Art Basel Best Pratices

artnet news recently ran an interesting article on new Art Basel Art Market Principles and Best Practices. To read the full Art Basel best practices document, click HERE. The report is about 8 pages and has a best practices section followed by a legal compliance section

artnet news published some good commentary on the guidelines and believes the document will have an impact beyond Art Basel and impact the art market as a whole. It is worth while reading, and follow the source link for the full artnet news article.

artnet news reports

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT: On Friday, Art Basel released its Art Market Principles and Best Practices, a sleek document consisting of two separate sections: a set of suggested guidelines for the fair’s exhibitors, and a Legal Compliance Process governing “cases involving intentional criminal activity directly related to an Exhibitor’s professional art-market activities.”

In my eyes, the document also represents a manifesto with the possibility to impact at least some aspects of the larger industry. To see why, let’s take a typical Gray Market deep dive. Luckily, though, we don’t need to rely on any of those fang-toothed, light-emitting nightmare fish to find our way through, since Art Basel Global Director Marc Spiegler was willing to answer a few of my questions by phone over the weekend.

Here are my three main takeaways from our conversation:

1) Art Basel’s guidelines are less a reaction to the past than an attempt to get ahead of the future

According to Spiegler, the document is something that Art Basel has been working through for “a couple of years.” Aside from a coterie of dealers and art attorneys, the organization also sought input from a standing group of gallerists drawn from its Basel, Hong Kong, and Miami Beach selection committees that it uses “precisely for addressing these cross-fair, market-wide issues.”

In this case, the issues were forward-facing. The document is intended to be “about anticipating a potential problem” that hasn’t yet happened, not belatedly reacting to some past lapse that snuck up on Art Basel like a goddamn ninja during a moonless night. And one important component of protecting the organization’s neck is ensuring that its personnel remains focused largely on their specific areas of expertise.

“Part of it,” Spiegler said “is about understanding the context of the types of situations that could arise and not putting it on our [exhibitor] selection committee to deal with. It’s not fair to ask them to understand what’s happening in the legal system six time zones away” in order to render a decision on a dealer’s possible inclusion in Art Basel.

Much better to have trained legal experts parsing those issues, especially as the art market continues to expand beyond a tight, clubby fraternity of insiders to include more and more transactions between people who don’t already know each other.

2) It was essential (and exhausting) to get to simplicity

To me, the most pleasantly surprising aspect of the document is its conciseness. The Best Practice Guidelines (Section 1) clock in at a svelte 528 words. And while it’s comparatively longer at 2,300 words, the Legal Compliance Process (Section 2) is still light years away from Infinite Jest.

“It was a complicated thing to write,” Spiegler says, “but in the end it’s a relatively simple document.” The goal was to create “something that would apply for hundreds of galleries across dozens of countries” yet “wouldn’t cause galleries to have to rethink the fundamentals of how they do their business.”

The result, in my interpretation, is a set of guidelines that you can only be upset about if you’re actively trying to defraud people. Just consider item 1.5 in the Best Practice Guidelines:

1.5 Exhibitors shall only sell works that they are authorized by the owner to sell, and only on the terms approved by the owner.

I mean, if you’re a dealer, railing against suggestions like this would be as self-incriminating as bellowing, “He was a whore and I’m glad he’s dead!” while you’re on trial for murdering your spouse.

Furthermore, it’s important to emphasize that Section I of the document is indeed just a set of suggestions. As Spiegler explains, “The Best Practices are not in any way binding. They’re just an attempt to lay out what we think is a solid way to do business. No one is going to get rejected from Art Basel because of the way they do or don’t invoice”—at least, as long as their procedure doesn’t involve any actual criminal activity, in which case they would be shuttled over to the Legal Compliance board for review.

Source: artnet news