George Lindemann Journal - "Car Parts, Guitars and Wall Art at Art Basel" @wsj by Kelly Crow
Early hours at the Swiss art fair Clara Tuma for The Wall Street Journal
Tap tap. Bang bang. What does a frothy contemporary art market sound like? A construction site.
Walking through the vast warren of art-filled booths at Art Basel, the Swiss art fair that closes Sunday, shoppers at the VIP preview Wednesday could hear nails regularly being hammered into booth walls—a sign that dealers had sold everything on display and were hanging up fresh pieces for sale.
"Every year, we come into this fair thinking it can't get better than last year, and then it does," said dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, who sold out his booth within the fair's opening hours Tuesday—including "Folk Thing Zero," a $2.3 million Georg Baselitz statue of a hulking blue man. "The art keeps getting bigger and selling faster."
After a blistering season of New York auctions, collectors descended on this fair with a feeding-frenzy feeling that they would need to shop quickly—and be willing to splurge—if they wanted to take home any of the roughly 14,000 works on offer. Miami art adviser Lisa Austin said her client, Miami collector David Martin, vied for seven pieces during the VIP preview Tuesday but bought only two because the rest had already sold.
Matthew Armstrong, art adviser to New York billionaire financier Donald Marron, said he typically expects to see a swath of brand-new pieces at Basel. But this time around he noticed more artworks that had been created a few years ago but were already coming back onto the market—a clue that the works' original owners may be seeking quick profits by reselling them through galleries now. As a result, the fair occasionally had a didn't-I-see-that-before vibe. "It's a moderately contemporary fair," he joked.
Whatever their budgets, the 86,000 people expected to attend Art Basel will all be on the lookout for the latest art developments. Here, a few early trends:
VROOM VROOM
Years ago, Richard Prince caused a stir by painting car hoods and hanging them, like canvases, on the wall. This year, Basel purred with pieces created from all sorts of car parts, from batteries to bumpers to windshield wipers that still swished.
Rob Pruitt transformed a miniature refrigerator into a Carmen Miranda-like figure by topping it with a pair of painted tires and tucking plastic fruit in the center hole so that it evoked a towering hat. One of the more elaborate examples is Josephine Meckseper's assembly-line installation that featured several tires balanced atop a silvery conveyor belt sitting beside a pair of TV screens broadcasting a 12-minute montage of car commercials. Ms. Meckseper's gallery, Andrea Rosen, said an art foundation had put a hold on the 2009 work, "Sabotage on Auto Assembly Line to Slow it Down." It was priced at $220,000.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
The fair's playful atmosphere was also reinforced by a suite of artworks made from, or about, musical instruments. Performance art duo Prinz Gholam embedded a video of themselves playing a guitar into the soundhole of one of the artist's childhood guitars, which was covered in Disney stickers. It sold to a European collector for around $16,300.
New York's Pace Gallery devoted much of its booth to an orchestra's worth of lumpen soft violins and towering blue sculptures of drums and clarinets by Claes Oldenburg, which the gallery said were selling briskly.
Over at New Delhi's Gallery SKE, artist Navin Thomas salvaged a group of trumpets in Bangalore and used them like speakers to blare his recordings of chirping tree frogs. The gallery said the artist is interested in "electroacoustic ecology," which means he uses urban scrapyard items to remind people about the nature they may be leaving behind. The work, "The Fruit of Some Unknown Tree," was priced around $20,000.
BUY ONE, BUY ALL
In a season where collectors are seeking wall-power art, more galleries were spotted offering multiple, smaller works by artists arranged in huge grids—some of which could be bought individually or in various sets. Singapore conceptual artist Heman Chong at Singapore Tyler Print Institute offered up his $4,000 painted book covers on their own or as a set. Günter Förg's wall of colorful abstracts, which had titles like "Mr. Green" and "Mr. Brown," were priced at $7,300 apiece, or $24,500 for a quartet.
Photographer Joel Meyerowitz's nine still-life scenes, which were inspired by a visit to Paul Cézanne's studio, could be bought individually for around $10,000. But Karen Marks of Howard Greenberg Gallery said collectors at the fair preferred to buy them in trios. "Grids are cool," Ms. Marks added. "Collectors can get interactive by choosing how many they want and how to hang them. It gives them a chance to get involved."
Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com