“We were all waiting. We were watching the auctions very intently, and they did well. We didn’t know how this was going to go,” Samanthe Rubell, the president of Pace, told ARTnews.

Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz, similarly, noted the art market’s “period of recalibration” and the atmosphere of caution these days. However, he told ARTnews that the energy of the crowd on Art Basel’s first day was evidence that “the market is very much still here, and very strong.”

Horowitz may not be far off. By the end of Tuesday, it was apparent that not only had the worst been averted, but there was enough sales activity to consider the day successful. Dealers told ARTnews with some surprise that, unlike previous years, more purchases were made in-person, rather via presale PDFs, suggesting a real desire to experience artworks in person and all that the fair and its surroundings have to offer.

Perhaps the most direct, and colorful, message about the market’s resilience was sent to press by Hauser & Wirth cofounder Iwan Wirth. “In spite of the ‘doom porn’ currently circulating in the art press and along gossip grapevines, we are very confident in the art market’s resilience and the first day of Art Basel has confirmed our perspective,” Wirth said in a statement.

“The advantage of the market returning to a more humane pace is that the most discerning international collectors are committing here and now to the very best of the best,” he continued.

There were certainly collectors galore taking advantage of that “more humane pace”—in other words, a time for good deals—including mega-collector Steve Cohen, who made the rounds with a colleague dressed in paraphernalia from the New York Mets, the baseball team Cohen bought in 2020. Despite Cohen’s prodigious art collection, he not a usual sight at the fair.

Other dealers, too, were seeing some excitement in the air. By afternoon, news spread through the crowded halls that David Zwirner gallery had sold a Joan Mitchell diptych titled Sunflowers (1990–91), for $20 million. (ARTnews has heard disputing reports from well-placed sources that the actual selling price was closer to $18 million.)

“I would call that a very strong fair,” Zwirner told ARTnews, before pointing to works throughout the booth repeatedly saying “sold.” 

He continued, “And it really happened today. People want to see [the works], experience, talk about them. So, it’s happening here, much more this year than last year.”

Zwirner noted that, in some cases, advisers came on behalf of collectors from all over the world and used FaceTime or messaging to close deals.

“There’s been a narrative out there that the art market is weak and I feel like, when we do well, other galleries do well,” he said. “I assume this will be a very successful fair for the galleries. If the art market is not performing well in the auction environment, that’s one problem, but it’s certainly performing well right here.”

Zwirner also sold Gerhard Richter’s 2016 Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting) for $6 million, and Yayoi Kusama’s giant Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart (2023) for $5 million in the fair’s Unlimited section.

For what it’s worth, secondary market markups seemed more reasonable than usual. At Gagosian’s booth, an Ed Ruscha painting, Radio 1, which last sold at Sotheby’s in May of last year for $2.1 million, was on offer for $2.8 million. Also at Gagosian, Andy Warhol’s Hammer & Sickle (1976), which last sold at Sotheby’s in 2017 for $5.5 million, was on offer for $8.5 million.

“Overall, most galleries are better off today than they were in 2019,” Alex Forbes, the vice-president of galleries and fairs at Artsy, told ARTnews, referring to the last pre-pandemic fair. “It’s always important for folks to zoom out and take in the longer trend, rather than just focusing on year to year. In my view the art market in particular tends to respond to uncertainty more so than, necessarily, the ups and downs of the S& P 500.”

The European Central Bank’s decision to cut interest rates last week, offers some of that needed sense of stability, according to Forbes. ”I’m optimistic in the long run, particularly as we’re coming out of maybe the period of peak anxiety around possible runaway inflation,” he said.

Despite the top line successes, many dealers told ARTnews of a “slow down” in sales at the fair, with dealers taking longer to close sales and having to “work harder” with their clients to get pieces sold.

A New York–based art adviser who wished to remain anonymous, told ARTnews that a market slump, and what she called “disastrous” auction sales, have given her access to excellent artworks that were out of reach a few years ago.

“They will call you up, and before they didn’t have the time, because they had like 50 people calling them,” she said. “They are doing a really good job. They are the only people in the art world who put their money where their mouth is, [and] they are working harder.” When asked, the adviser echoed others who said primary prices have not changed, or gone down, despite concerns they have gotten too high.

“We do the very best we can, and when things do get quieter, it’s always also a moment of opportunity of getting even closer to the relationships you have, and build more there,” Marc Payot, president and partner of Hauser & Wirth, told ARTnews, while nevertheless noting sales are taking more time at the fair.

Basel is the mega-gallery’s home turf, and it had one of the fair’s stronger presentations, including mostly works by women and two artists of color.

“We have always done well when the market was not as hot,” Payot said, because the slower pace allowed them to spend more time “building relationships” with clients and artists. Despite any market cooling, by day’s end, the gallery said it sold more works Tuesday than on the first day of the 2023 fair.

In terms of sales, Hauser & Wirth placed its most expensive work brought to the fair, Arshile Gorky’s, rare 1946–47 large work on paper, Untitled (Gray Drawing (Pastoral)), for $16 million. The gallery also sold Jenny Holzer’s red granite benches to an Asian museum for an undisclosed sum, Blinky Palermo’s Ohne Titel (Untitled), from 1975, for $4 million, and Louise Bourgeois’s Woman with Packages (1987–93) marble sculpture for $3.5 million. Coinciding with their museum-caliber Vilhelm Hammershøi show in their new gallery space in Basel, a 1906 painting by the Danish painter, depicting a woman pinning up her loose hair, was sold for an undisclosed amount.

At the time of writing, a large Philip Guston painting, and a serene, white, moonscape by Georgia O’Keeffe (both priced at undisclosed sums) had not sold.

“Almost everything was sold in-person today,” said Pace’s Rubell, calling the gallery’s first day at Basel “fantastic.”

She continued, “In years prior, there has been a good amount of pre-sales from previews, but this time we’re really trying to capture new interest, and this moment of suddenly engaging, and having that feedback and response—it’s really worked. The energy is very good.”

A sprawling Jean Dubuffet bench sculpture titled Banc-Salon, overhung with suspended kites above, was a welcoming attraction for visitors who stopped at Pace’s booth. By early afternoon, the gallery had sold three editions of a total of six, priced at €800,000 ($860,000) each, in collaboration with Galerie Lelong & Co. 

Pace also sold its star Agnes Martin painting, Untitled #20 (1974), which last sold at auction in 2012 for $2.43 million. Though they would not share the price, a source told ARTnews that the price was $14 million. In 2021, a similar work sold for $17 million at auction. First Nation artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, whom the gallery recently took on, also had her pieces sold: one for $250,000 and the other $220,000. Kngwarray had a retrospective at Australia’s National Gallery, and next summer will be featured at Tate Modern in London.

Thaddaeus Ropac, which historically does not pre-sell its booth, was humming early in the fair, with fast paced sales from the get-go. “Like the old days,” one spokesperson told ARTnews. The gallery sold a major Robert Rauschenberg work from 1985 for $3.85 million, several editions of a Georg Baselitz bronze sculpture for €2 million each, along with other works by the artist, priced between €1.2 million and €1.8 million.

At White Cube, a Julie Mehretu painting from 1999 went for $6.75 million; it was last seen at auction six years ago, when it sold for $2.5 million. A “monumental” Mark Bradford, titled Clowns Travel Through Wires (2013), also sold for $4.5 million. Jeff Wall’s The Storyteller (1986) sold for $2.85 million, along with works by David Hammons, Tracey Emin, Gabriel Orozco, Antony Gormley, Howardena Pindell, and others. At the time of writing, the Richard Hunt sculpture for $1.75 million and the Frank Bowling for $1.35 million were not listed as sold.

“It’s neither the end of the world nor is it speculation,” Belgian collector Alain Servais told ARTnews. But that can make for a lack of newsy buzz. In fact, Servais says pre-sales and a broader commercialization of the fair have helped sap the fair of its urgency so that, “the froth (or the buzz) is down, so the excess are down, but you’re still selling.” Now, “80 percent of the reason I go to Basel is for the networking,” he added.

Others felt differently. Wishing away the pre-selling model is “nostalgia,” Madrid-based art adviser and curator Eva Ruiz, a friend of Servais, told ARTnews. She said she sees excitement in the way people share what they’ve seen and talk about in the early moments of the fair. “I still see collectors excited to be there the first day,” despite having seen a PDF in advance. “They still want to rush to see the work, and to be the first to buy,” she said.

As to whether Art Basel Paris might soon eclipse the Swiss fair? Ruiz said other regional fairs remain limited to their geographic locations. Basel is the exception. “Art Basel, Basel is seen as the prized, first art fair to visit,” she said, before adding that there is “room” for two European fairs. Americans, in particular, she said, are happy to come back to Europe for the Paris fair.

On the fair’s upper floor, where mid-sized and smaller galleries have their booths, New York’s Canada gallery featured color- and material-rich abstractions by Joan Snyder, which have attracted a lot of attention. They sold and reserved her pieces for $180,000 and $190,000. The artist is enjoying some overdue attention in her 80s, selling above her estimates at auction and set for her first solo exhibition with Thaddaeus Ropac in November. Canada gallery also placed a 2013 painting by Joe Bradley for an undisclosed sum. Co-founder Phil Grauer agreed collectors were calculating and taking their time.

“They’ve got time, it’s not a rush,” he said. “But there’s still desire and interest and enthusiasm.”

Also stuck to Yao’s painting was a speech bubble that said, “No cheese, Gromit. Look at all this cruelty on RSPCA farms!” Animal Rising wrote in its social media post: “Find out why King Charles, patron of the RSPCA [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] should ask them to drop the Assured Scheme”, alongside a link to its website.

The RSPCA Assured Scheme is a program intended to raise welfare standards for farm animals throughout the United Kingdom. According to the RSPCA, farms, abattoirs, hatcheries, and haulers must be assessed and confirmed to have met its standards to remain in operation. A RSPCA Assured sticker is used on products to indicate their high quality.

However the Assured Scheme has faced scrutiny from animal rights activists over the exact criteria used to determine whether a farm passes inspection. Shortly before the vandalism, Animal Rising published an investigation into 45 RSPCA Assured farms, whose operations they described as “indefensible” 

In response to the vandalism, the RSPCA said in a statement: “We cannot condone illegal activity of any kind. Our staff and volunteers work extremely hard rescuing, caring for, and speaking up for animals. Animal Rising’s sustained activity is distracting from our focus on the work that really matters—helping thousands of animals every day.” 

According to the RSPCA, its Assured Scheme is “the best way to help farmed animals right now, while campaigning to change their lives in the future”. The statement added that “concerns about welfare on RSPCA Assured certified farms are taken extremely seriously and RSPCA Assured is acting swiftly to look into these allegations. After receiving the footage on Sunday morning, RSPCA Assured has launched an immediate, urgent investigation.”

Philip Mould told The Telegraph that he was “delighted to say there was absolutely no damage” to the portrait after the stickers were peeled off.

The first official portrait of King Charles III since his coronation last year, Yeo’s painting was unveiled at Buckingham Palace last month.

Bernini is renowned as a master of Baroque architecture, and the disappearance of the 18-page manuscript spurred an elaborate sting operation. The suspect allegedly met with Mauro Gambetti, head of administration at St. Peter’s Basilica, on May 27 under the belief that Gambetti was interested in buying the gilded document, which contains details of ornate features Bernini created to decorate the famous canopy rising above the basilica.

Gambetti, however, had secretly partnered with Vatican investigators to ensnare the suspect, who was reportedly accompanied by an unidentified accomplice. After handing the seller a €120,000 ($129,000) check in exchange for the manuscript, Vatican gendarmes arrived and arrested him.

The seller has been identified in Italian media reports as the art historian Alfio Maria Daniele Pergolizzi, who is believed to have stolen the manuscript from the archives of the Fabric of St. Peter’s, an institution established in the 16th century to manage the construction of the basilica and that now oversees restoration of the structure. Pergolizzi served as head of the communications department between 1995 and 2011. Per Reuters, he is being detained in a Vatican prison on charges of attempted extortion. 

Vatican News, the state’s official media channel, reported that Alessandro Diddi, promoter of justice for the Church, will decide this week whether to indict Pergolizzi.

But in 2002, when dealer Wendi Norris visited the British-born artist at her home in Mexico, Carrington was known primarily to Surrealism enthusiasts. One was the art historian Whitney Chadwick, who wrote what is now regarded as the most important book about female Surrealists (now in its second edition); Chadwick recommended that Norris seek out Carrington.

Norris, who was just getting her start as a dealer, followed Chadwick’s tip, expecting to spend just a few hours with the artist. She ended up chatting with Carrington all day—mostly about politics and literature, not art, as was Carrington’s preference. But because Norris did not initially come out of the art world, she brought a perspective to Carrington’s paintings that the artist prized.

“I don’t have an art history background. I have an economics background,” the San Francisco–based dealer told ARTnews, speaking by phone. “She really appreciated my way of viewing her paintings. She knew I was seeing something in a way that wasn’t through a scholarly lens, but in the way most people probably would.”

That first visit was the start of a friendship and business relationship between Norris and Carrington that lasted through the artist’s death in 2011, and continues to this day via her estate. In 2022, Norris’s gallery lent one of the five paintings by Carrington—Portrait of Madame Dupin (1949), featuring a lithe figure whose neck sprouts a flowering branch—that featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale. This week, her gallery will spotlight Carrington’s art once more, this time at Art Basel, the world’s most preeminent art fair, where Norris’s dealership is making its Swiss debut.

The booth will feature Portrait of Madame Dupin and other gems by Carrington, including one piece that includes text Carrington wrote backwards, so that it is only legible when a mirror is held to it. (“I think only Carrington and Leonardo da Vinci were able to do that,” Norris conjectured.) Dealers regularly bring older works to Art Basel, but these Carringtons are likely to be some of the most art historically important pieces at the fair this year.

Their presence in Norris’s booth testifies to her commitment to Surrealism, a movement which her gallery has quietly helped rewrite in the past decade. Although Norris’s gallery is not limited to Surrealism specifically, with contemporary artists such as Chitra Ganesh and María Magdalena Campos-Pons on her roster, it is shows for modernists such as Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paahlen, Alice Rahon, and Remedios Varo that have defined her programming. Norris has been exhibiting these artists for over a decade, but only recently have they begun appearing regularly in blockbuster exhibitions that reassess Surrealism, often by adding more women and non-European artists to the movement’s canon.

But, Norris said, “I didn’t start out wanting to represent Surrealists.” In fact, she didn’t start out in the art world at all.

While studying economics during the ’90s, she spent time abroad in Madrid, where she was given the option to take one class outside her chosen discipline. She chose to take an art history course, and as part of it, she visited the Prado. “I remember just standing in front of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” she recalled. “I had goosebumps.”

Though she had a strong attachment to art, Norris continued to pursue a business career, graduating in 1996 from Georgetown University with an MBA and soon taking a job as a Paris-based director of strategic planning for the biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb. After that, she worked for several years at Scale Eight, which she recalls as a “really geeky data storage company that was probably ahead of its time.”

Then the dot-com bubble burst, and Norris sought a new direction. “I decided I needed to change what I was doing and do something that I loved, and I just kind of came to it naturally,” Norris said of her transition to the art world. “I had no real idea about the art industry—and it is an industry. Thankfully, I had a business background where I analyzed industries, so I was able to get a sense of it. But it took a while.” She went on to open her eponymous gallery in 2002.

Gallerists are generally not fond of talking publicly about their businesses in percentages and numbers, but Norris credits her business background with making her comfortable with doing just that. In 2017, amid a wave of gallery closures, Norris made the decision to turn her space nomadic, staging shows beyond one base in San Francisco. In an Artsy op-ed, she said that “less than 10 percent” of the gallery’s sales were actually done in its space in San Francisco. “The data,” she wrote, “is not adding up for me or for my artists with respect to maintaining a stationary gallery space.”

It was a gamble, and Norris said it paid off. Through the offsite program, she has staged shows by Carrington and Varo in New York. The Carrington one, held in 2019, ended up in New York Times critic Roberta Smith’s list of the top art shows of the year. The Museum of Modern Art bought a Carrington painting from that show that now hangs in the institution’s Surrealism gallery.

Since the pandemic, however, most of Norris’s shows have been staged in San Francisco, whether at the gallery’s headquarters or elsewhere in the city. She said she is now more focused on “helping my artists realize their visions and meeting them where they are.”

And part of that project has been finding unusual forms of crossover between her Surrealists and the contemporary artists she represents.

Norris said that María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who recently had a Brooklyn Museum survey, joined the gallery in the first place because it had shown work by Remedios Varo, a Spanish-born Surrealist who made a name for herself in Mexico. Campos-Pons’s first show was with Norris’s gallery in 2017; the catalogue for her 2023 Brooklyn show ended up featuring a reproduction of a Varo painting within its first few pages.

Last year, Campos-Pons won a MacArthur “genius” award, a moment that Norris has continued to celebrate alongside the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale of the Carrington painting earlier this year. “I want to continue to be the catalyst for these momentous art moments for each and every one of my artists,” Norris said.

A spokesperson for Creo, which operates the contemporary art fair dedicated to photo-based works, digital art and new media, told ARTNews that market conditions and consultations with “our community of galleries and partners” led to the decision.

“Our priority is mounting a dynamic and high-quality event, so we feel it is best to hold the fair once market conditions improve,” the spokesperson said in an email. “In the meantime, we remain committed to PHOTOFAIRS and to its role as a vital platform and convenor for the photography and contemporary art community.”

The debut of Photofairs New York last year at the Javits Center included the participation of 56 galleries from over 20 cities around the world. VIP attendees included Whitney Museum curator Rujeko Hockley, Inditex chair Marta Ortega Pérez, actor Chris Rock, actress Jane Seymour, English artist Zoë Buckman, and photographer Joel Meyerowitz.

Photofairs New Yor was founded by Scott Gray, the founder and CEO of Creo Arts. Gray also founded Photofairs Shanghai and serves as CEO of exhibition consultancy firm Angus Montgomery Arts.

In a previous interview with ARTnews, Gray acknowledged that Covid-19 was one of the challenges to bringing a Photofair to New York, as well as finding the right venue in an increasingly packed international art fair calendar.

The spokesperson from Creo Arts confirmed to ARTnews that Photofairs Shanghai would still take place in 2025, after it held its most recent edition with 46 exhibitors at the Shanghai Exhibition Centre in April.

The 172,000-square-foot hall reserved for Unlimited is currently home to 76 projects and live performances by Seba Calfuqueo, Resto Pulfer, and Anna Uddenberg and others. Giovanni Carmine, director of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen in Switzerland, has curated this edition of Unlimited, which, for the first time ever, will also feature a People’s Pick award, selected by visitors themselves. A winner will be announced by the end of the week after the votes are tallied.

There is no shortage of old works that have returned to view here: Wu Tien-Chang’s Farewell, Spring and Autumn, which appeared in the Taiwanese Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale; Christo’s 2014 recreation of his 1963 wrapped Volkswagen; a 153-foot-long Keith Haring frieze from 1984; a reactivation of Carl Andre’s 1988 Körners Repose, consisting 50 floor units. But fear not, there are new works here, too.

Below, a look at some of the best and most impressive works on view in Art Basel’s Unlimited section.

THE HEADLINES

UNDER REVIEW. The Academy of Museum Motion Pictures in Los Angeles announced Monday that it will revise an exhibit on Hollywood Jewish History following backlash, as first reported in the New York Times. The exhibition, titled “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” opened on May 19, and was swiftly met with criticism from a group Jewish activists for its portrayal of Jewish studio founders, which some described as antisemitic. An open letter from United Jewish Writers, as reported by the Hollywood Reporter on Monday, protested the use of the words “tyrant,” “oppressive,” “womanizer” and “predator” in the show’s wall text. Some cultural critics pushed back against these detractors, noting that those descriptions were apt when applied to certain Hollywood figures who had mixed legacies. For its part, the museum has said in a statement that it “will be implementing the first set of changes immediately — they will allow us to tell these important stories without using phrasing that may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes.” 

GRAZE AND GAZE. The world’s largest art fair, Art Basel, is upon us, and the guides to must-see shows, guesses to what wares will be offered, and artist spotlights are rolling in. ARTnews’s Devorah Lauter journeyed to the bucolic outskirts of the Swiss city for a feature on the Basel Social Club, which she describes as an “art fair–cum–social gathering” set on 50 acres of farmland in Bruderholz, where cows graze between installations by Tomás Saraceno and David Medalla, among others. The Art Newspaper, meanwhile, took the party indoors, as its reporter attended the swanky dinner for the imminent art crowd at a one-off eatery at an old water reservoir in the heart of Basel. The menu included mussels served with tarragon and ginger, apparently.

THE DIGEST

A former Vatican employee has been arrested for trying to sell a manuscript by Gian Lorenzo Bernini that he allegedly stole from an official archive of the Holy See. The suspect was busted as part of a major sting operation. [The Art Newspaper]

Hundreds of protestors staged a die-in on the streets outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to protest the mass casualties in Gaza. Between the bodies, a monumental Palestinian flag was unfurled. [Al Jazeera]

In his sterling review of the exhibition “I Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker,” at the Norton Simon Museum, Christopher Knight likens the show to a balm for the “criminality, outrageous racism, gaslighting, antediluvian misogyny, pedestrian hatreds, cruel religiosities, [and] fascist violence” prevalent in American politics in recent years. This is the museum’s first presentation of all four of Goya’s main print series; it sounds like a must-see. [Los Angeles Times]

A new museum dedicated to TV sci-fi memorabilia is set for Santa Monica. Aptly called Sci-Fi World, the institution was conceived by the nonprofit called the New Starship Foundation, and boasts the support of Star Trek alumni William Shatner and George Takei. [Deadline] 

Archaeologists have unearthed around 19,000 artifacts dating to the Middle Stone Age, at a “once-in-a-decade” excavation site in the United Kingdom. [Newsweek]

The American Institute of Architects is under scrutiny after 22 past presidents of the AIA signed letters containing claims of misconduct against the organization’s executive vice president and chief executive officer, Lakisha Ann Woods. The letters accuse current leaders of “potential misspending, nepotism, cronyism, and the pursuit of personal gain.” [Bloomberg]

Oxford University will return a 500-year-old bronze sculpture of a Hindu poet and saint to India, the university’s Ashmolean Museum said. [AP News]

AY CARAMBA. The British Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, even the Louvre—each institution has been the target of a headline-dominating art heist, but are authorities overlooking an active thieving ring operating in plain sight, albeit in a humbler venue? Taco Bell—yes, the fast-food chain—has an art collection, and it’s been disappearing since at least 2015. In one incident at a Taco Bell in Westlake, Ohio, a thief pulled an acrylic painting, created by artist Mark T. Smith on commission and worth $800, right off the wall and walked out, to the shock of staff. (Though that location admittedly has bad luck: “It’s caught fire, they had somebody crash into it and it caught fire. That place is kind of jinxed,” Westlake police captain Guy Turner told Artnet.) The stolen paintings have been spotted for sale on online marketplaces, where a bundle of two or three could bring in thousands of dollars. When will the madness end? Justice for Taco Bell, we say. 

“They will go up to the artworks, and lick them, rub up against them. They are very curious,” said Roman Mathis, one of several farmer’s hosting the event. He said he had to work late into the nights leading up to opening day, repeatedly adjusting the fencing around the contemporary art installations, as weather conditions regularly shifted where and how works by over 150 artists, including performers, could be shown.

Following last-year’s widely acclaimed event in a former mayonnaise factory, BSC took a gamble this year in convening art and nature so literally in this outdoor venue, with works installed in fields, planted in forested nooks, or tucked inside barns, especially given Basel’s unpredictable weather. While severe storms have been averted thus far, the first day alone saw a mix of rain and shine, and by evening, as showers poured down on visitors, many were grumbling.

“The biggest challenge for us has been navigating with the changes in climate, and not knowing what fields we can use,” because of heavy rains, said Paris-based dealer Robbie Fitzpatrick, one of BSC’s co-founders. It has forced the team to play it by ear, and accept that “we don’t know, we’re flexible.”

In fact, two works that were to be displayed have been withdrawn due to rain, according to Fitzpatrick: Jean Tinguely’s tractor sculpture, Klamauk (1979), which can’t withstand “a drop of rain,” and another “high-value” work, Beni Bischof’s Made on Earth by Humans (2023), a souped-up DeLorean car (of Back to the Future fame).

But some artworks actually welcomed the inclement weather. The suspended circular drums in Margaret Raspé’s Regenrommein (Raindrums), 1988/2023, reverberate with sound them. It is one of the event’s poignant highlights. Since the 1960s, Raspé has addressed issues of climate and ecology through various mediums; a related film is also on view in the forest, along with videos by other artists.

Locating all the works on view is also part of the adventure for this year’s BSC, though daily tours are offered. An interactive map on the website informs visitors of where to wander. Though cell reception can be spotty, it’s a perfect excuse to get lost amid the undulating green fields and wildflowers.

As pieces were still being installed on opening day, part of the affair’s go-with-flow attitude, Fitzpatrick said, “People are asking me where the artworks are. The artworks are everywhere!”

It may not be an easy walk in the field, but it is an experience more than worth the journey that feels lightyears away from the commercial bustle of the Messeplatz, where Art Basel opens to VIPs on Tuesday morning. “This project is not an art fair, and it shouldn’t be confused with that, and the aim is really to present all of these different facets that comprise the ecosystem of our artistic community. The emphasis is really on the artists,” said Fitzpatrick.

Basel Social Club is technically a nonprofit event that is free to visit and includes participation from commercial galleries, artist-run projects, and foundations like the Pinault Collection and the Beyeler Foundation, who present a range of artistic practices and artists, from the very young to the historically established. Artists are given carte blanche, and commercial participants pay a flat fee of 2,500 Swiss Francs (around $2,788), while artist-run projects can participate for free. This year, the event has added a concert to its programming, headlined by Haddaway & Wolfram  on Wednesday night.

Young dealer Mischa Lustin of London’s Galerina said BSC “is a better fit for us because we have friendly relationships with the people organizing,” adding that the event is “a little more fun and a little less cringy” than a typical art fair. He described Galerina as “practically non-commercial,” with a marked rock ’n’ roll edge. On cue, he opened his leather jacket to show several “smuggled” artworks by Sarah Staton pinned to the garment’s inner lining. Jewel-like, mini sculptures made of gold-plated bronze, they are priced between 100 to 900 Swiss Francs ($111–$1,003).

Other memorable highlights include Himalayan artist Aqui Tami’s ephemeral, vulva-shaped sculpture made out of the muddy earth and titled Shrine for Boju. She said the work “honors our grandmother, the divine feminine presence” and later performed a ritual of thanks with the piece.

Cloud Canyons (1963/2016), the late artist David Medalla’s white, rain-proof sculpture of overflowing biodegradable soap columns was popular among the many visiting children who ran after the sudds as they blew away. Priced at about €250,000 ($268,000), the piece was brought by Berlin’s Mountains gallery. (The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles this week opens a major survey for Medalla, who died in 2020.)

On, Sunday, amid a sunny break in the clouds, Paulo Nazareth’s iconic performance Moinho de Vento/Windmill (2018) was re-enacted with 13 local immigrants come from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, kicking off BSC’s live programming. Dressed in white, the performers solemnly walked through the green fields while holding Dutch ceramic coffee grinders, which they silently ground, leaving a trail of beans behind. We were told the grounds are not harmful to the surrounding environment.

“Richard Serra once said, ‘Sidney prefers to hurry slowly,’ and we think that captured him perfectly,” Felsen’s family said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times, which first reported the news. 

Felsen, his fraternity brother Stanley Grinstein, and Kenneth Tyler founded Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited) in 1966. Since then, the workshop has collaborated with a range of renowned artists, among them John Baldessari, Philip Guston, and Man Ray.

Gemini’s output, as well as the friendly relations its founders fostered between printmakers and artists, ushered in a new era for the medium in the United States, effectively raising it to the status of painting and sculpture.

Josef Albers was the first artist invited to make a print; Felstein was known to mail postcards that acted as cold invitations to collaborate. Soon, Robert Rauschenberg followed, becoming one of the most prolific visitors to Gemini.

Rauschenberg’s Booster, from 1967, was the largest lithograph the artist had made as of then, and Claes Oldenburg’s Profile Airflow (1968) was Gemini’s first multiple edition. (Both publications were included in a 1991 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art dedicated to Gemini.) A 2010 Artforum review of a Rauschenberg show cited how significant the shop was to the artist and his peers, offering an environment that gave them “free rein and seemingly unlimited resources.”  

Under those conditions, Gemini became a clubhouse of sorts for Los Angeles’s emergent artist community—the workshop even reportedly hosted raucous all-nighters. And as its network expanded, Gemini became a landing pad for East Coast scenesters, too. Claudine Ise, writing for the Los Angeles Times in 1999, noted that Felsen made Gemini into “an arterial channel between the Los Angeles and New York art worlds.”

Felsen was born in Chicago in 1924, and moved with his family to Los Angeles as a teenager. A dapper dresser often spotted in a seeksucker suit and straw Panama hat, Felsen first worked as an accountant while taking painting and ceramics classes in the evenings at Chouinard Art Institute (now known as CalArts). 

He was an avid amateur photographer, too, and after founding Gemini would frequently take snapshots of famous artist at work. In 2003, he published a collection of photographs in the book The Artist Observed.

In 2016, to mark the 50th anniversary of Gemini, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hosted a survey exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., of noteworthy Gemini projects from 1966 to 2014, many of which had rarely been exhibited in their entirety. Titled “The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L.”, the show included historic pieces by Johns, Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella, as well as more recent series by Serra and Julie Mehretu.

An exhibition devoted to Gemini G.E.L.’s history is on view now at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Even as recognition mounted, friends and peers said Felsen remained unchanged, soft-spoken and dedicated to Gemini up to his death. “It was innocence,” Felsen told the Los Angeles Times in 2016. “We thought it was gonna be a hobby, that it would be fun to hang around the artists, maybe build up a collection.”

The election results among staff at the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) were unanimously in favor on June 6. Voting with UAW Local 2110 occurred a month after workers at the institution announced their intention to organize for a variety of issues including fair wages and better benefits.

AFAM was created in 1961 and changed its name from the Museum of Early American Folk Arts in 2001. The institution’s public galleries are located near the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in Manhattan, while its administrative offices, archives, and collections center are located in Long Island City, Queens. The museum’s collection of approximately 8,000 works of art from the United Stated and abroad, with the oldest examples from the turn of the eighteenth century. The union will include curatorial, retail, education, and information technology staff.

Other institutions located in New York City and across the Northeast that have unionized with UAW Local 2110 include the Dia Art Foundation, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

On June 6 and 7, hourly-wage employees at the Glenstone Museum held their own vote, joining Teamsters Local 639. A press statement said the group of 89 workers included all of the institution’s hourly guides, café workers, registration, grounds, engineering and maintenance, community engagement, and housekeeping staff. 

Glenstone staffers have called for livable wages, better benefits, and safer working conditions. A press statement on the vote said that many of the hourly workers had second jobs, part-time employees did not receive health care benefits, and that staff had been forced to work outdoors “during extreme heat and cold”.

A private museum, Glenstone was founded by billionaires Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales for the couple’s personal collection in 2006. The couple live across a pond from the institution’s galleries and have appeared on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors List since 2010. A expansion of the museum, designed by architect Thomas Phifer, was completed in 2018 at an estimated cost of $219 million.

According to the Washington Post, staffers faced union-busting strategies from museum leadership, including an appeal signed by Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales delivered to the homes of workers on June 3. The letter stated, “It is our sincere hope that you give due consideration to voting NO and keeping the Teamsters out of this special place we’ve built together.”

“We have said from the beginning of this process that we respect the right of our associates to decide whether to join a union,” the museum said in a statement to The Washington Post, which first reported the news of the union election results. “We accept the results of this election and intend to negotiate in good faith with the goal of achieving an equitable contract for the members of this new bargaining unit.”

“These workers defeated a sophisticated union-busting assault personally waged by some of the wealthiest people in America,” Local 639 president Bill Davis said in a statement. “I want to welcome them to our local union, and I look forward to helping them negotiate a first Teamsters contract.”