Visitors at the 2018 edition of Art Basel gathering around “The tip of the Iceberg” by artist Barbara Bloom.
Photographer: Pacific Press/LightRocket
On Thursday, Art Basel announced that its marquee Swiss fair would be postponed from June until September.
While the announcement isn’t much of a surprise—countries are struggling to contain a more contagious strain of the virus—the postponement is the latest acknowledgment that a return to group events is still a very long way away.
“It will take a while even now that we have vaccines,” says Marc Spiegler, Art Basel’s global director, in a phone interview.
“The nature of Art Basel shows is that they’re large-scale events. Their success is dependent on widespread international travel, and that, for us, is the uncertainty for how long it will take [to resume]. So postponing from June to September makes the most sense.”
Art Basel is traditionally the final stop on the spring/early summer global art buying tour.
The Unlimited section of the Art Basel fair in Switzerland.
Photographer: Pacific Press/LightRocket
Unlike other art fairs, where galleries bring comparatively affordable work that can be snapped up by impulse buyers, the Swiss fair is a showcase for the best dealers have to offer. Galleries will often hold back their most expensive pieces specifically so that they can present them to Art Basel’s nearly 90,000 visitors.
In 2019, the last time the fair took place, an estimated $4 billion worth of art was crammed into a sea of booths and private viewing rooms, as crowds delighted in spectacles like a 30-foot-long blow-up recreation of a Nike sneaker by the artist Olaf Nicolai and a 28-foot-long sculpture by the artist Tom Wesselmann. Last year’s edition was cancelled entirely after a similar postponement to the fall.
Sales Alternatives
Now this sales opportunity is gone—or at the very least, delayed until Art Basel’s rescheduled VIP preview day on Sept. 21—leaving dealers to generate sales through other means.
Art Basel, for its part, is planning three online viewing rooms (OVRs).
The first will take place between March 24–27 and will be “dedicated to artists who have broken new grounds aesthetically, conceptually, or socio-politically,” according to a press release. The second and third will be held in June and November respectively, with major themes yet to be determined.
“Nobody in their right mind considers an OVR with 100 galleries to be a substitute for an art fair,” says Spiegler. “We think that under a specific set of conditions, and handled in the right way, these digital events do bring attention to galleries and artists.”
An artwork by Polly Apfelbaum at the 2018 edition of Art Basel.
Photographer: Pacific Press/LightRocket
Looking Ahead
The news of the postponement strikes a blow to other art fairs, who are, as yet, are going ahead with plans for in-person fairs this spring and summer.
Frieze plans to hold its annual New York fair in The Shed between May 5 and May 9, and has already pushed its Los Angeles fair from February to July. TEFAF, a showcase for old masters and decorative arts, has scheduled the European branch of its fair for May 29 in Maastricht.
Art Basel Hong Kong plans to open its doors in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on May 19.
In light of the same factors that postponed the Swiss edition entirely, Spiegler’s ambitions for the Asian edition of his fair are limited.
“We’ve already informed visitors that we expect strong travel restrictions, but it’s not clear what the state of play will be there,” he says. “We’re hoping for a regional fair, but keep in mind that there are many international galleries that have gallery spaces and staff in Hong Kong.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
