Strong Sales at Art Basel

The Telegraph has an update on the activity at Art Basel, and the sales appear to be both strong and deep. The estimates are for about 500 sales with an estimated sales price of $300 million. Sales ranging between $5,000 and $10 million. The article notes that by the end of the fair, the sales total could double.

The Telegraph reports

A sales bonanza in Basel Switzerland has left everyone agog at the normally invisible strength of the modern and contemporary art market outside the auction room. By the end of day two, the Art Market Monitor website had produced a list from various press sources of some 500 sales worth an estimated $300 million (£235 million), which is the equivalent of London’s Frieze week auctions.

Prices ranged from $10 million-plus works by brand name artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sigmar Polke, Philip Guston, Alberto Burri and Piero Manzoni, to small works by less familiar artists in the $5,000 range.

With three other days completed, later sale conclusions, and the private sales that take place in the seclusion of the upstairs viewing rooms - rentable by the hour for galleries whose clients don’t want their intended purchase to be seen by all and sundry - that figure could double. It is already being rumoured a $230 million Rothko not seen on a stand was sold at the fair.

The spree is being attributed to many factors – mostly preceded by the adjective "more". More confidence, more millionaires, more billionaires with more sophisticated (sceptics might say more gullible) taste, more Asian spending, more museum and institutional buying etc., to which I would add more sales information.

Until recently, to glean the quantity of sales being made you would have to work your way through the stands and ask. Only a small handful of journalists would do this, and the market followers would eagerly await their reports over the first few days. Now the fair has PR agencies which employ staff to do the leg work for the journalists.

One of the most remarkable stats was the 20 sales of Wolfgang Tillmans photographs at David Zwirner worth $1.2 million, followed by almost as many at Maureen Paley and others who exhibit his work. As I wrote last May, Tillmans prices at auction have been advancing ahead of gallery prices in response to exhibitions at Tate and the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, and these reported sales were the continuation of that.

The effect of these lists, apart from inflating the egos of the galleries concerned, is to inspire more confidence in Basel as a brand, not only as the biggest and best art fair in the world, but also the greatest challenge to the auction rooms that the dealers can muster.

My first port of call is usually the Unlimited section in a converted hangar for very large works and films – which gives the fair more of a biennale look. Sensing I might need something light-hearted to see me through the marathon, I headed for humorous American artist Rob Pruitt’s installation of lookalike photographs on canvas and was not disappointed.

It was laugh-out-loud time to see dealer Tony Shafrazi likened to Beethoven, and cringe time to see dealer Larry Gagosian compared to young hunk of a basketball player, Blake Griffin. Flattery gets you everywhere in the art world. It was not surprising to learn that the work sold immediately.

The $550,000 spend will provide endless entertainment for the buyer and their friends…or will it? How long does a joke last? Art Basel director, Marc Spiegler, who was likened to the drug dealer El Chapo, dismissed the work as "a one-liner".

Another quick-selling fun piece was Belgian artist David Claerbout’s "de-anthropomorphised" version of Disney’s cartoon, The Jungle Book, made in an edition of seven, two of which sold for a handy €90,000 each. A Christmas tree by Philippe Parreno – and it certainly felt like Christmas in Basel despite the 30 degrees temperature – sold for €1.2 million.

Missing from the press sales list was London’s Mayor Gallery, tucked into the corner of the fair that sold 46 works in two days, ranging from £6,000 to £240,000. Twenty of them were from the ongoing series of subtly different paintings of the same glass tumbler made at different times of day between 1993 and 2000 by Peter Dreher.

Another significant omission was the Lisson Gallery’s sale of a Delacroix-inspired carved wooden relief by Egyptian artist, Wael Shawky, to an American museum for around $200,000. Private collectors prefer his more standard puppets and animated films about the crusades, but this sale indicated how museums target less commercially popular examples of an artist’s work.

Nor was the action confined to the main fair. A short distance away, at the fair for younger galleries, Liste, business was also booming, but the fair doesn’t have the budget to pay PRs to research and promote sales.

As a random example, London gallery Southard Reid devoted its stand to recent Royal College of Art graduate, Prem Sahib, who is having a solo show at the Kunstverein Hamburg in July. Characterised by website Artspace last year as "provocative, transgressive chic" and "art to invest in", it quickly sold out at prices from £10,000 to £25,000.

Source: The Telegraph