The global art market appeared to collectively sigh with relief as deep-pocketed collectors descended on Art Basel this week after two years of dwindling sales.
The world’s biggest contemporary art fair opens to the public on Thursday, but VIPs got an advance peak at the vast array of artworks for sale.
They range from 20th century masters like Pablo Picasso to today’s cutting-edge creations.
Photo: AP
Nearly 300 galleries representing more than 4,000 artists from around the world have put their best goods on display at the show, which has become unmissable for sellers and collectors alike.
“The mood is very, very strong,” enthused Art Basel director Marc Spiegler.
“There are great collectors here. Great artworks. There is a very good energy. Very good atmosphere,” he told AFP ahead of the public opening, adding that “sales are being made.”
Photo: AFP
That is good news for the global art market, which was last year valued at US$56.6 billion (50.5 billion euros) — down 11 percent from a year earlier, according to a study by Swiss banking giant UBS, the fair’s organizer.
It was down a full 17 percent compared to 2014, when the global art market reached its pinnacle value of US$68.2 billion, before geopolitical turbulence put the breaks on investors’ ebullience.
PRIVATE JETS
Photo: EPA
As a sign the pendulum may be swinging back in their favor, 116 private jets were expected at Basel airport on Tuesday when rich collectors descended on the show — 18 more than last year.
Galleries boasted numerous large sales in the first hours after their booths opened.
“We did a few sales around a million dollars,” Mathias Rastorfer, the head of the Gallery Gmurzynska, told AFP just an hour after the doors opened. Works by Fernand Leger, Wilfredo Lam and Roberto Matta were among those that had found new homes, he said.
Marc Glimcher, president of Pace Gallery, agreed that “Art Basel is fantastic this year... People are being very excited about the art they’re buying.”
His gallery sold about a quarter of its booth within the first hour, he told AFP, mainly pocketing checks in the US$100,000 to US$800,000 range.
And he said most of the multi-million-dollar pieces were already on reserve for museums, while he had numerous collectors vying for a US$6.5-million David Hockney.
Brett Gorvy of the new Levy Gorvy gallery also hailed the “fantastic energy” at the fair. Works were selling “very, very quickly,” including an Alberto Burri piece for US$4.5 million.
The gallery also had Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting Baby Boom on reserve, the asking price a smooth US$32 million.
MIDDLE MARKET STRUGGLING
But while the high-end galleries and the top artists are raking in sales, they acknowledge that the entire market is not faring as well.
“The top end, if you want to say the bluechips, have become so strong that it has in some ways disadvantaged the middle market,” Andreas Leventis, associate director at Lisson Gallery in London, told AFP.
This is because mid-level artists are “neither a sure thing or just affordable enough to be a viable risk, from a purely investment point of view,” he said.
Rastorfer agreed that there have been “some corrections in the contemporary middle section... I think they are having a harder time.”
But he said the dip in the market last year had a positive impact for “knowledge-driven” galleries.
When the market is booming and “everything is going up, you don’t need much expertise. It just goes up,” he pointed out.
But when times are a bit more challenging, “you go to a gallery like us, because we focus on expertise and knowledge,” he said.
“So I’m not unhappy about the current development.”
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
RSS