Art Basel

Art Basel is a for-profit, privately owned and managed, international art fair staged annually in Basel (Switzerland), Miami Beach (US), Hong Kong and Paris. Art Basel provides a platform for galleries to show and sell their work to buyers, and works in collaboration with host cities' local institutions to help grow and develop art programs.

Art Basel

Industry	Art
Founded	1970; 55 years ago (1970) in Basel, Switzerland
Founder	Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt
Number of locations	4 (2024)
Products	Art fairs

History

Art Basel was started in 1970 by Basel gallerists Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt.^[1] In its inaugural year, the Basel show attracted more than 16,000 visitors who viewed work presented by 90 galleries from ten countries. 30 art publishers also participated.^[2][3]

Under the direction of Samuel Keller between 1999 and 2006, Art Basel created Art Unlimited, a section for monumental artworks in the field of sculpture, installations, video art and performances^[4] in the newly built Hall 1. The first curators in charge of this very large section were Simon Lamunière (2000–2011), Gianni Jetzer (2012–2019) followed by Giovanni Carmine (since 2021). Art Basel Miami Beach was first introduced in 2002 by the organizers of Art Miami.^[5][6] In 2007, Ocean Drive launched the Art Basel Magazine (with Sarah Harrelson as editor-in-chief).^[7] The same year, fair events in Russian started to appear.^[8]

In 2008, MCH Group, Angus Montgomery Arts and events organiser Tim Etchells launched Art HK, sparking investor interest in Hong Kong. MCH bought it out in 2013 to create Art Basel Hong Kong, held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.^[9] In 2015, Art Basel Hong Kong moved its office to Shui On Centre, with their new office designed by OPENUU.^[10]

In 2011, art collector Adam Lindemann wrote an essay on why he was NOT attending Art Basel that year by describing the excess of VIPs and their lavish events.^[11]

The 2019 show in Miami Beach saw Maurizio Cattelan's exhibition of the infamous Comedian art piece, a banana duct-taped to a wall and sold $120,000.^[12] All the 2020 Art Basel editions (Basel,^[13] Miami,^[14] Hong Kong^[15]) were cancelled.

Art Basel's 2022 expansion included Paris+ par Art Basel, replacing the long-standing FIAC art fair.^[16][17][18]

Description

Activities

Art Basel is a group of international annual art fairs focused on contemporary art. The fair is originally organized in Basel, Switzerland, and has been extended to Miami Beach (since 2002), Hong Kong (since 2013), and Paris (since 2022).

A committee of four dealers review art dealers' plans and select the winners in a four-day session several months ahead of each fair.^[19] As of 2019, the smallest galleries pay CHF 760 per square meter for a booth at Art Basel, and the largest galleries will pay CHF 905 per square meter. Prices rise relative to each additional square meter.^[20]

UBS is the lead partner of the fair in Basel since 1994, the lead partner of Art Basel Miami Beach since its inception in 2002, and the lead partner of Art Basel Hong Kong since its inception in 2013.^[21][22]

When compared to the Venice Biennale, Art Basel was described by Georgina Adam as "less curatorially ambitious, less sprawling, better focused, easier to navigate". The capacity to exhibit many large-scale works also makes Art Basel stand out in the art fair world.^[23]

Initiatives

• Art Basel Cities: Art Basel, the city's local art stakeholders and the city's officials sit together to develop an annual program in line with the city's mid- and long-term cultural development goals.^[24][25] This initiative was launched during the 2016 Hong Kong edition of Art Basel. The first partner city was Buenos Aires.^[26]
• BMW Art Journey Award: Reward to promising artists from the Discoveries sector in Hong Kong and the Positions sector in Miami Beach. The chosen artist can select the destination and go almost anywhere in the world to explore new ideas, discover new themes, and create new works. It was established by BMW and Art Basel in 2015.
• The Crowdfunding Initiative: Partnership between Kickstarter to provide visibility and generate support for projects (artist residencies, education programs, public installations, other innovative artistic projects) from non-profit organizations around the world.^[27]
• The Art Market: Annual global art market analysis. The first report was published in 2017.^[28]
• Executive-education program Collecting Contemporary Art in Hong Kong was launched by Art Basel, HKU SPACE Centre for Degree Programmes (CDP) and Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design (CSM).

Leadership

• 1991–1999: Lorenzo Rudolf^[29]
• 2000–2007: Sam Keller^[30]
• 2007–2008: Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Annette Schönholzer, Marc Spiegler
• 2008–2012: Annette Schönholzer, Marc Spiegler^[31]
• 2012–2022: Marc Spiegler^[32]
• since 2022: Noah Horowitz^[32]

Visits

Art Basel Exhibition in Hong Kong

Year	Location	Visitors	Exhibitors	Countries represented
1970	Basel[2][3]	16,000	90	10
1975	Basel	37,000	300	21
2006	Miami[33]		180
2019	Basel[34]	93,000	290	35
	Miami[35]	81,000	269	29
	Hong Kong[36]	88,000	242	35
2021	Basel[37]		273
	Hong Kong[38]		104
2022	Paris[17]		156

See also

• Museums in Basel

Further reading

• Franz Schultheis, Erwin Single, Stephan Egger, Thomas Mazzurana: When Art meets Money. Encounters at the Art Basel. Verlag Walther König, Cologne 2015. ISBN 978-3863357443.
• Art Basel | Year 45. JRP|Ringier, 2015. ISBN 978-3-03764-395-2.