Welcome to your daily dispatches from Art Basel, a round-up of today's top stories, gossip and shows from the fair and beyond.
Top Story
The number of satellite selling events in Basel is growing, as dealers respond to an ever more overcrowded field by offering alternative modes of engaging with art. The latest is Maison Clearing, a pop-up group exhibition by the New York and Los Angeles-based Clearing gallery, staged across a peeling, four-storey villa in central Basel. A more established art fair alternative, taking place at a much greater scale, is found in Basel Social Club (BSC), the roving selling platform that takes place in a large historic building near the Kunstmuseum that was recently home to a private bank.
“This is the art experience collectors want,” says Clearing gallery’s director of programmes, Olamiju Fajemisin . “While the offsite gallery show is not a new concept, the market is in a weird place and we all need to adapt.” Kabir Jhala explores the new and innovative ways galleries are showing work off-site this Art Basel—from cramped cellars to grand parlour rooms.
In other news
Art Basel has long been considered the ultimate art fair. This year is no different—but even Art Basel is not impervious to market conditions and factors like rapidly shifting trade wars, international conflict and threats of recession. During this year’s fair, galleries have reported strong sales, but there are signs of shifts in the landscape and question marks about how both the fair and dealers will adapt.
Dealers agree that Art Basel stands above all other fairs when it comes to quality. A sense of “Basel brilliance” comes up again and again, whether it is among seasoned dealers or those exhibiting at the fair for the first time. In a “buyer’s market” Alexander Morrison and Carlie Porterfield explore what lessons can be learned from this year’s fair.
In depth
Uncertain times have always been Switzerland’s forte. During the Reformation, the Swiss cantons offered refuge for Protestants fleeing hostilities in neighbouring Catholic states. Fast-forward to the early 20th century: some 300,000 people passed through Switzerland while the Nazis ruled Germany. And, since Donald Trump’s re-election, wealthy Americans have been pulling out all the stops to move their money—and sometimes even themselves—to Geneva, Zurich and beyond.
Of course, borders exist much less for the ultra-rich than for the poor—or even the merely wealthy. So what options are there for those who don’t have a quarter-million dollars to spend on an expedited residence permit? Is there even room for ordinary people who’d like a nicer, cleaner, more functional place to live, where most people couldn’t even name the president? Atossa Araxia Abrahamian investigates.
Interview
In Midnight Zone at the Museum Tinguely, the French Swiss artist Julian Charrière plunges viewers into the oceanic abyss to explore the social, cultural and temporal urgencies of underwater ecologies. Featuring four new commissions alongside earlier works, the exhibition charts Charrière’s multidisciplinary approach informed by fieldwork across extreme geographies.
J. Cabelle Ahn asks what new works can be seen in the show, how Charrière navigates the impact of the carbon footprint generated by making and displaying art, and what materials he plans to explore next.
Diary
Jonas Staal, The Death of Elon Musk and Other Stories
A lightbox piece at Liste art fair showing Jeff Bezos’s yacht in flames is stopping people in their tracks and raising eyebrows. The AI work, by the Dutch artist Jonas Staal, is a “fiction and artistic provocation”, says a spokesperson for Laveronica gallery, which is showing the fiery image entitled The Death of Elon Musk and Other Stories (2025). The work, presented as a CNN Breaking News report, is timely as hundreds of high-profile guests are due to descend on Venice later this month for the wedding of the Amazon gazillionaire to Lauren Sánchez. Many Venetians are reportedly unhappy with the possible disruption prompted by the nuptials, which will is slated to take over the whole island of San Giorgio opposite St Mark's Square.
In 1968, Christo and Jeanne‑Claude, commissioned by the radical Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, draped 26,000 sq. ft of polyethylene over the Neo-Classical façade of the Kunsthalle Bern—their first wrapping of an entire building. The Kunsthalle recently relived the moment with another monumental intervention, this time by Ibrahim Mahama. In place of plastic, the Ghanaian artist enfolded the building in a material evocative of global labour and trade—jute sacks made in Southeast Asia and imported to Ghana for the transportation of cocoa beans to European markets.
“The history of the Kunsthalle has been a very Eurocentric, very white history,” says the museum’s director, iLiana Fokianaki. “This is something that one needs to address. If Szeemann put the Kunsthalle Bern on the map as a hotbed of avant-garde experimentation in the 1960s, Fokianaki wants to reconfigure its exhibition-making for the politically charged present.
What's on
Art Basel Awards Summit | The artist as visionary: Cecilia Vicuña in conversation with Elena Filipovic
12pm-12.30pm
The Art Basel Awards Summit kicks off with an intimate conversation between the Chilean poet, activist, and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña and Elena Filipovic, director of the Kunstmuseum Basel.
Art Basel Awards Summit | Radical reimaginings: Ibrahim Mahama and Lydia Ourahmane talk to Hans Ulrich Obrist
12.30pm-1pm
In this conversation with the Serpentine’s artistic director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artists Ibrahim Mahama and Lydia Ourahmane reflect on how risk, refusal and material storytelling have driven their practices.
Art Basel Awards Summit | Curating, decentred: Candice Hopkins, Shanay Jhaveri and Eungie Joo
3.30pm-4pm
In this panel, three leading curators reflect on how curating can confront inherited hierarchies and reshape the telling of cultural narratives.
