exhibition booth. A small prologue, so to speak, to the upcoming retrospective of the artist’s Berlin creative phase in the Gropius Bau.
Mehdi Chouakri had the most beautiful smile on his face, visibly proud of having sold Saâdane Afif’s model of the interior of the Statue of Liberty in New York to “the Federal Republic of Germany” for 42,000 euros. At Eigen + Art, Judy Lübke is showing, as she does every year, large-format works by Neo Rauch, and is recommending to visitors, in the slipstream of the great artist, the paintings arranged in a Petersburg hanging style in various techniques and on different surfaces by the far less well-known Ulrike Theusner (prices: 3,500-28,000 euros). He then explains that the sculpture in front of the large-format Rauch work (edition of 10, 120,000 euros) is one of only three sculptures ever made by the painter Rauch.
Sunflowers for $20 million
A great rediscovery with great entertainment value are the feminist-motivated tableaux by Tanya Leighton of Marianne Wex, who died in 2020 and is largely forgotten, with comparative studies of female and male body language. The newly made reproductions (edition of 5) cost 28,000 euros – the fragile originals have been secured by MoMA.
All of these galleries have their booths on the upper floor of Hall 2. Things are even more expensive on the ground floor, where the top dogs of the international art trade, Gagosian & Co., are based. At Max Hetzler, paintings by Katharina Grosse and Bridget Riley cost 295,000 euros and 450,000 euros respectively. Albert Oehlen: “seven figures”. At Sprüth Magers, the women, with Rosemarie Trockel, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker and Anne Imhof, make their usual strong appearance. The most expensive work on the stand, however, is by John Baldessari and is said to be worth 3.5 million dollars to the buyer. The Hauser & Wirth gallery reported the sale of an Arshile Gorky for 16 million dollars on the first day; David Zwirner sold Joan Mitchell’s “Sunflowers” for 20 million dollars.
The longest picture by Keith Haring
The status of Art Basel in Basel is no longer completely unchallenged; this year, for the first time, the Paris event will open openly as Art Basel Paris in the newly renovated, magnificent Grand Palais. From Basel, the in-house competition will also be put in its place by pointing out the global uniqueness of the Unlimited section reserved for monumental projects.
Here, in Hall 1, the VIPs were already stepping on each other’s toes on Monday to be the first to marvel at this year’s competition for the longest work of art in the show: a frieze designed by Keith Haring in 1984 to decorate a fence in New York in his typical graffiti style, measuring 4680 centimeters, narrowly beat out Sam Falls’ “Spring to Fall” (4572 centimeters) and clearly beat out Dominique Fung’s A Tale of Ancestral Memories (2687 centimeters).
By then, visitors have already passed Mario Ceroli’s 365 four-meter-high white peace flags (“Progetto per la pace”, 1968), which are both programmatic and non-binding at the beginning of the exhibition and thus of Art Basel. We are not at the Documenta here and we never will be: the fair successfully avoids more direct and potentially controversial references to the conflict in the Middle East, for example.
The most dramatic incident so far: a child who messed up Wolfgang Laib’s piles of white rice (“Brahmanda”, 2016-2022), which were neatly arranged around a black granite stone. The desired rejuvenation also has its pitfalls.