Before the night was over, de Pury had whipped the art tribe into giddiness as he prodded the guests to give it up for the lots on offer: a sketch of any house by Rem Koolhaas, a visit with Andreas Gursky in his studio, a family album deconstructed and transformed by Baldessari. “We’re up to zirty thousand—you can bid against yourself!” de Pury joked at one point before bringing the hammer down on the winning buyer’s dinner plate.
Two days later he was among the influential players previewing Art Basel, the king of art fairs, hoping to get a jump on the action. Three hundred galleries were showing work by some 2,500 artists, an estimated $1.75 billion worth of art. “I’m the extended eyes of the collectors,” de Pury told me as we passed Naomi Campbell and Eli Broad, explaining that he sends JPEGs to prized collectors who prefer to stay home. Already, his mind was on Phillips’s first sale in Hong Kong, planned for 2012, the new buyers emerging from Asia, the Eastern Bloc, and Brazil, and on the growing inclination of the rich to look at art as a safe investment, not just a pleasure. Then, of course, there was art to see: He suggested that I check out the new silver paintings by Kassay and directed my attention to neobaroque busts by Barry X Ball, a 1996 black and white painting by Christopher Wool, and Wade Guyton’s 2011 Untitled, all the while texting furiously and greeting colleagues in many languages. “For some collectors, it’s when a work is new that it hits their radar,” he explained. “For others, when it hits one million.” I began to ask about his goals, but he held up his hand. “I never think in terms of goals,” he said. “You just have to be attuned to what’s being offered, to which artists are emerging. It’s the same with music: You have to follow it all. You can’t stop.”
