Despite Fears, Art Basel Performed
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Collectors from Russia, Europe, the Mideast, and beyond kept the market for contemporary art bubbling at the 39th edition of Art Basel, dealers said after the world’s largest art fair closed in Switzerland on Sunday.
“This was our best ever Art Basel,” London-based dealer Sadie Coles said in a telephone interview. “There were 20 to 50% fewer Americans at the fair, but that didn’t seem to matter.”
Like London’s Frieze Art Fair, Art Basel doesn’t issue sales figures. This year’s edition featured 300 exhibiting galleries and attracted 60,000 visitors, fair organizers said in an e-mailed statement. Many arrived in the 205 private jets that landed at the Basel-Mulhouse airport during the event, the e-mail said.
Dealers attributed the lower American attendance to a shortage of hotel rooms, the continuing credit squeeze, the absence of a Venice Biennale this year, and the fact that Art Basel moved the event forward to precede the arrival of the Euro 2008 soccer tournament in Switzerland.
“Buying from Europe was stronger than ever and I had new clients from Russia, the Ukraine, the Middle East, Poland, and Turkey,” Ms. Coles said. “I also saw people from India, Malaysia, and Singapore researching the prices with their art advisers. The market is so much broader now.”
Others were not so rosy in their outlook. “There was a real bifurcation taking place,” Todd Levin, the New York-based curator of hedge-fund manager Adam Sender’s art collection, said in a phone interview. “Major dealers who showed flashy, big-ticket works by established names were doing plenty of business, but I sensed it was patchier for smaller galleries representing younger artists.”
New collectors from emerging economies feel less comfortable with unknown names, Mr. Levin said, adding that he made no significant purchases during his trip to the fair.
Art Basel’s most important confirmed sales this year included a Lucian Freud painting, “Girl in Attic Doorway,” that fetched $12 million for Acquavella Galleries; an Alberto Giacometti sculpture that Geneva and New York gallery Jan Krugier sold for $14 million, and a Takashi Murakami sculpture that raised $8 million for Los Angeles dealer Blum & Poe.
