Art at Basel confronts the big issues
Some 93,000 followers of the latest trends in modern and contemporary art made the annual pilgrimage to Basel on the Swiss/ French border last week to feast their eyes on the best that 290 of the world’s leading galleries could come up with. In doing so, they were also asked to confront some of the burning issues of the day.
Hogging the centre ground at Art Unlimited, a vast aircraft hangar of a space adjacent to the main fair, were two 13x65ft billboards by the selfstyled activist artist Andrea Bowers, documenting Metoo allegations of sexual misconduct by men against women. The men featured on the billboards included US President Donald Trump, film producer Harvey Weinstein, footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and the art magazine publisher, Knight Landesman. It attracted massive attention. A national museum director I found staring up at these imposing, mostly text works said he found it “shocking”. But was it art? “Hmm,” he paused, “not really.” Nevertheless, it was priced at $350,000 (£278,000).
The next day, the already controversial work became even more controversial when one of the alleged victims, Helen Donahue, whose image also appeared on the billboard, complained vehemently on Twitter that the artist had not sought permission to reproduce her image
on a public artwork – a tweet which then went viral. Bowers quickly apologised and the fair removed the offending work and withdrew it from sale.
The talks programme asked us to consider new developments in political and artistic nationalism, along with ecological issues (such as the damage each of us had caused by flying to Switzerland), global warming, and the gender gap (particularly in relation to artists’ prices). A week-long film programme was dominated by socio-political issues that included the Chinese artist Cao Fei’s take on society’s notion of freedom, to the British artist Phil Collins’s tribute to the Marxist, Friedrich Engels, in the context of Brexit and the British working class.
Perhaps the most appropriate work at Art Unlimited was by the Chinese artist Xu Zhen, whose casino-style installation, Nirvana, replaced the usual felt baccarat and roulette table tops with coloured sand. Priced at $350,000 and vulnerable, it would seem, to a draught of wind or a sneeze, it happened to be the perfect metaphor for gambling on art.
On the gallery trading floor, more than $150million of art was reported as sold on the first day (many works were not reported). Top price was an early photo painting, Versammlung, by Gerhard Richter at $20million (£16million), followed by $11million for a 1973 abstract painting by the late Korean artist, Kim Whanki. Richter is a known quantity in the west, but Kim, a precursor of the now fashionable Dansaekhwa movement, is not. Last sold at auction in Seoul in 2017 for a record $6.7million, the mark-up reflects the upward movement in prices for previously overlooked, older-generation artists.
Another example is the 74-yearold American artist Mary Corse, who enjoyed her first retrospective survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year. Her work, which is abstract and concerned with light, was never particularly noticeable at Basel before, but could now be found in at least three different booths, selling for as much as $650,000 apiece – double her auction record.
The fastest seller was probably Zanele Muholi, the South African activist photographer who campaigns for LGBT awareness and will have her first retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern next year. The Stevenson Gallery from Johannesburg sold 24 of her portraits, priced from $12,000 to $30,000 each, within the first hour.
Another female artist who conveys socio-political messages is the Portuguese-born Paula Rego. For those overseas collectors who will not have a chance to visit her current exhibition in Milton Keynes, Rego’s dealer, Marlborough Fine Art, was showing paintings and previously unseen sculptures on the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins. With paintings priced at up to £1million – including
The Family (1988), once owned by Charles Saatchi – and sculptures nearer £250,000 each, the display offered a relief from the jumbled mixture of artists seen at most booths, and sold enough to keep the selection changing daily.
At a dinner, one collector told me that collectors did not compete over buying things, but liked showing off how clever they had been in what they bought. Most, she said, just followed the fashions. If politically sensitive art is in fashion, then Basel had created the perfect storm where politics and gambling meet.