Christmas has come early to Art Basel
Is it the Asian money – and billionaires? Or is it simply PR? Colin Gleadell reflects on why the art fair has had a bonanza year
Asales bonanza at the Art Basel fair in Switzerland has left everyone agog at the normally invisible strength of the modern art market outside the auction room. By the end of day two of this 48th edition of the fair, the Art Market Monitor website had produced a list of some 500 sales worth an estimated total of $300 million (£235 million), which is on a par with London’s Frieze week auctions.
Prices ranged from $10 million-plus for works by brand-name artists such as Jean-michel Basquiat, Sigmar Polke, Philip Guston, Alberto Burri and Piero Manzoni, down to the $5,000 range for small works by less familiar artists. When the sales for the five days are totted up, including the private sales that take place in the upstairs viewing rooms, that figure could double. It is already being rumoured that a $230 million Rothko, not seen on a stand, was sold at the fair.
The sales spree is being attributed to many factors, mostly preceded by the adjective “more”. More confidence, more billionaires with more sophisticated (sceptics might say “more gullible”) taste, more Asian spending and more museum and institutional buying – to which I would add more sales information. Until recently, to glean the quantity of sales being made, you would have to work your way through the stands and ask. Only a handful of journalists would do this, and the market followers would eagerly await their reports. Now the fair has PR agencies which do the leg work. One of the most remarkable stats was the 20 sales of Wolfgang Tillmans photographs at the David Zwirner stand, worth a total of
$1.2 million, followed by almost as many Tillmanses at Maureen Paley.
The effect of these sales press releases is to inspire more confidence in Art Basel, not only as the biggest and best art fair in the world, but also the greatest challenge to the auction rooms that the dealers can muster.
My first port of call at the fair is usually the Unlimited section for very large works and films, housed in a converted hanger. Looking for something light-hearted, I headed for the humorous American artist Rob Pruitt’s diptychs of art-world figures and their celebrity lookalikes. It was hilarious to see the dealer Tony Shafrazi likened to Beethoven, and cringe-inducing to see the dealer Larry Gagosian compared with the young hunk of a basketball player, Blake Griffin. Flattery gets you everywhere in the art world. It was not surprising to learn that the installation of nearly 200 pairs of images sold immediately for £550,000. But how long does a joke last? The Art Basel director, Marc Spiegler, who was likened to the drugs dealer El Chapo, dismissed the work as “a one-liner”.
Another quick-selling fun piece was the film The Pure Necessity by the Belgian artist David Claerbout, a take on the Disney cartoon The Jungle Book made in an edition of seven which all sold for $95,000 each. A Christmas tree by France’s Phillippe Parreno – and it felt like Christmas in Basel despite the 30 degrees temperature – sold for €1.2 million.
Missing from the sales list was London’s Mayor Gallery, tucked into the corner of the fair, which sold 46 works in two days, ranging from $6,000 to $240,000. Twenty-four were from the series of subtly different paintings of the same glass tumbler made at different times of day between 1993 and 2000 by Peter Dreher.
Another significant omission was the Lisson Gallery’s sale of a Delacroix-inspired, carved wooden relief by the Egyptian artist, Wael Shawky, to an American museum for about $200,000. Private collectors prefer his more standard puppets and animated films about the crusades, but this sale indicated how museums target less commercially popular examples of an artist’s work.
Nor was the action confined to the main fair. At the fair for younger galleries, Liste, business was also booming, albeit in a more under-theradar fashion – the fair doesn’t have the budget to pay PRS to research and promote sales.