Up until last week, I’d long associated Switzerland with boredom and expense. Basel existed for me purely as stressful logistics conducted from afar.
Make sure this artwork gets added to the shipment list. Make sure it gets photographed in time for the preview. Reach out to the travel agent to get rooms at the Hotel Marthof. Make sure it’s an American-sized queen and not the smaller European double. Secure three dinner reservations for the gallery every night, including one pilgrimage to that restaurant over the German border that specializes in white asparagus. Yes, they’ll need a driver for that. And yes, please have the driver wait outside. And make sure to cancel everything 72 hours in advance, because believe me, the Swiss will charge you.
The extra fussiness wasn’t unwarranted. This is the most important week in the art world’s calendar. The market takes its temperature, and galleries stake their year.
A little girl in a white cotton dress, Banks Violette’s flaming disco ball, and the beginning of my Swiss conversion. Photos by Gabi Vidal-Irizarry, unless noted.
Of course, I secretly hoped that the galleries I worked at would bring me to Basel. But they didn’t. I was too busy drowning in minutiae to ever wonder what it might actually feel like.
This year, I was handed the keys to the castle. I had been granted access to Art Basel: the mother of all fairs, the Davos of the art world.
My pilgrimage to the mecca included an 18-hour layover in Madrid, on purpose. I loaded up on tortilla de patatas, a variety of crustaceans, and heirloom tomatoes drenched in olive oil and sea salt. Preparation for the overpriced Swiss meat slop to come.
Artist Henry Taylor poses with a Picasso at Restaurant Kronenhalle. I missed him by a day.
From there I hopped over to Zurich for a brief Art Weekend intermezzo. I saw people wearing Telfar en route to Restaurant Kronenhalle for some Picasso and vitello tonnato, which made me feel right at home. At Bernheim, a little girl in a white cotton dress giggled and ran circles barefoot around Banks Violette’s flaming disco ball, Untitled (Discoball), 2026. Around the corner at Galerie Peter Kilchmann, I digested lunch with Francis Alÿs’s pencil drawings of children’s hand games.
A tram took me to a handsome house on Witikonerstrasse for the Reena Spaulings group show opening-slash-barbecue. In the lush garden out back, I ate a purple radicchio risotto and my first sausage of the trip, marveled at the John Duff’s on the wall, and snapped a photo of Henrik Olesen’s crocodile, noting that I should find the other one at the Kunsthalle Zurich. Avery Singer gave a talk on poker players at Hauser & Wirth and I caught the end of the Nora Turato talk at Edition VFO.
I was coming around to Switzerland. The financial capital was lively and beautiful. I wasn’t bored at all. There’s a lake there, too, where the swans kiss. But it was time to go to Basel.
The barbecue at Reena Spaulings group show opening.
Summer Camp
The Knicks won the NBA Finals for the first time in 53 years. A downtown gallerist who prefers to remain unnamed sent me a video of a raucous crowd celebrating on my block. New York was on fire, and yet here I was in Basel. I consoled myself Monday morning with a hotel breakfast.
On my way to the muesli table at the Volkshaus, I clocked Art Basel’s global head of audience growth and intelligence, Elena Soboleva, and a camel-colored Birkin. I held the door for Swiss artist Tobias Schpitzing and Michella Bredahl lugging their Rimowa suitcases. They did not say thank you. The MVPs had descended.
Church bells rang as I moseyed over to the KBH.G for a meeting with Chloe Wise.
Cecilia Alemani and Massimiliano Gioni share cookies outside of the Liste opening.
Cecilia Alemani, seated on a Lime bike, handed a bag of cookies to her husband, Massimiliano Gioni, outside the VIP opening day of Liste, while Zero 10 curator and artist Trevor Paglen, decked out in a Swans T-shirt, took a phone call. I made a mental note to write a standalone column about his collection of band tees.
Inside, I spotted art advisors Rob McKenzie and Eleanore Cayre on the escalator. I spoke with people about what they liked about Liste and Basel.
Andrea Torrigilia, sales director at Gratin, at Liste. Notice her Wickelfisch in the right corner.
Freshman: Andrea Torrigilia, Gratin, New York, presenting a solo booth of works by Gerhardt Liebmann. “It feels less transactional than U.S. fairs, and there are certainly more institutions.” Two works were already reserved for a museum in Norway within an hour of the fair opening. She was looking forward to swimming in the Rhine. Luckily, the Liste organizers had given all the exhibitors a Wickelfisch, a waterproof bag shaped like a fish that you stuff your clothes into and use as a flotation device while you drift downstream.
Sophomore: Alec Petty, King’s Leap, New York. Having secured institutional placement for Nandi Loaf after last year’s “challenging” booth, this year the gallery was showing Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton, a French-Swiss duo making silkscreens from cinema stills. “The attention span is wider here,” Alec said. He had gone for a swim the day before.
Junior: Chris Sharp, Los Angeles, presenting wall-hung ceramics by Oakland-based duo CrossLypka. “It’s the best young fair if you’re an emerging gallery. Not sure about Asia, but the collectors are real and the institutions show up.” Sharp loves swimming and tries to do so every day, outside the Museum Tinguely.
Meanwhile, across the Messeplatz, the blue chips were frantically hanging their booths in preparation for the two-day preview.
The Trix rabbit that didn’t make the cut at the Gagosian booth. Jeff Koons’s Loopy (1999). Photo courtesy the artist and Gagosian. © Jeff Koons.
Gagosian swapped out Jeff Koons’s Loopy (1999), a nine-foot Trix Rabbit painting from his “Easyfun” series, for Picasso’s Portrait de femme assise dans un fauteuil (1941). Then Picasso for Bacon‘s Study from the Human Body: Figure in Movement (1982). And then put Picasso next to Bacon. The Koons, last sold at auction in 2010, for $5.1 million, was relegated to storage.
Art handlers snapped photos in between swaps. The directives were coming from above.
Gavin Brown, partner at Gladstone, sized up his competition at Michael Werner, paying multiple visits to the booth, or maybe he was just admiring that cuckoo Jörg Immendorff, which sold in the mid six figures the next day.
A booth in Art Basel’s main Galleries sector runs $85,000 to $125,000, before shipping, hotels, and dinner. Large galleries can spend upward of $400,000 for a fair that is open for six days. A booth at Liste runs $8,000 to $12,000, by comparison.
Drummer Greg Fox at Basel Social Club. I also heard double bass drumming at Janiva Ellis’s amazing exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel. Double bass drumming in Basel!
Now that I was in the Schloss, it hit me: Art Basel is summer camp. Did I pack the right things? Is this navy suit okay? Will I make friends forever? Dealers take a dip in the Rhine. Veal sausages are just fancy hot dogs. Attempting to close a sale to a Mugrabi at Renée isn’t so different from pining for a smooch at the camp social.
I fixed my eyes on a Tina Braegger painting of a Grateful Dead bear at Bodega von Strauss, then met up with friends at Katharina Hajek’s apartment show, “A Table of One’s Own.” Reece Cox alerted us to a performance he had planned with drummer Greg Fox. Berlin-based CFA artist Travis Macdonald explained New Zealand meat pies to me. Embarrassingly, I bumped into a Vladislav Markov painting on my way out. Katharina, I am so very sorry.
The Haegue Yang on the Mittlere Brücke.
Unlimited Potential
Waking up to news more galvanizing than the Knicks winning seemed unlikely. Yet it happened. Kanye West was in Basel. The Life of Pablo soundtracked my run through Art Basel’s Parcours (10k total, with a few detours), which I ended at the Haegue Yang on the Mittlere Brücke.
Emma Enderby, chief curator at KW Berlin, and I were twinning with Celine Trio bags outside the Unlimited opening. I said a quick hello and she was whisked away by Klara Liden.
Inside: Mary Ceruti closely inspected a Torkwase Dyson. Andrew Kreps and Max Falkenstein of Gladstone huddled. Michelle Kuo looked at the Isa Genzken. Father and son David and Lucas Zwirner were dwarfed by a stately Kusama. Still no Ye!
Max Falkenstein and Andrew Kreps at the Unlimited opening.
At Pace‘s Amber Bar party, held only days after SpaceX’s IPO minted a fresh crop of millionaires and made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, David Schrader eagerly anticipated the trickle-down effects.
“This could be amazing for the art market,” mused Schrader, partner in Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries, the secondary-market venture launched last December with Pace and Emmanuel Di Donna. “So many people I know made five to ten million dollars.”
Remember when Superblue was called PaceX? (The troubled immersive-art venture rebranded as Superblue at Laurene Powell Jobs‘s behest.)
Enough is enough.
Over a dessert fashioned to look like Maurizio Cattelan’s banana, Matheus Yehudi Hollander (formerly at Mendes Wood DM, now at Yehudi Hollander-Pappi) discussed mounting a James Lee Byars exhibition in Brazil.
We headed upstairs to see DJ James Massiah (one half of Babyfather, one of my favorite musical projects). There, I saw a sight I will never forget: former Art Basel director Marc Spiegler gyrating to Beenie Man. According to Massiah, whom I sat next to at Lily’s a few days later, Spiegler came up to him after the set to compliment him on the selection. Apparently he’s a big Jamaican dancehall fan.
Emma Enderby, director of the KW Berlin.
Good Morning
The goonies were out. VIP day at Art Basel was in full swing.
Scott Rothkopf at Werner. Klaus in front of a Damien Hirst medicine cabinet at Gagosian. Hans Ulrich at TARQ Mumbai; it was the gallery’s first time at the fair. A pack of Pinault curators (Caroline Bourgeois, Emma Lavigne, Cyrus Goberville) inquired about a Selma Selman at ChertLüdde before heading to Chapter NY. Joe Sheftel took in Guston at Hauser. Ben Godsill texted furiously at Ropac.
And, weirdly, James Franco and Jared Leto were there, too, paying visits to the megas.
James Franco, full video up on my gram.
(I’d see Franco again that night at Basel Social Club, where he videotaped himself as Robin S. performed “Show Me Love,” flipping the camera to zoom into his own eye. He was accompanied by the ever-fascinated Magnus Resch, who created Shazam for art, an app called Magnus. I guess he’s his advisor?)
Artsy’s Casey Lesser alerted me to Arthur Jafa’s presence. I’d been meaning to ask him about the white cowboy mules I keep seeing him wear.
I compared the two very similar lavender Monika Baers at the neighboring Trautwein Herleth and Greene Naftali booths, got an espresso gelato, and embarked on my search.
On the way to the Gladstone booth, I bumped into Ebony Haynes and asked if she’d seen him.
“I just hopped off the phone with him,” she said. “AJ is in the building.”
AJ with the Rubells.
Ten thousand steps later, there he was, taking a selfie with Don and Mera Rubell. Now was my chance.
“These are Raf for Prada boots, off the rack,” Jafa said.
“But you have another pair that’s slightly different, mules, right?” I asked.
“Not mules, Mary Janes. Raf made those custom for me.”
“I just saw him outside.”
“Where? Oh, I guess I’m having dinner with him tonight.”
Enough about shoes. Let’s get back to the booths.
Marianne Boesky called this year “one of the stronger energies I can remember.” This was her 25th Basel. By the end of day one, she’d sold most of her hang, including a 1990s canvas by Mary Lovelace O’Neal, placed with a European museum for $1.5 million.
Rosza Farkas of Arcadia Missa was over the manufactured amusement and echo chamber of recent Basels. “Depth is back,” she declared.
CFA placed Dana Schutz’s The Health (2026) with a Lebanese foundation for $1 million (Tony, is this you?), while works by Travis Macdonald (whom I’d first met at Katharina Hajek’s salon and later danced with at DJ Marcelle’s set) found buyers in Australia, Cyprus, and the U.S.
“It was exciting to bring Hannah Hoffman back to Basel after her 10-year hiatus,” Bridget Donahue said. Hoffman Donahue, the bicoastal gallery formed last September by Donahue and Hoffman, marked its first Basel as a merged entity by placing works by Rochelle Feinstein with Swiss and German collectors.
By 4:30 p.m., my feet were destroyed. I limped to a gardening store and bought wellies two sizes too big, then paid my respects to Nick Doyle’s Human Resources at Basel Social Club, the Stems Gallery-presented bar where you spin a wheel to draw a fetish.
Wet Paint is thrilled to confirm that the work is heading to New York for a two-year run at a yet-to-open and yet-to-be-named interactive-art space on 29th Street, funded by Dutch pharmaceutical executive Laurens Kruidenier in collaboration with the museum advisory del Rio Byers. Kruidenier has decided that nothing at museums was fun enough.
Doyle poured me a drink called Sweat from a black Louboutin stiletto. He confessed it once belonged to Ariel Kliegerman, his liaison at Perrotin.
At a dinner hosted by art advisors Rachel Carr and Ranya Ghandour, several dealers admitted the fair felt sleepier than usual.
Bianca Censori (married to Kanye West) performs in front of Vanessa Beecroft’s Untitled (Izanami) at Unlimited.
A director at P.P.O.W. mentioned that she spent a lot of the preview days sitting down, an anomaly. Carr and Ghandour themselves had brought no clients to the fair. Come to think of it, I’d barely seen any collectors.
“Where were all the Americans?” Hollybush Gardens’ Lisa Panting asked forlornly. “Where was Glenn?”
They hate us when we’re there. They miss us when we’re not.
Sliders were passed at midnight at Gagosian’s annual Trois Rois party. At 2:30 a.m., Kanye and Bianca Censori waltzed in. To my surprise, the art world did not freak out.
Everyone simply glanced up, looked briefly, and went back to what they were doing.
