BASEL, Switzerland – War is raging in Ukraine. Shares are down 20 percent; Inflation has risen by more than 8 percent. The crypto economy is collapsing.
But back in the bubble of the international art world, the rich seem, at least for now, like a bouncer. Following the two-week series of major select auctions in New York that raised more than $2.5 billion, collectors were on the hunt for more desirable modern and contemporary works at the 52nd edition of the Art Basel fair in Switzerland, which opened to VIPs. . guests Tuesday. An iconic “Spider” sculpture by artist Louise Bourgeois, priced at $40 million, was heralded as the largest of many big ticket sales.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this was the first in-person, full-scale Art Basel fair to be held in Switzerland in the usual June period since 2019. A slightly smaller edition, in September last year, was hampered by an unknown date and ongoing Covid. -19 restrictions.
“September was down,” New York-based dealer Sean Kelly said in an interview on the first floor of the exhibit’s main building, where contemporary gallerists are concentrated. But this year he said, “Sales have been strong.”
Kelly was one of 289 exhibitors at this year’s show, up from 272 in 2021. There are “barely any” Chinese collectors, Kelly added, “but it feels like we’re very much back. There have been some big buyers here .” Kelly made more than 20 sales in the $30,000 to $250,000 price range within the first six hours of opening.
The stock, along with the rest of Europe’s luxury retail business, has been negatively impacted by the Covid-related restrictions on “unnecessary” travel imposed by China in May. The masks and coronavirus tests were gone this year and Art Basel was back to relatively normal. But the crowds were a little thinner, the pace slower and the lunch lines at the sausage stands a little shorter than in the boom years of the 2000s and 2010. (According to Art Basel, some 93,000 visitors attended the fair in 2019.)
However, international collectors, particularly in Asia, have become familiar with buying and purchasing art online at significant price points. Today, Basel exhibitors flood their customers with online pre-fair offers, and as a result, many of the works in the stands are either pre-sold or temporarily reserved, pending confirmation by a collector or their advisor.
“I had four minutes to make a decision, and there were two others right behind me,” said New York and Florida-based adviser Kimberly Gould. She described buying the large, lavish 2003 canvas “New York Ice Cream” from pioneering black American abstract painter Ed Clark, which was featured in the influential touring museum show “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.” ‘ .” The Clark was offered for a non-negotiable $1.2 million at New York dealer Mnuchin’s booth. “I said, ‘OK, confirmed,'” added Gould. “Decisions have to be made so quickly.”
With the stock markets on the slide, some VIP visitors were reassured by Art Basel’s rock-solid reputation as the fair for modern and contemporary art in Europe.
“I feel people are concerned about the stock market’s decline,” said Emilie Pastor, a collector from Monaco. “They take more time and look for safe names. I go for more classical established artists, or unknowns.”
Pastor purchased “Ages (Jurassic),” a framed arrangement of 15 found photographs created by British artist Steve Bishop, depicting one of the Cabazon dinosaurs, a Southern California roadside attraction. This cost £15,000, or about $18,400, on the stand of London’s Carlos/Ishikawa gallery.
Pastor, who has been a regular visitor to Art Basel for 15 years, noted how works by younger, in-demand painters are increasingly prominent on the stands of established “blue-chip” galleries.
“You, blinded by M,” a 2022 quintessentially scenic study by Brooklyn-based artist Jenna Gribbon of her musician friend Mackenzie Scott, sold for $70,000—and could have been sold many times over—on the booth of LGDR, an international gallery that usually specializes in high-quality 20th-century art.
A super-sized close-up portrait of Gribbon of Scott in tears, “Fake cry”, also from 2022, on Massimo de Carlo’s booth was considered by many to be one of the standout works at Art Basel. Priced at $125,000, it was purchased for a UK-based collector during the first few hours of the fair.
While the subject of high demand in galleries, Gribbon has yet to make a breakthrough auction price, unlike the young Los Angeles-based painter Lucy Bull.
Last month, at the Sotheby’s “The Now” sale of works by “today’s most exciting artists,” one of Bull’s richly layered abstracts sold for $907,200, an auction record for the artist. Another painting, titled “21.57,” from 2021, was discreetly sold to a carefully selected buyer at Art Basel for $55,000 in the back room of Bull’s Los Angeles dealer, David Kordansky’s booth. How many potential buyers does the gallery have for Bull’s coveted paintings? “Too many to count,” said Kurt Mueller, Kordansky’s director of institutional relations.
“Everyone is looking for lot #1,” says Philip Hoffman, founder and chief executive of the Fine Art Group, a New York-based consultancy, referring to the rarely available works of young names that auction houses use to price their sales. which are a multiple of the amounts first paid in galleries.
“They say, ‘I’ll buy this, if you can get it to me,'” Hoffman added. “They think they can make a lot of money.”
But despite – or perhaps because of – the current highly speculative market for young art, top names continue to sell at Art Basel. A museum-quality rarity like Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ 1992 “Untitled (Tim Hotel),” one of 22 light-string sculptures the Cuban-American artist created, was sold by David Zwirner for $12.5 million to an Asian collection, aided by an exhibition of The work of Gonzalez-Torres is currently on display at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. But then the Lisson Gallery could also sell an art fair, such as a sculpture by Anish Kapoor, in this case the diamond-shaped piece “Non-Object Black” from 2018 for £750,000 (about $920,000).
After it was announced that Bourgeois’ 1996 22-foot-wide “Spider” steel sculpture had found a buyer for $40 million, Iwan Wirth, co-founder of the international mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, applauded.
“It’s super exciting,” he said. “This is the highest price ever paid for a female artist at Art Basel.”
No details were revealed about the buyer of the sculpture, which dramatically dominated the dealer’s booth. A similarly sized Bourgeois “Spider” sold at auction in 2019 for $32 million, but that was an edition in bronze.
“The ‘Spider’ is the only piece a non-civil collector would want to own,” Wirth said. “It’s one of the iconic sculptures of the 20th century.”
True enough. But given that $40 million sculptures aren’t usually the stuff of four-minute or even four-hour decisions, would that huge ticket purchase really have been confirmed at the fair? Chloe Kinsman, director of communications at Hauser & Wirth, said in an email: “The sale took place on the opening day of Art Basel, following discussions leading up to the show.”
Marc Spiegler, the global director of Art Basel, is now looking ahead to the first edition of the company’s “Paris+” fair in October. Spiegler thinks it will take a “major economic crash” to curb the enthusiasm of the relatively small cohort of super-wealthy collectors who currently rule the top of the art market. “People’s predictions that the pandemic would spell the end of art fairs have turned out to be radically wrong,” Spiegler said.
“You hear every other theory,” he added. “There is always money floating in the system.”