art basel :)
Christian Flierl for The New York Times
Contemporary work at Art Basel by Allan McCollum.
By CAROL VOGEL
PublishED: June 14, 2007BASEL, Switzerland, June 13 - "Is there anything left?" Anne Mosseri-Marlio asked as she surveyed the red dots beside many of the paintings in Paula Cooper's booth.
The doors to Art Basel, the annual contemporary art fair here, opened promptly at 11 a.m. Tuesday, and 10 minutes later Ms. Mosseri-Marlio, a collector from Basel, looked distraught. Works by artists like Kelley Walker, Sherrie Levine and Rudolf Stingel had already been sold.
Steven P. Henry, director of the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, seemed just as surprised. "People literally ran and were here by 11:01," he said.
There's nothing like competition. In this overheated market the collectors who lined up to be first through the door at this invitation-only opening day knew that if they spotted something they liked, there was no time to dillydally, or someone else would snap it up.
In the lexicon of modern and contemporary art fairs, collectors recognize Art Basel as the biggest and the best. By the time the fair ends on Sunday some 60,000 visitors will have flocked here to see an international array of some 300 galleries showing more than 2,000 artists. Many will also peruse art in the coinciding smaller art fairs and institutional exhibitions here.
But not everyone is upbeat. Dealers are complaining that it has become difficult to sell great works. Collectors are grumbling about the scarcity of top-quality art.
"There are some good things, but not as many as there used to be here," said Donald L. Bryant, a Manhattan collector and trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. "The market is so hot, and the demand is so great, it's getting harder to find great art."
Yet it's not just about shopping. There is a certain lifestyle involved, focused on a month of nonstop travel. Many of the collectors, curators and dealers here began the journey last week at the Venice Biennale. Some are headed to Germany, first to see the Documenta art fair in Kassel and then Sculpture Projects in M?nster. From there London beckons, with the Impressionist, modern and contemporary art auctions and a bevy of museum and gallery exhibitions.
Along the way are endless parties and many trips on private planes. Officials at NetJets, the private aviation company, said they expected to fly more than 200 planes into the Basel airport by the time the fair ends Sunday.
Watching people is part of the fun. Among those perusing the fair's booths Tuesday were the financier Henry Kravis and his wife, Marie-Jos?e, who is president of MoMA; the publishing magnate Peter Brant; the Baroness Marion Lambert and her husband, Baron Philippe, of the Belgian banking family; and Jennifer Stockman, president of the Guggenheim Museum. Museum directors were on hand, including Norman Rosenthal from the Royal Academy of Art in London and Glenn D. Lowry from MoMA. The artists Lucian Freud and Takashi Murakami were looking around too.
Irving Blum, a seasoned dealer and collector from Los Angeles who has sold several paintings at auction recently, saID: "If you're a collector, and you have something to sell, your first impulse is to go to the auction houses - not the dealers - because the prices they're getting are unimaginable. It makes it difficult for the dealers. They can hardly get to smell the material.
"But even though the fair is fairly thin this year, you can still find the odd thing."
Noticeable here are works by some of the same artists featured in the Venice Biennale. Andrea Rosen, a Chelsea dealer, represents David Altmejd, whose work occupies the entire Canadian pavilion in Venice. Taking center stage at her booth here is "Wood Clock," one of his fantastical sculptures. It includes a giant log, mirrors, a white plaster waterfall, moss and an array of fauna like owls and a peacock.
Donald Young, a Chicago dealer, is also taking advantage of the visibility the Biennale provides. Joshua Mosley, the Philadelphia multimedia artist he represents, had a large installation at the Biennale. So Mr. Young brought "A Vue," a 2004 video work by Mr. Mosley about a park ranger named Henry and a woman named Susan.
A Zen-inspired installation by the Korean-born artist Lee Ufan made its debut in Venice; several of his paintings are in booths here. The dealer Micheline Szwajcer from Antwerp, Belgium, for example, is showing an untitled 1994 painting, an all-white canvas adorned with one gray brush stroke.
One of the more striking booths belongs to Presenhuber, a Zurich gallery. Urs Fischer, the Swiss artist, designed the entire installation, which includes a series of cast aluminum and enamel doors. His work can be seen in Venice too, at an exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi.
With the highest-quality material hard to come by, some dealers are offering works they had squirreled away. Karsten Greve, with galleries in St. Moritz, Cologne, Paris and Milan, brought several Cy Twombly paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s. "When I bought one painting at auction 20 years ago for a record price of about $200,000, people thought I was a fool," Mr. Greve said. By Tuesday morning he had sold it for $1.5 million.
Art fairs help to gauge popular tastes, and dealers hungry for material often revisit artists who have gone out of fashion. A decade ago no one would have paid attention to the installation of Belgium street signs by Marcel Broodthaers adorning the booth of Michael Werner, a dealer in Cologne and New York. But by the afternoon of opening day they had all been sold.
"Michael has had them since 1969," said Gordon VeneKlasen, his partner. "He showed them at Mary Boone in New York in 1987, and nobody touched them. Now everyone wants to have them."
The international flavor of Art Basel is part of its attraction. Walking around the cavernous exhibition hall, one could hear German and French, Russian and Japanese.
"We held our first event in Russian," said Sam Keller, the fair's director. On Monday the Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and the Russian philosopher Boris Groys took part in a series of talks about various art world topics. "We had a translator," Mr. Keller said. "The Kabakovs live in the United States, and Mr. Groys lives in Germany. Yet they're Russians. It's a sign of the art world's globalization."
Buyers represented the global market too. By Tuesday evening William Acquavella, a New York dealer, said he had sold about 10 paintings by blue-chip masters like Magritte, Warhol, Mr. Freud and Mr. Twombly. "Eighty percent of the buyers were new people, the majority of them Europeans," he said. "It was a huge day."
Posted by artistscedarkey
at 9:22 PM EDT
cardboard/foamcore mike
This is a handcolored intaglio print by my friend Eva Pietzcker who runs the 'druckstelle' atelier in Berlin.
