Art Basel’s former director Samuel Keller explained that the event’s reputation began to take its current shape with the early involvement of artists Joseph Beuys and Henry Moore, who brought site-specific performances and works to the fair in the Seventies. “The mix between the artistic and the commercial seems to be in exciting balance,” Keller said.
“There’s a nonlinear, omnidirectional cultural energy that is part of the fair,” offered artist Doug Aitken, who has attended in the past with his European gallerist, Eva Presenhuber; this year he will participate in a program at Theater Basel curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and also featuring Matthew Barney, Olafur Eliasson and Pierre Huyghe. “Also, while I don’t think that exclusivity is necessarily a good thing, Basel has a sense of being curated. It weeds out the white noise. It’s like a museum experience.”
Despite the woeful economic climate in the real world, the evening at Broad’s art-filled Shangri-la had all the trappings of headier days. Cosponsor Cartier invited a bevy of its diamond-clad customers, and additional sponsorship from NetJets and UBS was a subtle reminder that only a year ago, private planes were an aspirational luxury, not a political liability. There was a slightly frantic edge to the merriment—as if a four-course Wolfgang Puck dinner including hand-formed mascarpone agnolotti with black winter truffles could jump-start a new bull market. In conversation, though, Art Basel codirector Marc Spiegler struck a more measured tone. The art market may be in retreat, he acknowledged, but it is not dead. Only two dealers who showed at Art Basel last year pulled out this year, he noted, and the programming around the fair, which opens June 10, will include a public conversation on “Institutions: A Time of Crisis—and Opportunity?”
Guests dined in another of the downstairs galleries, a narrow space hung with Close’s enormous photographs of artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Cindy Sherman—all of whom are represented in the Broad collection. Sherman’s Olympian likeness stared down from the head of one table, appearing coolly indifferent to the chatter beneath its nose.
Throughout the evening, Broad loomed almost as large. “Times are tough,” he allowed, when he rose to address his guests. “But we got a lot of great things in the early Nineties, which were also tough times. If you’re a real dyed-in-the-wool art collector, you may find it’s a pretty good time to buy.” (As if to prove his point, about two weeks later, Broad purchased a major work by hot L.A. artist Elliott Hundley.)
Another prominent L.A. collector at the dinner told friends that he has lately received out-of-the-blue calls from a couple of New York dealers offering choice works and volunteering that the galleries could be “flexible” on price. And a top museum administrator reported still another sign of the times: Galleries are not only being forced to cut costs by mounting fewer shows, they’re also chasing outstanding IOUs like black-clad bill collectors. Top clients, he explained, have been in the habit of taking home works with ridiculously lenient payment terms—as long as a year to settle an invoice. “Dealers are being much more diligent about collecting,” he said. On the other hand, at least one gallery owner refuses to trim his sails: Larry Gagosian, perhaps Broad’s single most important acquisition source, is in the process of nearly doubling the size of his Beverly Hills outpost, with the expansion being overseen by Richard Meier.
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