Art Basel is the world's biggest contemporary art fair, where leading dealers compete to seduce wealthy collectors with their most expensive pieces. Anyone who is anyone was at this year's event – and so was Tom Horan
Into the vast exhibition centre in the Swiss town of Basel come thousands of people, striding forward with an iron purpose. The sun is shining and there is plenty inside that is fun and beautiful, but their faces do not betray even a hint of levity. The building is alive with intention, thick with the possibilities of beauty meeting money. They have gathered to do battle at the Olympic Games of modern artistic commerce – Art Basel, the biggest contemporary art fair in the world.
 |
Inside the doors, staff at a central helpdesk slip without a flicker from German to French to English, Italian, Spanish, Romansch. The fair is open to the public and attracts 50,000 visitors in five days, but the artworld elite is already equipped with its security passes, and marches past the queues for day tickets. Without a glance at the hyper-efficient Swiss signage that marks out the 270 stands, the dealers – or "gallerists", as they prefer – make their way to their temporary homes. Here, inside miniature empires rented at 427 Swiss francs (£195) per square metre, they await the arrival of Art Basel's ruling class – the buyers.
The fair may offer the chance to see an array of post-1900 artworks that would put virtually any gallery in the world to shame, but it is the intricate, courtly dance of a thousand discreet business deals that makes the event so gripping. Descending on escalators from a labyrinth of cordoned-off anterooms and hospitality bays on the upper floors, come the collectors. The antennae of the gallerists begin to quiver as they sense the arrival in their territory of a rather special kind of person. The word "rich" being considered in this milieu the height of vulgarity, they are known in the trade as "individuals of high net worth".
Although I am wearing my best – indeed, my only – suit, I sense that even the rooky dealers on the edges of the hall have me marked the second they see me as an individual of virtually no net worth. I make my way from stand to stand. For the most part the gallerists are too busy attending to the buyers to bother with people who have just come to look. In closely packed, open-sided booths that have none of the intimidatory element of walking into a commercial gallery, you are so close to the art you can smell it. You are left to examine it at your leisure – and watch the artworld at work.
I go up to the first floor, where the younger galleries are billeted. Art Basel sells itself on the quality of the work it attracts, and this is maintained through strict vetting of applicants. A gallery must have been dealing for at least three years to qualify, and then its work is assessed by the fair's seven-man committee. I decide to head for the stand of White Cube, the London gallery run by Jay Jopling. An extraordinary character, Jopling is dealer-in-chief to Damien Hirst and many of Brit Art's key figures, and son of Lord Jopling, a former minister for agriculture. Before I can get there, however, I'm stopped in my tracks by four enormous basketball players on the far side of the floor.
The stunning series of manipulated colour photographs The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is at the stand of a New York gallery called The Project. The artist, Paul Pfeiffer, has taken action shots from big games and removed the hoop, the ball and all but a single, peripheral player. In turn, this player's uniform has been stripped of numbers, names, sponsors. The lone figure stands frozen and exposed in front of 20,000 cheering spectators. The effect is eerie. "Has there been any interest in the basketball images?" I ask Jenny Liu, the gallerist. She pulls on her cigarette. "They're sold," she says, "and we're in a quiet spot. It's Siberia out here, baby."
From the corner of my eye I catch sight of dismembered body parts hanging from a tree, being eaten by maggots and snails. It's the Chapman brothers' Sex II, for sale at White Cube. Of basketball-playing proportions himself, Jopling in full dealer mode is a compelling sight. He towers over a pair of fortysomething American women, whose haircuts alone have cost them the price of a Chapman brothers sketch. His signature heavy black glasses stand out like a logo for all of Brit Art, drawing crowds of people into the stand. Jopling reaches out a long arm and wraps it round the shoulders of his clients, enfolding them in a decade and a half of London art grooviness. It's irresistible.
 | |
Now he and the two Americans have me wedged in against the rotting flesh of Sex II. "Are you coming to the Bulgari dinner tomorrow night, Jay?" one asks him. "Dinners schminners," he says. "I can't be bothered." I decide that now is the moment to catch his eye and get a word with him, but his command of the room is imperious, and I am blotted out in favour of someone with more noughts in their current account. I decide to take a break and regroup. Being so close to so much contemporary art is having an odd effect. The intensity of all that human expression is unsettling. I slip away upstairs to the Collectors Lounge.
Basel is a drug town, the centre of the pharmaceutical industry, a global business second only to the arms trade in terms of profitability. It's home to many superb art galleries, built on its astronomical wealth. Up in the Collectors Lounge, the financial hierarchies that make up the town are starkly set out. At one end, the luxury jeweller Bulgari has its enclosure, for those with an eye for a luxury jewel. But pride of place goes to Art Basel's other sponsor, Swiss bank UBS. Its VIP enclosure is so exclusive that you can't even see into it. It's ringed off in a circle of ruched curtain that stops just short of the floor, like the one that hides the wizard in The Wizard of Oz.
As they are at the stands on the floors below, most people are smoking. A group of Catalans in their mid-fifties sits down at my table. They talk in dollars, euros and Swiss francs, pet their mobiles, sip at flutes of champagne. They're wondering whether to go to the "Conversations" tonight, the first of a series of discussion panels about burning issues in the art world. They nod at Sam Keller as he breezes through the room, his shaven head glinting.
Keller is the organiser of Art Basel, a dynamic and preternaturally charming Swiss of 37. People love Keller. He has a smile that says success. In a magazine interview available throughout the lounge he describes the qualities required to do his job: "To serve, to listen, to calculate, to moderate, to motivate, to communicate, to analyse, to criticise, to organise, to change, to set goals, to risk, and to take yourself not too serious."
I head down to the ground floor, where the biggest operators are sited, to ask a long-established British gallerist, David Juda, about what makes Art Basel special. Juda's gallery Annely Juda is one of only five that have shown at every fair in the event's 35-year history. He's on the Basel committee. "You can go to a fair like Arco in Madrid," he says, "and find twice as many people, but it's a bit like going to the Ideal Home Exhibition. Boyfriends and girlfriends wandering around and you're not sure if they're really looking at what's in front of them. At Basel people stare intently and they're very serious. This year is a big selling year. You can feel the buzz of people buying. You can tell, because you can see dealers smiling."
Jopling is certainly smiling. He's winding up a chat with another little knot of Brit Art buyers. Sex II is sold, for £450,000. This is his skill, to ease the qualms of buyers, to reassure them that their money is well spent on Jake and Dinos Chapman's astonishing 5ft painted brass vision of putrefaction. I step up to Jopling. "Could I have a few words, Jay?" I'm 6ft 2in, but he looms over me like a great larch. "What's this?" he says, staring at my notes. "'Dinners schminners'? You've been writing down my conversations." Disaster. I say maybe I should come back tomorrow. He tosses my business card into a thick notebook that contains 500 others.
 |
I feel dazed. It will soon be time for the "Conversation" and I need to go and change. This intense concentration of art makes huge demands on the imagination, drains your last drop of empathy, exerts an unnerving power. Some of it is breathtaking. The proximity you get to the works – Miró, Picasso, Dalí, Duchamp, Hockney, Warhol, Koons, Hirst – is quite unlike a museum exhibition. All distance is removed; history comes alive; you can feel the ghosts of the makers hovering around them. And beneath it all the incessant whisper: "Anything you see can be yours."
The "Conversations" panel is made up of international museum directors, and starry names. There's the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose enormous sun installation The Weather Project caught the public imagination at Tate Modern last year. Next to him sits the British architect Zaha Hadid, whose innovative projects are lauded rather more frequently than they are built. Hadid keeps turning away from her mic to point at accompanying slides, so all we hear are single phrases: "urban context", "spatial experiences", "aggregates", "typography". None the less, everyone cheers. Eliasson says something about chalk, and then: "How do you present presentation?" No one seems to know.
Then a row starts between an inflammatory German museum boss who has been smoking roll-ups and the chief curator of the Guggenheim in New York. Just as things are getting personal, the lights come up and it's time for a dinner of Louis Quatorzian opulence. The guest speakers throw slightly nervous glances around the room as the high-net-worthers buttonhole them. During the perfunctory disco, I make a run for it.
I take a taxi to the Kunsthalle, which I've heard is the destination after a hard day's culture commerce. You've got to meet Frank Cohen, someone says in the packed open-air courtyard, he's a heavyweight British buyer, fantastic collection – made millions out of wallpaper. The style magazine, I ask? No, the stuff you put on the bathroom wall. He's from Cheshire – had a chain of DIY shops in the North.
Cohen is the soul of affability, full of bonhomie and dry Mancunian one-liners, and hugely enthusiastic about art. He lost some of his collection of a thousand-plus pieces in the recent London warehouse fire. "There's an art fair every week of the bloody year," he says above the din, tugging on a bottle of beer. "And there's only so many modern artists churning out stuff to fill 'em. But Basel's the one. It's where all the dealers bring out the good stuff they've been keepin' back." I ask him what makes him spend his money on contemporary art. "I love it. It's the thing – it's got a sense of what's going on, right now, today, in the world. It's bloody modernity, i'n't it?"
At the end of the night, as Jopling and the international young gallerists let it all hang out at Le Plaza, a basement disco beneath the Swissotel, I think back to a fleeting moment I witnessed earlier in the day. I was passing a tiny private sideroom at the stand of New York giants Gagosian, the premier traders in the modern art game. I caught a glimpse of an old man, finalising his purchase of a deep blue Andy Warhol painting, frosted in a diamond glitter. The Warhol was so dazzling, so iridescent, that it seemed to pulse with life. Looking at the Warhol, the old man too looked alive, animated. This was what all those rich people were here for. They betrayed it in their eyes: they knew that cold, arid money was worth nothing in the end. They were here to strike one last deal, and trade it in for vials of pure human spirit – the finest works of art in the world.
沒有留言:
張貼留言