November 2008

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Art Basel – which took place on 4-8 June – is, quite simply, a phenomenon: a contemporary art fair in a class of its own and one that is not so much a marketplace as a meeting place. Thousands of industry players of every description descend on this art-rich and unassuming Swiss town each year not so much to see and to buy, one suspects, as to do their deals, and network. Substantial business is also transacted at the fair, however. As Los Angeles dealers Blum & Poe, who sold both their large and small Takashi Murakami Oval Buddhas – at $8m and $2m respectively – told me: ‘It has been a great fair. We were selling from the first minute.’

Certainly there were outstanding displays, notably that of New York dealer Matthew Mark’s sell-out homage to the 85-year-old Ellsworth Kelly, a mini retrospective of some 20 paintings from a self-portrait of 1949 to a dazzling yellow abstract produced last year. London’s Helly Nahmad had similarly devoted his stand to a loan exhibition bringing together for the first time Joan Miró’s ‘The Masonite Series Spain’ of 1936.

To my mind the most compelling and affecting work in the fair was the one that dominated the cavernous space of Art Unlimited, Qui Anxiong’s Staring into Amnesia installation. It included Memory for Forgetting (Fig. 2), an aged Chinese railway train shipped to the fair by the Beijing gallery Boers-Li for a cost barely less than the asking price of €400,000. Visitors could climb into the train, walk through the carriage, or sit at the tables and contemplate. The train windows offered projections of grainy newsreel footage of the Sino-Japanese War – soldiers marching and waving flags – contrasted with memories of private, domestic moments, recorded in shadow theatre. A memorable journey. Its purchase was already under negotiation with an institution.

As for the sprawling, visually cacophonous rest, the exceptional was in the minority, not least in the realms of classic modern art. There was also a sense among serious specialist dealers who did not deal in the obvious or fashionable that, as at Art Basel Miami Beach in December, collectors had become more reluctant to dip into their pockets.

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