The Art Basel Vibe Shift

Welcome to Arts Radar, a monthly column by Marc Spiegler breaking down key developments in contemporary art and the wider worlds of design, music, cinema and television.

BASEL, Switzerland — As the art world’s dominant trade show for more than three decades — and the last major market event before the summer holidays — the original Art Basel fair functions as a bellwether for the sector’s financial performance. Its deroulement can also shift global art market sentiment, a critical factor in an industry shaped almost entirely by perception.

Coming into this year’s event, the indicators were unnerving. And yet, to the surprise of many insiders, by the end of Basel week the art world felt reinvigorated. (Full disclosure: I led Art Basel from 2007 to 2022). It wasn’t the sales clocked up by galleries — many remained challenged by the state of the market. But there was a sense of renewal in the ascent of new players, new platforms and new art forms.

The prologue was not promising. The auctions in New York a month earlier had featured a Giacometti statue that failed to find buyers at $70 million, and a Warhol “Electric Chair” estimated at $30 million that was pulled the day of the sale in anticipation of a similar catastrophe. Global markets continued to suffer from Trump’s unpredictable trade policy. Not only had many US collectors cancelled, but even a few major American art advisors had decided to forgo the trip. Why? Theories were flying thick over the cocktails at Zurich’s Kronenhalle bar, where the art world gathers en route to Basel.

Was it the broader malaise in the market or a generational wealth shift? Was it the dollar being down 10 percent against the Swiss franc, and not much better versus the euro? Was it cannibalisation by Art Basel Paris, whose host city offers better hotels, restaurants and shopping than Basel? Was geopolitics making collecting feel trivial — even immoral?

One of the few people predicting success was the inveterate optimist Marc Glimcher, CEO of Pace Gallery, who told Bloomberg in the run up to the fair: “We think some new data is going to come out of Basel. It’s going to be the place that will show that there’s new energy in the market.” Insiders laughed and insinuated that Glimcher was just talking his book.

The vibe shift started for me Monday afternoon, when I walked into Basel’s Liste Young Art fair, where for 30 years emerging galleries have started their Swiss journey hoping to one day enter Art Basel’s halls. At first, I thought it was just the change in architecture. The fair’s new director, Nikola Dietrich, had ditched the previous panopticon layout (better suited for a prison than for pulling patrons into stands). Walking Liste’s new map, the words of the late Hamburg collector and thinker Harald Falckenberg came to me: “Good markets make bad art, and bad markets make great art.” Galleries I had never heard of, from all over the world, had delivered strong work by equally fresh names.

Next came the opening of Unlimited, Art Basel’s space for large-scale works that transcend the usual fair booth. Power collectors from America and Asia were harder to spot. But the halls were anything but empty, offering hope on the eve of the main hall’s opening.

My next stop was the Basel Social Club, a free-admission selling exhibition launched in 2022 as a passion project by its organizers. First staged within an abandoned villa, where visitors could buy art (and hit the pool) until midnight, it then moved to the Thomy mayonnaise factory slated for redevelopment in 2023 and, last year, went to the countryside (with mixed reviews). This summer, the organisers landed in the former Basel HQ of the Vontobel Private Bank: three interconnected buildings, two minutes walk from the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Spread over the former bank’s offices, cellars, attics, stairways and corridors, the experience was chaotic and kaleidoscopic. Art world hierarchies exploded and collided. Historical figures such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Gilbert & George and Leonora Carrington were displayed in proximity to current stars such as Linder, Anthea Hamilton, Shinro Ohtake and Nan Goldin. Galleries from Art Basel displayed work alongside pieces from foreign art spaces few visitors knew. In the basement, there was a room where Korean artist Dahoon Nam fabricated Jeff Koons-style balloon dogs and sold them for 1 Swiss franc each, right next to works Alice Bucknell had rendered with video game engines. The only constraint that seemed to apply: quality, in the sense that almost all the work was good, sometimes even great.

Exploring the space, I stumbled into a barber shop, a tattoo parlor, Keen’s sauna-plus-cold-plunge wellness center and a clothing pop-up from Switzerland’s Tasoni. Was it a hot mess? Yes, intentionally. “You’ll probably never see it all — and that’s kind of the point!” said Basel Social Club co-founder Robbie Fitzpatrick.

The next morning, as Art Basel opened, the sense of newness continued with main-sector debuts such as China’s Beijing Commune and Magician Space, Prague’s Hunt Kastner and Osaka’s Third Gallery Aya, alongside the East End’s Emalin, Tribeca’s Chapter NY and the French-Egyptian gallerist François Ghebaly, with spaces in New York and Los Angeles. The quality of work was predominantly high: gallerists were pulling the smart down-market move of coming with their A game, rather than playing it safe.

As always, sales results were uneven. Many galleries rapidly announced sales of major works (often presold). Those who did less well had focused on the stalwart Basel patrons whose presence they felt was missing. Was it a record year? Obviously not. Was it a catastrophe? No.

After dinner that night, my former fair director muscle memory kicked in, so I swung by the bar at Les Trois Rois to check the mood after the pivotal first day, during which the majority of big deals happen. In the past, Tuesday night at the Trois Rois was like the Players Ball, with major collectors swirling between the top gallerists and advisors still looking to close deals before the opening-day energy subsided.

This was not that: the crowd was sparser, younger, thirstier, people still bobbing and weaving to claim their space in the artworld. On the terrace, Lucas Zwirner, son of David Zwirner, was sitting next to Caspar Jopling, nephew of White Cube founder Jay Jopling, both sounding very satisfied with their results — and totally confident that the act of collecting art was not somehow lost in translation for their own generation.

As I roamed the rest of the week, venturing far beyond the fair halls, what struck me most was the extent to which tech had infiltrated the art world. “There used to be this disdain for digital art, NFTs, work on chain, but now people in the art world seem more willing to take risks, to discover something new,” said crypto and Web3 investor Benny Gross, who sits on digital-art advisory committees for both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Toledo Museum of Art. “It feels like the barrier is finally eroding.” We toured “Bass,” the stunning Steve McQueen show at Schaulager, where the only elements were digitally-amplified sound and endless banks of LED lights, transforming the emptied Herzog and De Meuron building into perhaps the most powerful immersive-experiential art work ever made.

On Friday, my last full day in Basel, I dropped into the ArtMeta conference to watch JJ Charlesworth, the editor of Art Review, interview artists Hito Steyerl and Simon Denny, both represented by front-row Art Basel galleries, about creative authorship in the AI age. A few hours later I checked out Jordan Wolfson’s “Little Room” VR piece at the Fondation Beyeler, about which gimlet-eyed Artnet writer Kate Brown wrote: “Wolfson has brought us into a dissociation with our own bodies in the most visceral way... It cracks open a shell of psychic privacy you didn’t know you had.”

The next day, at Art Basel’s Digital Dialogues, I attended a talk with Kate Crawford, who along with artist Vladan Joler just won the Silver Lion at the Venice Architectural biennial for “Calculating Empires,” an 80-foot long dissection of technology’s often-corrosive influence on society. At first Crawford addressed the dark underside of AI, especially its environmental impact, pointing out that by 2030, generative AI will use as much electricity as the country of India. But she also struck positive chords, suggesting: “Rather than assuming technology is at the centre and we just have to tame it, we could decentre technology and say, ‘What kind of world do we want to live in?’ The core of designing how these things work is where artists can be really powerful.”

After that panel, I took one last swim in the Rhine, hit Keen’s cold plunge at Basel Social Club and went home, feeling wildly more optimistic about the future of the art world than when I arrived. Yes, this is a moment of creative destruction for the art market, which may emerge radically altered at the other end of the tunnel, but I left Basel feeling excited by the prospect of new players surfing the flux.

I wasn’t the only one. “Everybody was really nervous before Art Basel, because we live in an unprecedented global situation,” said Karolina Dankow of Zurich’s Karma International gallery. “But in Basel, it felt like people wanted to embrace the art world even harder.”

Meta’s Pyrrhic AI Win

In the ongoing war between AI and creatives, last week Meta defeated 13 authors — including Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Díaz and David Henry Hwang — who had sued the tech giant over the way its Llama AI was mining their texts. But Silvermen et al lost on a technical issue, and legal observers felt the judge was inviting reworked suits from other creators. Critically, the ruling dismissed Meta’s central argument: that paying people to mine their IP would impede society’s progress. “These products are expected to generate billions, even trillions of dollars for the companies that are developing them,” wrote US District Judge Vince Chhabria of San Francisco’s federal court. “If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it.”

Fake Bands, Fake Streams

The Velvet Sundown story that made waves in the entertainment industry last week started on Reddit, then hit the music sites. Although the “band” had only 1,533 Spotify followers, it had seemingly racked up 400,000 monthly listeners and showed up on playlists that made no sense, like “Vietnam War Music.” The more cyber-sleuths dug into the matter, the more likely it seemed a scam was afoot: a fake band using playlist hacks to get downloads as well as using bots to generate streaming revenues. The band’s faux profile featured a made up “Billboard” quote, a band pic that look like an AI version of Creed, and bio text that felt like AI describing AI, saying the the band’s music “feels like a hallucination you want to stay lost in.” How big an issue is this? Spotify hasn’t released numbers re AI-generated tracks, but French streamer Deezer — whose user base is 98 percent smaller than Spotify’s — revealed recently that 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks are uploaded daily.

What Else I’m Reading

Exhibition Execs Think ‘Traditional Moviegoing’ Has Less Than 20 Years [Variety]

New York to Welcome CANYON, a New Hub for Video, Sound and Performance Art [Hypebeast]

Jordan Wolfson’s New Virtual Reality Is Peak Body Horror [Artnet]

Charli XCX Pitches “It Girl” ‘Final Destination’ Film Starring Rachel Sennott, Jenna Ortega: “Just Hot People Getting Killed” [Hollywood Reporter]

Having led Art Basel from 2007 to 2022, Marc Spiegler now works on a portfolio of cultural-strategy projects. He is President of the Board of Directors of Superblue, works with the Luma Foundation, and serves on the boards of the ArtTech and Art Explora foundations. In addition to consulting for companies such as Prada Group, KEF Audio and Sanlorenzo, Spiegler has long been a Visiting Professor in cultural management at Università Bocconi in Milan and launched the Art Market Minds Academy, which just announced its Cultural Catalyst Project.