Business As Usual at Art Basel

The world's most prestigious art fair returns in the post-covid era with a raft of new features – including NFTs in the main fair and a more diverse artist list in it's monumental exhibition, Art Unlimited.

Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy: Art Basel

Despite opening amidst the unprecedented horrors of the first war on European soil for over thirty years, Art Basel – the biggest commercial art world event of year – is carrying on as if very little's changed. With over 229 of the world’s most respected galleries from over forty different countries, the week is a busy festival of events, talks, openings and parties. The biggest, and by far the most anticipated of these is the opening of Art Unlimited, a huge and distinctive exhibition platform for Art Basel with an emphasis on monumental large-scale projects.

This year featured the work of more than 70 artists, including the work of the unsettling British artist, Marianna Simnett, the enormously popular German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans as well as the world-renowned German painter, Gerhard Richter. In a statement, the curator Giovanni Carmine, spoke about wanting this year’s Unlimited to be “intense… a polymorphous chorus of artistic voices, singing in protest against isolation, loneliness, and indifference.”

Yet, somehow, amidst all the strident statements and vast scale of the installations, it was the more introspective and intimate works that really shone through. Nowhere was that more in evidence than in the work of Jeanette Mundt, who’s room of stark self-portaits – juxtaposing art-historical images with half-nude selfies – was a raw and pointed exploration into the gendered gaze and the contemporary consumption of images.

Perhaps the most visually arresting work in the giant hall was by the New York-based artist Leonardo Drew, whose weathered, charred installation stretches out from the wall and falls in a chaotic heap into the main space. Art Unlimited was designed for installations like this, and beside it, Huang Yong Ping’s American, Kitchen and Chinese Cockroaches captures a pivotal moment in world history when President Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev met in Moscow at the American National Exhibition in 1959. With its giant cockroaches, the work highlights the material incursions of the West into Asia and Chinese life and demonstrates too the new and rapidly changing balance of power.

Huang Yong Ping’s American, Kitchen and Chinese Cockroaches. Courtesy: Art Basel

Despite barely being mentioned in Art Unlimited, the war and its implications dominated the press conference with fair director, Marc Spiegler, telling the assembled journalists that in this year’s edition, no Russian galleries have taken part. A result of there being longstanding changes in the country’s “state of affairs” rather than drastic measures taken recently by the admissions committee at the fair.

What has taken place, however, is a purge of all sanctioned individuals from the coveted collectors’ list. “We went through the VIP list and took them out based on sanctions and their involvement with Putin’s regime.” Some institutions and international fairs have gone so far as to refuse entries for Russian artists altogether; however, cutting “off their involvement because of their passport”, is something Art Basel is definitely not willing to do, says Spiegler.

Running parallel to Art Basel, the nearby Liste Art Fair, puts a focus on young galleries and emerging artists and includes two new Ukranian galleries at the expense of two Russian galleries who voluntarily made way. One of the galleries, The Naked Room from Kyiv will be exhibiting three Ukrainian artists. Since March, the gallery’s physical space has understandably been closed and business has been put on complete hold.

Leonardo Drew. Courtesy: Art Basel

Intriguingly, at the fair, some Congolese artists have minted some NFTs to challenge a well-known United States museum’s ownership of an indigenous sculpture. In response to a disagreement over its loan, the pair, part of the art collective CATPC, created the NFTs of a sculpture made in the Congo but owned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It is available now in the booth of KOW, a Berlin-based gallery, and costs roughly 0.2 Eth. All proceeds from the sale go directly back to CATPC who intend to use the money to buy back land in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The museum has launched a legal copyright claim, claiming that the actions of CATPC “violates our open access policy and is unacceptable and unprofessional”. The artists responded by saying: “We don’t want to deny it to the people of Richmond (Virginia). They can still have it, but we need it too.”

In addition, Tezos blockchain, had a small affiliated booth with Art Basel and desperately attempted to get persuade visitors to download QR codes and mint their own NFTs. Called The Live Generative Gallery, it was at least breaking new ground by showing the capabilities and versatility that comes with the blockchain and live minting; at the same time, its concept was a little cumbersome. In time, that will surely change and in the future we can expect to see an entirely new section of the prestigious fair given over entirely to the still unexplored possibilities of digital art.