Sunshine and sales at Art Basel

Art Basel opened its 53rd Swiss edition to sunshine and sales with dealers pleased to see an influx of high-powered international visitors on the fair’s opening days. “We were pleasantly surprised by how much more active this year has been than last year. It is a stark contrast to the disappointing auctions that we just witnessed. There’s great material all around — it’s a big win for the galleries,” said David Zwirner. His high-volume early sales included Joan Mitchell’s “Untitled” (1959), a bold abstract with an asking price of $20mn, which sold to an unnamed, major European institution. 

Other mega-galleries similarly reported a raft of opening day sales, though observers say many were at lower price points than last year. Gagosian said that more than 40 works had sold, while Pace, Thaddaeus Ropac and David Kordansky also posted a high number of transactions early on.

This fair can be make or break for younger gallerists in sections that restrict them to just one artist but one incentive is the Baloise Art Prize, a collaboration with the insurance company since 1999. This gives SFr30,000 ($33,250) each to two emerging artists, whose work also goes into a museum collection, and was this year won by Sin Wai Kin (Soft Opening gallery) and Sky Hopinka (Broadway). Antonia Marsh, founder of Art Basel first-timer Soft Opening, was happy to report six further sales of editions of Sin’s films at the fair, for up to $29,000 each.

The overall mood was high but the uncertain global economic backdrop contributed to a more careful sales approach. At Jeffrey Deitch’s split-level booth, Andy Warhol’s silkscreen “Mao” (1973) is on offer for $10mn, having sold at auction for $14.5mn in 2015. “For certain artists, the market has been a bit too frothy and now it is down to a rational level. It’s nothing terrible, just the usual cycle,” Deitch said. Art Basel runs until Sunday.

Exhibitors at Design Miami/ Basel this week welcomed the news that the fair had found a spot to open in Paris in October, to coincide with Art Basel’s edition in the French capital (October 18-22). Originally slated for the Place de la Concorde last year, plans were stymied by the heightened security measures that were implemented in the wake of the chaotic Champions League football final in Paris last summer, confirms Jen Roberts, chief executive of Design Miami/.

The event will now be in the 18th-century L’hôtel de Maisons, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. “It will be incredible backdrop for a select group of galleries,” Roberts says, adding that she plans for up to 25 exhibitors.

The move seems a no-brainer for the event, which in Basel this week has 16 Parisian galleries out of just 24 exhibitors. They remain committed to showing in both cities. Design Miami/ is a sister fair to Art Basel whose owner, MCH Group, has a 4.75 per cent stake in its parent company, Design Commerce Technologies. 

“NFTs, what the hell?” asks Damien Hirst in the trailer for a new film that aims to demystify non-fungible tokens and charts their swift rise and fall from grace. The 101-minute documentary is co-produced by Josh Berger’s Battersea Pictures and Atomized Studios, and directed by David Shulman, of Basquiat: Rage to Riches fame. Other interviewees include Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, whose NFT sold for $69mn at Christie’s in 2021 and its buyer, Vignesh Sundaresan, who goes by Metakoven.

The arc of NFT:WTF? closely follows Hirst through his The Currency project, which offered a choice between an NFT and a physical work from a collection of 10,000 works. Running between July 2021 and October 2022, the project happened to map the NFT boom and bust. “We thought we were telling one story but ended up telling another, but the best documentaries seem to work that way,” Berger says. His film takes in the cryptocurrency collapse and the fallout of the FTX exchange as well as the multi-million hacking of Yuga Labs, parent company of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The positives of art NFTs also feature, notably the $1mn-plus raised in 30 seconds by Reli3f to support the people of Ukraine in 2022. 

The result of the Hirst project keeps NFT art in play, Berger says: 5,149 physical art works were picked and 4,851 remained as NFTs (including 1,000 that Hirst kept for himself). “NFTs are still getting traded, still getting minted, and people still want to collect things digitally,” Berger says.

London’s summer season of sales, which tends to lack supply after the megawatt sessions in New York in May, is shaping up nicely this year. This week, Sotheby’s announced that it will auction Gustav Klimt’s late “Dame mit Fächer” (1917-18) for about £65mn, the highest estimate ever put on a work offered in Europe. If it sells at that level (and its third-party guarantee makes that more likely), its price before fees would match the most expensive work sold in the UK capital, namely Giacometti’s “Walking Man I” (1960), which went for £65mn, including fees, in 2010. Exchange rates might scupper the official art records, though: these are measured in US dollars. Back in 2010, £65mn equated to $104mn; in June 2023 it translates to $80mn.

Offered in Sotheby’s evening sale on June 27, the square-format Klimt shows an unidentified woman in a kimono-style robe, surrounded by Chinese-influenced motifs, something that will likely appeal to art’s growing collector base in Asia. The work has been in the same family since 1994, when it was bought for $11.6mn with fees — declared a “whopping” price back then in the New York Times.

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter