Basel, Switzerland — War is intensifying in Ukraine. Inventory is down 20%. Inflation has risen by more than 8%. The crypto economy is collapsing.
But back in the bubble of the international art world, wealthy people seem to be spending money, at least for now. Following the May bumper two-week series marquee auction in New York, which raised over $ 2.5 billion, collectors were looking for more desirable modern works in the 52nd edition. Art Basel Fair In Switzerland, open to VIP guests on Tuesday. The iconic “Spider” sculpture by artist Louise Bourgeois was announced at a price of $ 40 million, the largest of many high-value sales.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this was the first full-scale, face-to-face Art Basel fair held in Switzerland in the regular June slot since 2019. The slightly reduced edition, held last September, was hampered by unfamiliar dates and continuations of the Covid-19 limit.
“September was depressed” New York-based dealer Sean Kelly He said in an interview on the first floor of the main building where modern corridors are gathered. However, this year, he said, “Sales were strong.”
Kelly has been one of the 289 exhibitors at this year’s fair since 272 in 2021. “Almost” there are no Chinese collectors, Kelly added. There are some major buyers here. Within six hours of opening, Kelly achieved more than 20 sales in the $ 30,000 to $ 250,000 price range.
The fair, along with other luxury retailers in Europe, has been adversely affected by Covid. “Unnecessary” travel restrictions What China imposed in May. Masks and coronavirus tests are gone this year, and Art Basel has returned to a relatively normal state. However, the crowd was a bit thin, slow-paced, and the worst lunchtime lines were slightly shorter than in the boom years of the 2000s and 2010s. (A few 93,000 visitors According to Art Basel, we attended the fair in 2019. )
However, international collectors, especially in Asia, have become accustomed to working and buying art online at considerable price levels. Currently, Basel exhibitors are flooding their clients with online pre-fair offers, and as a result, many of the works in the booth are pre-sold or booked for a limited time, awaiting confirmation by collectors or advisors. ..
“I took four minutes to make the decision, and two people were waiting right behind me,” said a Newyork and Florida-based advisor. Kimberly Schooled.. She found out how she bought the big, luxurious 2003 canvas “New York Ice Cream” by pioneering African-American abstract painter Ed Clark, who starred in an influential tour museum show. I was explaining.Soul of a Nation: Art in the Black Power Era.. Clark was on sale at the New York dealer Mnuchin’s booth for an unnegotiable $ 1.2 million. “I said,’OK, I’ve confirmed,'” Gould added. “The decision needs to be made very quickly.”
With the stock market on the slide, some VIP visitors were reassured by Art Basel’s solid reputation as an outstanding trade fair for modern and contemporary art in Europe.
“People can feel concerned about the decline in the stock market,” said Emily Pastor, a collector based in Monaco. “They spend more time looking for safe names. Go looking for more classic established artists, or the unknown.”
The pastor purchased “Ages (Jurassic)”. This is a frame arrangement of 15 found photos created by British artist Steve Bishop, showing one of the Southern California roadside attractions, the Cabazon Dinosaurs. This cost £ 15,000, or about $ 18,400, at the booth at Gallery Carlos / Ishikawa in London.
A minister who has visited Art Basel regularly for the past 15 years has pointed out that the work of young and in-demand painters is becoming more and more prominent at the booths of the established “excellent” galleries.
Brooklyn-based artist Jenna Gribbon’s 2022 study, “You’re Blinded by M,” is $ 70,000, like a typical painting by musician girlfriend Mackenzie Scott. It has been sold and may have been sold many times. LGDRAn international gallery that usually specializes in high-end 20th century art.
A close-up portrait of Scott’s super-sized Gribbon, which also shed tears from 2022, at the booth “Fakecry” Massimode Carlo Recognized by many as one of Art Basel’s outstanding works. Priced at $ 125,000, it was purchased for UK-based collectors in the first few hours of the fair.
Although subject to intense demand in the gallery, unlike the young Los Angeles-based painter Lucy Bull, Gribbon has not yet set a game-changing auction price.
Last month, at The Now sale of Sotheby’s’s “Most Exciting Artists of the Day” work, one of Bull’s rich layered abstracts went on sale for the artist’s auction record of $ 907,200. Another painting, titled “21.57” from 2021, was carefully sold to art Basel’s select buyers for $ 55,000 in the back room of the booth of Bull’s Los Angeles dealer David Cordansky. .. How many buyers of Bull’s coveted paintings are in the gallery? “Too many to count,” said Kurt Mueller, head of institutional relations at Cordance Key.
Philip Hoffman, founder and chief executive officer of FineArt Group, a New York-based advisory firm, mentioned the rarely available work of the young name that auction houses use for their kickstarts: “Everyone Lots. I’m looking for No.1 “. Sold at a price that is a multiple of the amount originally paid at the gallery.
“They say,’If you can get it to me, I’ll buy this,'” Hoffman added. “They think they can make a lot of money.”
Still, despite the current highly speculative market for young art, or perhaps because of that, the names of the best-in-class companies continue to grow in Art Basel. Museum-class curiosities such as Felix Gonzalez Torres’ 1992 “Untitled (Tim Hotel)” are one of 22 lightstring sculptures created by a Cuban American artist and 1,250 in the Asian collection by David Zwillner. Sold for 10,000 dollars. Gonzalez Torres’ work is currently on display at the Bruce de Commerce in Paris. However, Lisson Gallery can also sell Anish Kapoor’s sculptural art fair staple, in this case the 2018 diamond-shaped work “Non-Object Black,” for £ 750,000.
Iwan Wirth, co-founder of the international megagallery Hauser & Wirth, rejoices after it was announced that a bourgeois 22-foot-wide steel “spider” sculpture built in 1996 found a buyer for $ 40 million. Did.
“It’s very exciting,” he said. “This is the highest price ever paid to a female artist in Art Basel.”
Details of the purchaser of the sculpture that dramatically dominated the dealer’s booth were not disclosed. A similarly sized bourgeois “Spider” was sold at auction for $ 32 million in 2019, but it was a bronze engraving.
“‘Spider’ is a dress that collectors other than the bourgeoisie want to own,” Worth said. “It is one of the iconic sculptures of the 20th century.”
It’s true enough. But given that $ 40 million sculptures tend not to be a four-minute, or even four-hour decision, was that huge purchase really confirmed at the fair? Chloe Kinsman, Communications Director at Hauser & Wirth, said in an email:
Mark Spiegre, Global Director of Art Basel, is looking forward to the first edition of the company’s “Paris +” fair in October. Spiegler believes a “major economic crisis” is needed to curb the enthusiasm of a relatively small cohort of ultra-high net worth collectors who are currently leading the top end of the art market. “People’s predictions that a pandemic will be the end of an art fair have proved to be fundamentally wrong,” Spiegler said.
“You hear all the different theories,” he added. “Money is always flowing around the system.”