After flirting for years, Art Basel Paris is officially upon us. What does it mean for the future of fair-dom? Plus: updates on a Diddy-collection mystery, a Warhol Marilyn whodunit, and more in this week’s column.
And then out of the house stepped Owen Wilson
Why was the artist-loving actor in the City of Light, hanging out in a seven-figure design-object-slash-art-domicile? Well that’s just the magic of Art Basel Paris. Even before stepping foot inside the main event—the global fair company’s first edition at its permanent home in the Grand Palais, the fulcrum point of a week that is now a vital part of the collecting-as-lifestyle global tour—there are celebrities doing art stuff.
At this moment, in this town, an art fair really seems to be seeping into the mainstream. Art Basel ads blanket the Métro stops on Line 1. Multiple Uber drivers googled “art basel paris tickets” on their phones while driving—eyes on the road, mon frere! All week, the city’s cultural offerings seemed logjammed and bustling, as if the surge in tourists never receded after the Olympics. In fact, a Paris resident told me that October in Paris is actually more crowded than it was during the summer games, when many Parisians retreated. Now everyone’s back and the art tourists are here too.
It was so crowded on Sunday afternoon that Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner coincidentally ended up at the same tiny room for lunch: Bar Vendôme, the posh spot nested inside the warren of luxury that is the Ritz Paris. A cold war went down while each party pretended the other wasn’t there. It was so crowded that, the following night, Zwirner actually teamed with a third mega-gallery, Hauser & Wirth, to do a joint dinner at Loulou to avoid making their clients choose between bashes. Both global powers have outposts in Paris, of course. The French capital has risen as a gallery hub in the years after Brexit and all of the foreigners who planted flags here. And it was so crowded that they all opened on the same night, Monday. Gagosian offered a Harold Ancart show of gigantic landscape paintings, Zwirner new paintings by Dana Schutz, and Hauser & Wirth paintings, sculpture, and video by Rashid Johnson. The latter was the most in-demand show in town, according to private dealers trying to get their hands on some for clients.
All the galleries took over a small strip of Avenue Montaigne. At a certain point in the evening, a mob had formed in front of the Takashi Murakami show at Perrotin—a group of fans were desperately seeking a selfie with the artist, one of the rare few who can spark a photo frenzy. But actually James Turrell whipped his fans into a similar fever right next door at Almine Rech, where he sat behind the desk and greeted gallery goers. White Cube had an opening next door, and I followed Eric Fischl and KAWS up the stairs to Skarstedt, where Per Skarstedt had a Warhol show up.
Upstairs, the collector and music industry vet Josh Abraham introduced me to a friend he had brought along on the gallery hopping: the actor and musician Hilary Duff.
“I’m here on a girls trip and I’m in Paris, and I wanted to make sure Josh shows me all the art,” she told me.
“They have hotels here, they have good restaurants, you can make a reservation, and that’s part of the whole experience,” said collector and dealer Adam Lindemann, who’s shown at various Art Basel fairs and bought from all of them.
Perhaps that’s why the Americans in Loro Piana ball caps and On sneakers seemed at times to outnumber the Europeans in designer loafers. Craig Robins, the Miami developer and collector who helped build the Design District, looked perfectly at ease sitting in a chair with Philomene Magers at the Sprüth Magers booth. The Rubells were there from Miami, and the Horts were there from New York. I spotted a quartet of museum directors—Melissa Chiu from the Hirshhorn, Jeremy Strick of the Nasher Sculpture Center, James Rondeau of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Max Hollein of The Met—all leading museum groups around. The NFL player turned collector Keith Rivers wasn’t just visiting for the fair; he’s fully moved to Paris.
And the actor Natalie Portman was casually taking in a long tour of the Mariane Ibrahim booth from the gallery’s namesake, before a dealer from a booth over grabbed me for an introduction.
““I’m really looking forward to getting to the Jeu de Paume, for the Tina Barney show,” Portman said, and she’s right to, because the Tina Barney show is really that amazing.
During the VIP opening day of the big fair, once I got past the Prouvé house, the $500 million renovation to the building really smacked me in the face, the fresh paint job popping and the golden banisters of the dome glistening in the light. Even James Murdoch, whose Lupa Systems has acquired a serious chunk of Basel’s parent company in the last few years, was spotted staring up at the ceilings of a palace so vast it looks almost fake, like AI-generated.
There’s been endless bickering about Art Basel Paris versus Frieze London, and Art Basel Paris versus the original Art Basel, and that line of inquiry kept the chattering classes busy at the opening of the fair. “This is going to bury Art Basel in Switzerland,” one adviser told me. “The idea of London being replaced is pretty ridiculous, the museum shows are better there,” said a collector. And so on.
But more relevant was the fact that right before our eyes, art works were selling for numbers that far eclipsed anything that went down in London, at least at the fair. Dealers brought serious stuff, and there was an appetite to buy. I saw collector Wendi Deng Murdoch and her adviser, the art dealer Xin Li, engaging in a chat with Jay Jopling at White Cube. A massive 2013 Julie Mehretu painting at the booth was eventually sold to another buyer to the tune of $9.5 million. (The gallery declined to comment on the purchaser’s identity.)
And multiple galleries reported sales in the seven figures, no small feat considering what’s said to be a soft 2024 art market. Among those artists that reached the million mark include Victor Man at Zwirner, Barbara Chase-Riboud and Mark Bradford at Hauser, Méret Oppenheim at Michael Werner, Howardena Pindell and Lucio Fontana at White Cube, Tom Wesselmann at Gagosian, Jonas Wood at Karma, and, per ARTnews, Alice Neel at Xavier Hufkens, to name a few.
Some big-ticket works remained unsold, at least by Friday. Just like it does at the Basel fair in Switzerland, Nahmad Contemporary brought serious stuff, impressive Picassos and Calders, though not all were for sale. Both Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth brought serious works by Philip Guston, and Zwirner had some works by gallery artist Gerhard Richter on the wall. Hauser was hoping that someone might be interested in acquiring a Louise Bourgeois Spider for $20 million—and found a buyer as of Thursday.
There is one work for sale in Paris that is certainly more expensive than all others—and it’s at the fair. Jean-Michel Basquiat made eight large-scale paintings in Modena Italy in 1982, and these works are among the most desired in the artist’s whole oeuvre. Ken Griffin bought one, Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, reportedly from Peter Brant a few years ago for more than $100 million, and others from the series are owned by Aby Rosen, the Nahmad family, and Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich sold one in 2002 that is now reportedly in a Swiss collection. And on Wednesday, Gagosian installed Untitled [Woman with Roman Torso (Venus)]—once (and perhaps still?) in the collector of dealer Bruno Bischofberger—at its Rue de Castiglione gallery.
And it is very much for sale. When asked for a price, a source at the gallery noted that Untitled [Woman with Roman Torso (Venus)] was one of the eight Modena works shown at the Fondation Beyeler last year, pointing out the exhibition was insured for $800 million, and that perhaps a math equation was called for—implying the cost was about $100 million.
The Basquiat was installed at the Gagosian space a stone’s throw from the Ritz, and after a few moments a camera crew showed up. Perhaps a head of state or a king was coming down from their suite and the news cameras wanted to get B-roll of them rolling into the Place Vendôme.
Nope. It was a major channel’s TV crew there to do a big feature on Gagosian, taking the art world in Paris to screens across America.
The Rundown
Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…As Diddy awaits trial after being indicted on, and pleading not guilty to, sex trafficking charges, the fate of his not-insignificant art holdings has sparked conversation in art adviser circles. A few weeks back we heard that Kerry James Marshall’s Past Times, which Diddy bought at Sotheby’s for a record $21.1 million, was being shopped around by an auction house, and then had found a buyer. But when we reached out to Diddy’s camp for a response, they emphatically denied that Diddy had sold it. On Tuesday in Paris I heard via another source that it had sold, via a different entity than before, for a price of $30 million. And then Artnet reported the sale Wednesday, also at $30 million. So we went back to Diddy’s camp to see if they had changed their statement, but they did not reply in time for publication.
…It’s been over two years since Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold to Larry Gagosian’s paddle at Christie’s for $195 million, and back in May 2022 we asked around about who the art world thinks Gagosian was bidding on behalf of, if he was in fact buying for a client. Several candidates emerged: Francois Pinault, Oprah Winfrey, David Geffen. (Jeff Bezos told us it wasn’t him.) But in the years since, the most expensive postwar artwork to ever sell has been hidden away…until now. VIP guests at the preview Tuesday for the massive, fun, and wildly successful Tom Wesselmann retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, “Pop Forever,” walked into a large gallery on the bottom floor to see Shot Sage Blue Marilyn smack dab in the middle of the room. The show has work by Wesselmann’s contemporaries as well as living artists responding to his work—but nobody expected this work to show up. It sure seemed like a big hint that Gagosian was bidding on behalf of Bernard Arnault, who’s son Alexandre was in the room a few rows back, studying the catalog. But when reached for comment, the Fondation Louis Vuitton said, “The work belongs to an American collection. The Fondation does not comment on who works from private collections belong to.” An American! The search continues.
…It’s an election year, which means that the Paris classic Harry’s New York Bar, the world’s greatest expat watering hole, is doing its presidential straw poll. They’ve been doing it for a century. You can only vote if you present the barkeep with an American passport, to make sure the French don’t rig the election. Don’t trust those polls at home, trust the one at Harry’s; it’s only been wrong three times in a 100 years. And as of Thursday, Kamala Harris was up on Donald Trump 63-58.
…We mentioned there was a Vanity Fair party, and what a party it was. Cohosted with Art Basel at the Paris institution Laurent and held on the eve of the fair opening, it was the official—and officially very fun—kickoff to the fair, and the start of a great Art Basel Paris tradition. There was also a secret bar! I wrote a party report that you can read right here.
…And while we’re logrolling for the home team, please go watch Anatomy of Lies, the Peacock docuseries based on Evgenia Peretz’s two-part Vanity Fair exposé about Grey’s Anatomy grifter Elisabeth Finch. Peretz also codirected the series and it is getting raves…What are you doing? Go watch it now!
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Nate Freeman