Canapés Next Time, Mr. Obrist
Basel Diary Day 4: The cookout comes to Basel and our intro to art hell
🚽 Read Day 3 of the Basel Diary here 🚽
🎎 Read Day 2 of the Basel Diary here 🎎
🐮 Read Day 1 of the Basel Diary here 🐮
The Basel Diary Series is daily reportage from the Basel art fairs from June 9th to June 18th for the Season 4 Episode 6 vertical. The gallery will be exhibiting at Basel Social Club from June 9 - 16.
Nine a.m. meetings in the art world are a rarity, so I had no need to do it to myself. But it was important — with a gallerist for Minor Attractions — so I dutifully woke up and showered, still bleary eyed from my late night. I just about managed a cup of coffee before I had to smile and wave on camera, pretending I’d been up for hours. While it was mercifully short, I was now buzzing with the equivalent of four espressos in me, and spent the rest of the morning sending emails I was already behind on.
Like many in Basel, I’ve cobbled together my accommodation, spending a few days with friends and the rest in a private room at an AirBnB. But, of course, everything is prohibitively expensive. Even the private room is being shared among three of us, the last arrivals shunted to an air mattress. It’s hardly glamorous but still holds a kind of “boys on tour” appeal; sleeping arrangements so awful that you keep the party going if only to avoid them. Taken up in a professional capacity, however, and maybe a bit of the sheen is lost. I’ve got maybe one more year of this before I just stick to the hotel (or get a real job). In any case, my new host is kind and assuring in a milquetoast Swiss sort of way, and satisfied that he wouldn’t try to steal my things, I went to Liste.
The fair looks the same as always. With its circular format, there’s only going to be so much variation. Still, the booths are consistently strong, and it’s easy to see why sales have reportedly picked up. Even if there was more painting than I had anticipated, most booths sat nicely within “ambitious-but-legible,” and I could count on one hand the number of booths I left totally unsure of what I’d just seen (or all too sure that I hated).
Because I’m in some capacity traveling for Minor Attractions, the conversations are formulaic: beautiful booth; how are things; let’s talk about October. Fortunately people are generally receptive, sparing us a potentially very awkward few hours. With that said, no wants to be seen lingering, so once we got what we wanted, we got the hell out of dodge. Of course we are tired and want a break, running on five hours sleep and a 20 CHF sausage, but there’s a better place to collapse than right in front of your future colleagues.
Taking a short meander around Unlimited, we killed time before a Hans Ulrich Obrist book launch that bore the promise of free food and drinks. Dutifully marching down the banks of the river towards a Brazilian (?) Italian (?) generically exotic bar, we soon found that neither the drinks nor the food were free, and all we got for our troubles was Mr. Obrist himself. (Hans, if you’re reading this, you’re great and all, but next time…canapés would be a nice touch.) We caught wind of a cookout back towards the centre of the city, which held the promise of eating up something more than a Swiss curator’s time.
We could smell the cookout before we could see it. Basel’s cuisine isn’t exactly a feast for the senses, so the smell of barbecue was unmistakable in the air. Kendra Jayne Patrick, the American-born, Switzerland-based gallerist, and her partner had arranged the cookout, relying on their own recipes and the generous social lubrication of a wine sponsorship. There were other things going on, sure, but they probably didn’t have free drinks and definitely didn’t have baked beans, so any further plans were discarded in favour of riding out the night there.
And that generally proved the case. The bartenders kindly pretended I wasn’t returning for my eighth glass of rosé, and the burgers (made from scratch, I might add; no frozen patties to be found) kept coming off the grill. The music was loud enough to draw a few quizzical looks from the neighbours, but nothing that the promise of some free baked goods couldn’t solve.
Although, there was one brief but significant detour. Standing outside, somewhere between probably my fifth or sixth glass of wine and third helping of potato salad, a woman approached me and my friend to ask if we wanted to go to an exhibition opening down the street. As they say, when in Basel, so we followed her, hoping at least that this other gathering’s drinks would provide some variation from our own. What our new friend had neglected to tell us was that this, while nominally a collaboration between a private collector and Volta, was like entering the various levels of art hell.
Dante’s Inferno is an apt analogy for the multi-story car crash. At every level a new kind of art ghoul emerged, fresh off telling a fresh-faced collector they were “showing at Basel” and walking from the shadows to offer us an $85,000 Ai Wei Wei print (we politely declined). Admittedly, there were one or two impressive pieces from the private collection, but surely going to Sotheby’s would have been a simpler way of offloading work than hanging it around fourth-rate art for favourable comparison.
Swiftly giving fake names and emails (Hotel California-esque requirements as we tried to leave), we walked out into the Basel night. Hoping to avoid any further such requests — we learned our lesson regarding following strange women to art shows — my friend and I got the bus home. There were still events happening and bad decisions to be made, but I felt I needed a little bit of recovery; they’re not easy to come by in this place.