What Does It Take to Keep Art Basel on Top?

0:00Art fairs don't begin and end in the first few hours any longer, and they haven't for some time. You know, it really takes the totality of a week. It takes several weeks after that for business to close. That is also to some degree a reflection of how the trade is evolving.

0:21Noah Horowitz:I'm Katya Kazekina, and this is The Art Angle.

0:31This week, the art world descends on Basel, a Swiss city on the Rhine River where the latest

0:37Noah Horowitz:edition of the world's most important modern and contemporary art fair is taking place. I'm talking about Art Basel, of course. Its 290 exhibitors include all the top galleries of the world. It's a place where you can see and buy museum-quality Picassos and Warhols next to still wet paint by emerging artists, though not as many of those lately. Major collectors like Donna Mira Rubella there, and so are celebrities like Kanye West and James Franco. At the center of it all is Noah Horowitz, Art Basel's CEO since 2022. Noah and I have known each other for years. I was an art market reporter, and he ran various art fairs, starting with the first online art fair called VIP in 2010.

1:26Noah Horowitz:In 2011, he became the executive director of the Armory Show in New York and remained in that role for almost four years, until 2015. He then advanced to Art Basel, becoming its head of the Americas, which put him in charge of Art Basel Miami Beach, the largest contemporary art fair in the United States. In 2021, Sotheby's hired Noah to lead his gallery and private dealer services worldwide. But he stayed for just a year before returning to Art Basel triumphantly as his chief executive. Noah is also the author of Art of the Deal, Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, a book that was published in 2011.

2:09Noah Horowitz:For many years, Art Basel ran three art fairs, the original one in Basel, second one in Miami Beach and a third one in Hong Kong. But in the last couple of years it added a fourth fair in Paris and just this year another one in Qatar raising questions about expansion model and sustainability. It also introduced a new platform 010 for digital art and the Art Basel awards. Noah and I discuss the changing art market, digital art, and the strain Art Fair's place on mid-tier galleries. Noah. Hey Katja. Hi, welcome to the Art Angle. Thank you for joining us here today. Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure.

3:00I wanted to ask you, where are you actually? I'm in New York. I fly out to Basel tomorrow evening. So your marathon starts tomorrow? Officially, yes. And we should tell our listeners that we are speaking less than a week until the opening of Art Basel. You know, I know you're here in New York, you haven't seen the floor yet, but what are you most excited about for this year's edition of Art Basel? Well, first of all, I mean, as ever, Basel holds a special place in our heart and our universe of things. Also, for me, and I think the industry, it really is the event. That's the event to end all events in our industry.

3:47You know, there's great anticipation this year. We're clearly coming out of a challenging cycle of the last few years. We'll talk more, I'm sure, about that. Also, the May season here in New York. But there's a lot of extraordinary things happening that have been lined up this year. In addition to the extraordinary museum shows, of which there are a number, we've introduced this year Basel Exclusives, which we're really excited about. We can talk about that in terms of working with the gallery community to hold back some really special works that can only be seen on site at the fair. This is the first year that Ruba Khatri will be curating Unlimited, which we're really excited about as well.

4:29Ruba's a New Yorker, as you know, at PS1 and been involved with Greater New York. She's opened a great fanfare here earlier this spring. Steffi Hessler, several years now into Parkour, which we're really excited about. Another New Yorker. Another New Yorker. and then we're also inaugurating 010 co-curated by Eli Scheinman who we've worked with since the inauguration of 010 in Miami Beach last December but co-curated with Trevor Paglin a fantastic artist also based here in New York lived in Berlin for many years also spent a lot of time in the Bay Area so there's a lot of new elements to the fair this year but of course you know big part of the focus and the driving force of Art Basel especially Art Basel and Basel is what happens in the main halls themselves and the 290 galleries from over 40 countries that'll be with us with over 20 new galleries that will be showing with us for the first time this year.

5:25So really across all sectors of the fair from early modern masters to new voices from the US, Europe, and globally, there's an extraordinary amount of amazing art on view from a lot of different positions and artists from all over the world. So we're, as ever, thrilled to host the art world at this critical moment, mid-June. It's definitely a B must-see event for the trade and for collectors. We will touch on some of the things that you've outlined later, but I want to ask you specifically for the market. Do you think there is a relationship, direct relationship between a strong auction season in May in New York and strong results in Basel in June?

6:12So I think there is a relationship, but I also think that one of the reasons, and we talk about this internally, that Basel in June, also for many years running Miami Beach in December, have established themselves as such strong fares is they also come a few weeks after these major auction and market moments. So I think that's really important structurally because it allows audiences and the market to show up with a real sense of where the market is at a moment in time. Collectors that have acquired things or in other instances, sold things either have money to deploy or redeploy back into the market.

6:53But there's a real sense of aligned pricing. There's an updated and renewed sense of what collectors are interested in and what's performing and what's perhaps a little softer. And I do think that that's one of the reasons that the Basel Fair for over 50 years now, but also the Miami moment at the end of the year, have established themselves as such fixtures within our industry at a global level. The market shows up, they're aligned, they're focused. And, you know, especially on the back of, you know, what was a strong season in New York in May, I think, you know, there's renewed confidence, focus, and anticipation heading into the fair this year, notwithstanding, of course, the Venice Biennial, which historically has also been an important draw and magnetic moment to draw audiences, curators, collectors, and those through Basel in June and then off to Venice either before or after.

7:49See in Venice, buy in Basel, right? As they say. You betcha. I love how you guys outlined like a whole section so conveniently of so many artists that are showing in Venice. You have them listed one by one on your website. It was very useful for an art journalist for sure. But let me ask you more specifically, you know, let's get a little bit more granular here. Last year, coming out of Basel, it kind of opened the floodgates of just bad news for galleries, Tim Blum closed, and then it just was on and on and on and on. Just a tough, very, very tough stretch. Hopefully, it will be much stronger.

8:31Basel, obviously. But, you know, the emerging segment of the market still hasn't recovered. The results in May, all the headlines were about the tippy, tippy top of the market. You know, we're talking about the biggest masterpieces, the Newhouse collection, Bob Nuchin's collection, Goodman, all of those works, many segments, lots of niches. And you have some of them on the trade floor. So I'm curious about how, you know, you're seeing this dynamic between emerging market that's still not out of the contraction fully and the top of the market that seems to have, again, like disconnected from the rest and is just soaring into the stratosphere.

9:13Like, what are we going to see in Basel? What are you hearing from your exhibitors, from collectors? Is there hesitation on the emerging art front? A lot of emerging galleries are also invested into exhibiting people who've been overlooked, who have history behind them. Everybody's adjusting. I think some people are trying different models, but the trajectory was very, very tough. So what are you hearing from your exhibitors and collectors? Like how are people positioning themselves for this upcoming edition of Art Basel? There are some noteworthy galleries clearly that have closed. I think the industry itself is going through a lot of growing pains that are well discussed.

9:54Cost pressures are real. the cost of moving art around the world, insuring, shipping, and so on and so forth is real. At the same time, we see some of these highlights coming through, especially at the high end of the market. I think there's going to be a lot of anticipation and expectation around the fair next week coming through the gallery community. There's a lot of people certainly on pins and needles. I've talked to a number of clients here in New York just in the last week, gauging interest and lining up sales already leading into the fair week. and I think there's a lot of anticipation.

10:26The detail is going to be read in actual fact next week when we're on the ground in Basel. There's a number of new voices, I said, coming in. I think we're seeing an uptick in confirmations, which is reassuring in terms of people reengaging, coming back to the fair. Again, I think the Venice moment plays into that. Perversely, I think not having a marquee artist representing the U.S. and the U.S. pavilion and is also to some degree beneficial for the Basel show week. How so? Well, we're seeing renewed interest, certainly from some folks in this part of the market that maybe didn't feel the urgent pressures to necessarily go to the opening week of Venice about a month ago and are now sort of scheduling and programming and coordinating their visits aligned with Basel in June.

11:14Right. So you're saying people are timing their visit to Basel around Venice because they didn't feel the necessity to come to the opening. I think that that's correct. Somebody told me just this week was like, the story to do would be like, who is coming from America? Because so many people are not coming. Is that what you hear? That's been the discussion for several years now. That's not in itself. Paris is so shining and wonderful and everybody wants to be in Paris. Well, they're different, but they're interrelated. And I've been saying this for some time now and I've had a number of interesting conversations as has Vincenzo, who leads the Flair platform, as have our directors and VIP team.

11:53And we are also hearing in parallel, which is very interesting, Paris is enigmatic, let's be very clear. In many ways, there's no greater city to look at, celebrate art. There's no greater building in many ways to look at art. I would say Rome. There are many, but Paris is certainly one of them. Definitely. But having said that, there are differences too. And it's a much more boutique fair, The city has a huge amount on offer, repeat visitations, how you get people and audiences and collectors in a fair environment, which is ultimately what we produce and what we're responsible to deliver on for our clients.

12:31You know, Paris is a different dynamic. And after several years as well, we're also hearing, which is interesting, from some very serious advisors, collectors, like desire of them, their clients, of coming back to Basel again to really have that connoisseur type experience. Several days in Switzerland, surrounded by art community and people that only want to talk about art, what they've seen in the halls, what great exhibitions they've seen, they're comparing notes over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And that experience is really, really important. It's fundamental to business happening. And the other thing that we can also say is true is that Basel, Switzerland is very unique in its ability to deliver that in a totally purified way.

13:20There's no better art trading floor, how it's set up, the floor, the private rooms, the whole structure is very conducive to trade. Yeah. And so I think coming out of a challenging cycle for several years now, with clear and very real challenges and high cost pressure, I think that there's also a green shoot around that experience, around the purity and uniqueness and substantivity of that thing. And I think we're hearing and seeing that as well, but the proof will be in the pudding. And we're speaking ahead of the fair. We can talk in another week and go through and see what we hear on the halls of the floor.

13:55The other thing as well that I'd say for several years now, Now, art fairs don't begin and end in the first few hours any longer. And they haven't for some time. You know, it really takes the totality of a week. It takes several weeks after that for business to close. That is also to some degree a reflection of how the trade is evolving. It's so fascinating. Yeah. I think it's very important to acknowledge that change, right? Because I feel like it's been a couple of years at least. It's really significant, right, in how galleries are approaching the sales just like for the morale. For years and years and years of my coverage, it was the first few hours and we wouldn't be standing there and counting all these sales, right?

14:37Like you said, it's no longer the cadence. And so I think it's just an important thing to just acknowledge that there is change that. And then another thing that I thought was interesting, just this time around, you've rolled out this new exclusive. and it's so funny in a sense that we need the structure right you need to impose the structure for galleries not to send everything out in pdfs and not to pre-sell everything that in itself is also like a huge change in how things used to be I mean we know each other for almost 20 years so I feel like we've seen a lot of changes but it's like we're going back to something that was very fundamental 15 years ago, right?

15:22And now you have to impose it again as a structural change. So I think there's a few things here. I'd say two things. One, we continuously think, rethink, adjust, fine-tune our platform on a day-to-day. With five fairs now and a number of new initiatives as well that happen during at and around those fairs, we have the ability to constantly have our ear to the ground, speak with clients, see what's working and adjust things in real time. Before directly touching on Basel Exclusives, I'd roll back to last summer as well, where we started looking at the Paris Fair coming out of this challenging summer and taking a more proactive role also in addressing a fundamental challenge in that fair, which is that there's this extraordinary demand, but the venue itself is appreciably smaller in terms of the size.

16:18And so we inaugurated Avant Premier, which was the first cut of invitations that we really worked hand in hand with the galleries to self-nominate clients. And I say that by way of example, because across the fair platform, as we look at how to adjust all the dials to where the market is, we are refining the way that we have done things historically, we're listening to our clients and we're trying to respond and adapt our platform to meet the needs of galleries, but also professional audiences, series collecting audiences, and a lot of the new audiences that are coming to the Art Basel platform.

16:56So Avant Premier was one, I think, ultimately very successful step in that direction in the fall. And when we started then looking at, you know, as the Basel cycle unfolded at the end of last year and this year, what else we could do with our flagship fair in Switzerland. In speaking to committee members and speaking to galleries and speaking to our clients, one thing is also becoming true is that there's already a trend that was happening organically within which a number of galleries were holding back truly extraordinary work from their previews and telling their clients that they're only going to bring this, that, or the other work onto their booth at the fair in Switzerland, especially.

17:44There are some secondary dealers doing this, but also primary or hybrid dealers. And a number of our key clients were finding success talking about the impact that this had in their conversations with clients of theirs and how they felt that was creating further traction and engagement. And so while for a number of years now, we've looked at what we can do with this, because it's a two-way street. As the industry and as the business has professionalized galleries, as they participate in more fairs, started de-risking by pre-selling and pre-offering. And at some stage, we've gotten to where we are now, where there's a normed pattern of how galleries promote their offering.

18:32and to some degree it's impacted or created a degree of urgency alignment around the fair where certain professionals, certain clients, certain end users feel that there's perhaps less urgency to show up on site because they already know what gallery ate. No bull rush. Well, these things all sort of play into each other. They do, they do. Why show up, right? Like why do you need to go if everything is delivered to you on a PDF? Like there's no urgency to go. There's plenty of reading within that. But Basel Exclusive was a way to recapture that. So it's really about building on what was happening already, but then doing it with a degree of specificity and intentionality to say, hey, you're showing the fair.

19:12You do not have to do this, by the way. But a number of your colleagues are doing this or similar already. And are you interested in withholding a work or a body of work and partaking? And it exceeded any reasonable expectation that we had set around 190 galleries in Basel next week are going to participate. And it's really exciting. And I think you're going to see a variety of things. You're going to see some extraordinary masterpiece, secondary market offerings. You're going to see certain artists that are highly in demand, exceptional new paintings or new sculptures by those artists that the galleries will pop out.

19:49But our hope is that this will create a degree of discovery, excitement, chatter in the period leading up to. And I've certainly talked to many people that are at dinners and whatnot, all asking each other what they're bringing, kind of constantly listening and refining. But hopefully it also creates a sense of discovery at the fair where on the opening day and the days to follow, people are really turning through the fair trying to find these extraordinary objects in addition to the normal ways that they've patterned navigating the halls of the show.

20:27I'm also very interested in talking about Zero Ten because it's like a whole new segment which premiered in Miami and it was really the talk of the fair. It was the most unexpected, surprising, provocative section. People talked about it. It really went viral with Beeple's robotic dogs running around with heads of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Beeple and Picasso and Warhol. And there was a lot more there. People sold a lot. It was, I think, very successful from my interviews and from other news reports. But there was really like a great sense of like, whoa, what is it? So weird, so new, really feels like it's a window into another community, another ecosystem that feels different from kind of more traditional art market ecosystem.

21:18This is the third iteration. You guys have done it also in Hong Kong and now you're introducing it in Basel. I would say Miami audience is very different from Art Basel. I was thinking about this 010 and how it would actually fit within Art Basel culturally. The list of participants who are doing it took me by surprise because it was House and Worth, Marion Goodman, Almin Resch, some of the biggest galleries in the world. It's clearly evolving. I don't know if it's a pivot or evolution. You know, if you can tell us a little bit about what's happening there. In its essence, Zero 10 is a new global initiative dedicated to art of the digital era, trying to put a hand on a circuit of practitioners, new gallerists collecting communities that over the last years have started bubbling up, let's say on the periphery of the core institutional art world that we more traditionally represent, let's say.

22:23And I think it's inarguable. There's been a lot of excitement, a lot of activity coming out of that corner, but it's for the most part been off to the side while the core institutional art world of galleries, museums, biennials, fairs, has marched in a certain direction on a whole. And 010 is really our acknowledgement that this is an evolving discussion, an evolving universe of things. And our great hope is that in introducing 010 across the platform, we can give visibility to a generation of artists who are actively practicing and increasingly i just read you know this morning big preview piece on rafiq anadol's dataland museum opening in la and it's really acknowledging that there is an incredibly important thing happening here and i think if you were to take a directional bet on on the future of artistic production you can't not acknowledge that the way that artists and practitioners use digital computer and increasingly inevitably AI-generated based technology to create work, but also not just to create work, but to inform the channels, distribution methods, and create touch points with new communities.

23:44Noah Horowitz:That is a really important direction of travel and critical in that journey because I don't want to overstate the uniqueness of the thing itself. We've had media-based art, new media art, various forms of conceptual film, time-based media. No part of that is unique to the current moment. But what is increasingly also the distinctive of many of the artists and practitioners and galleries that are part of the Zero 10 universe is that there is a highly dedicated community of collectors, buyers, sellers, as well as audiences that are looking to these types of artworks and aren't necessarily getting serviced in the core art market and art world context.

24:32And I think that's important as a business as we look at where things are happening and where we can create touch points and modes of connectivity to new practitioners, new communities to ensure that in the next years that we are meeting them where they are, so to speak. Because I think the risk in this fast evolving world, and we're seeing all sorts of institutions trying to figure this out in real time, is that if you don't meet that community in a genuine and proactive way, the risk is that it just passes you by. Also, on the other hand, there are a lot of artists that are strongly associated with galleries, museums, biennials, so on and so forth that you know have been up till now speaking to a fairly insular community of the art world cognizante and i think with zero ten we're also aspiring to create bridges between these communities so that artists from say rioji ikeda or um avery singer vera molnar like artists that are part of our world hito styrol is a great example that's going to be with us in basel that artists from that community have a crew line and a touch point with practitioners and others from a different community, and that there's a cross-pollinating element.

25:47So in Basel itself, whereas Miami and Hong Kong were mostly digitally native artists and galleries, some degree in isolation, you know, our goal in Basel was to lift it up, to work with Trevor and Eli to create these bridges, more material. And Trevor is an artist strongly associated with straddling these worlds and just was honored at the Guggenheim earlier this spring, the LG Award. He's a recipient of a MacArthur grant, somebody that to us, I think, has really done more than almost anybody to advance discourse and dialogue and mutual understandings around this line. And so in Basel, we've assembled 20 projects bridging the Marion Goodmans and the Halders of the world with Asprey Studios or Art Blocks and Fellowship and others that are only, you know, either just coming to us anew in Basel or only recently started participating in the Art Basel platform.

26:43Right, right. Now that makes sense because initially my understanding of this platform was it's kind of like what's happening in the digital culture, let's bring it into the fold. But this, just looking at the list, I haven't seen anything yet, but it seems like almost like how are major galleries participating in this digital culture? Because it's suddenly hot. Obviously, that's where the heat was in Miami. And maybe that's just how things are evolving from that perspective. But of course, it'll be very interesting to see how it actually plays out. I was in the Bay Area earlier this year for the Node Foundation opening in Palo Alto, which is a really exciting new foundation focused on these types of practices.

27:26I think we're going to see more substantive new foundations and exhibition platforms emerge around all this. We mentioned Rafiq's Dataland Museum that's opening this spring as well. There's a moment happening. You know, it's interesting. You wrote about all of this in a way, not specifically about digital art, but you wrote in your book, The Art of the Deal, which was published 2011, so many years ago. And you were looking at the video art, at the experiential art, and how these non-traditional art forms are being collected and valued and institutionalized. But in a way, you know, it seems like the digital art where it is now, it kind of follows that same historical trajectory.

28:09But with other art forms, it took many, many years, like decades to kind of come into the fold and to be accepted by the quote unquote traditional art world and art market. I've heard people say that the digital art economy is a hard fork on the traditional art economy. And so it kind of follows its own rules. And so these museums and these institutions that some of them were just mentioned, they are coming up so quickly at the same time as the whole medium, right, is being evaluated. Those bridges are being created. It's all happening in real time. Well, I think that that speaks to the speed and the immediacy of much of the thing itself, right?

28:53You know, you could look at earlier moments of conceptual or media-based art. You look at artists who said Xerox in the 60s and 70s and the group around Seth Siegel out. Then using new technology to question authorship, the hand of the artist, how it works, disseminate, and get reproduced. But what you didn't have at the time was a whole community of buyers, collectors, and people coming around and say Xerox in the same way that you're seeing now. Obviously, there was the huge hype and easing out, let's say, of the whole NFT bubble. But something's going to stick. And I think to get back to why we're doing this, I believe we have a duty as a leading institution, a leading voice in the market to move a new terrain and to welcome new practitioners, new audiences to continuously challenge ourselves and to continuously adjust our platform to meet new audiences increasingly where they are.