Disneyland Basel
Basel Diary Day 6: I become host of a reggaetón party and finally make it to Art Basel
🚗 Read Day 5 of the Basel Diary here 🚗
🍔 Read Day 4 of the Basel Diary here 🍔
🚽 Read Day 3 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.
I’m running out of steam. It’s not so much that I’m afflicted by any specific ailment, but that instead everything hurts a little bit. My arms, my legs, my back – at 27 I’m not supposed to feel like this. To add to my list of ailments, my brain feels like putty, entirely unable to absorb anything, let alone produce something of quality. Only four more days to go.
My roommate had woken up by the time I emerged from my bedroom (he had kindly been granted a place on the couch), and so we decided to grab breakfast together. Having only arrived the day before, he still had vigor and excitement in him and eagerly peppered me with questions: What did I still want to see? What was my favourite piece thus far? Had I formulated thoughts on the quality of Swiss public transport? I just about managed monosyllabic answers to most and slowly sipped my coffee, hoping it might bring me back to life.
After two coffees and a sandwich, I finally felt I had the energy to go see Art Basel. I had avoided it for the previous days, aware that someone like me — entering the fair on a press pass — is the last person dealers want to see when they’re cutting deals. On Day Three, however, it felt like I was granted a little more leeway. Many of the major VIPs had come and gone, and I might be able to start a conversation without getting shooed away or cut off mid-sentence. I tried to get my co-lodger in on a press pass with me, telling the media desk that my “top journalist” simply had to walk the booths with me, but to no avail. Kudos to the people who do the Basel Press Accreditation – they grilled my friend on his assignment, asking me to submit a formal letter of commission. In the end, we had been found out.
Smarting from the injustice of having to buy him a ticket, we began walking through the fair. It is so large and so full that within minutes, the most incredible artworks in the world are reduced to little more than stock on gleaming white shelves. In this way, the whole process is very humbling: single works in these booths cost more than smaller galleries’ entire annual turnover, and in this context, it looks only standard. Of course, those that frequent these sorts of places don’t think like that, and I saw many visitors browsing as if they were at an IKEA, asking themselves what might look nice in their spare bedrooms. Then again, nothing wrong with that.
Lunch eventually beckoned and, as I had promised, I bought my company a Swiss sausage, as seemed to be standard fare for the experienced Basel goers. For business’ sake, much of the experience has become Disney-fied in a gauche, nightmarish kind of way: at the end of many of the aisles, servers stand with buckets of champagne which you can buy by the glass, before making your way to the food court. There, if sausage doesn’t take your fancy, you can get dumplings or a rather dubious looking poké bowl. Never mind that poké is about as far away from Swiss culture as one could get, the very purpose of these events is to make their given locale entirely indistinguishable from where any of the crowd had come from; to deliver exactly the same amenities that they might otherwise have at home. I could go on forever following this line of logic, but it comes with diminishing returns: those who choose to make it this way don’t care what I think.
Needing to catch up on emails, I took myself to a local café. These kinds of down moments are about as uneventful as one might expect, save for when I found out the event I was nominally hosting through Minor Attractions had been branded as some kind of reggaetón night, featuring artists called “A$$TER” and “TVBXS” (your guess as to how to say the latter). While it was not exactly what we had expected – we really should have seen this as a possibility when we put the only Latin American gallery in the group in charge – we seemed to be the last one to get the flyer, because we quickly learned all changes were off the table. Queue “Gasolina” by Daddy Yankee.
Reaching that point in the evening when it was time to suss out the available food and drink options, I left for a barbecue being hosted in the Hof of a local gallery. Getting there, it was exactly as I had hoped: someone had stationed their early-20s son (?) or nephew (?) on the grill, left to rapidly unpack packets of raw meat while children eagerly snatched up any available sausages. It was chaotic, yes, but as the night wore on and the other fairs finished, the crowd only grew, and finding a group, I stayed for the better part of the night, catching up on the week’s gossip and sales news (slow for most).
Eventually someone in our little group of art people called for a proper dinner. We made our way to a food hall where there were a bunch of different options, and yet we all opted for the same mediocre Thai (except for one who got the pasta – read the room, buddy). There was apparently something next on the agenda, but I had to go home. With party to host on the horizon, I needed any rest I could get.