(Bloomberg) -- As they stood in line outside the Grand Palais waiting for the doors to open for the first VIP day of Art Basel Paris, a group of major international collectors uniformly dismissed the doom and gloom narratives that have dominated the art market for over a year.
Will they still buy art in a depressed market?
“Yes, if I find something I like,” said the philanthropist Frances Reynolds. “I don’t buy art because I think of it as an investment, I buy art because I like it.”
Are they demanding discounts to close a sale?
“If the work is correct, I’m quite happy to pay more,” said Lonti Ebers, founder of the non-profit Amant contemporary art space in Brooklyn, New York. “That’s more meaningful to me than whether something costs less, because we all know that in the end it’s always the work that matters, not whether you paid 10% less or 20% less.”
The notion that dealers have to slash prices to create interest, Ebers continues, “is idiotic. If you actually think back in time and you see these great masterpieces, is it relevant whether the person paid $100 or $80? No, what’s relevant is they got the work.”
Once inside, it seemed like a lot of collectors had, in fact, gotten the work.“Several things have sold already,” said Alex Logsdail, the chief executive officer of Lisson Gallery, within minutes of VIPs entering beneath the glass roof of the Grand Palais. A golden textile work in Lisson’s booth by Olga de Amaral, who’s currently the subject of a must-see retrospective at Paris’s Fondation Cartier, had sold for $800,000. By the end of the day two other works by de Amaral in Lisson’s booth had been purchased: One for $350,000, another for $400,000.
By late-afternoon, other significant sales had rolled in. White Cube reported selling a 2013 painting by Julie Mehretu for $9.5 million; Hauser & Wirth reported that a Mark Bradford mixed media on canvas piece had sold for $3.5 million. A sculpture by Barbara Chase-Riboud went for $2.2 million; New York’s Ortuzar Projects said it sold out its booth of paintings by Takako Yamaguchi priced at $300,000 each.
However, the initial froth of interest remained muted when compared to the circa 2015 era when collectors fell over themselves to buy work (or be put on a waiting list to buy work) in the opening hour of a fair. “Some things just take a little time,” said dealer David Zwirner, about three hours after the fair began. By the close of the first day, Zwirner reported several sales including $900,000 for a painting by Dana Schutz and $875,000 for a painting by Elizabeth Peyton.
No Sure Thing
Despite those disavowals by mega-collectors, the art market—from the auctions to the fairs to gallery shows—has been sluggish at best and moribund at worst.
“We’re very cognizant that the market’s been slower,” said Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz, speaking a few hours into the fair. “September has picked up a little bit, but everybody’s on pins and needles right now, and there’s a lot of geopolitical noise as well.” In addition, he continued, “the general trend has been that the fairs are regionalizing more and more. So Basel Switzerland is becoming a more distinctly European fair. Miami over the years has become more distinctly American. And certainly post-Covid, Hong Kong is more and more Asian.”
The Paris location, however, remains the one truly global connection point, given the fact that France represents a mere 7% of global art sales by value, according to a report by Art Basel and UBS. (At 42%, the US is first.) “We’re seeing huge American buy-in,” Horowitz says. “There’s a lot of Asian collectors here, and a number of people from Africa, the Middle East and India. It’s a real, global fair.”
Logsdail put it more succinctly: “I think almost every American collector I know is here,” he said.
What’s Inside
The fair’s 195 galleries are spread across two levels of the Grand Palais. Visitors enter straight into the international heavyweights—Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner and their peers are clustered near the center.
Word quickly spread that a 1915 painting by Kazimir Malevich in Hauser & Wirth’s booth was a must-see. (The gallery declined to disclose the painting’s asking price, although it noted that it had sold for £21.4 million at auction in 2015, which was roughly $33 million at the time.)
“The work wasn’t in any of our previews, because we really wanted to emphasize the actual experience of being in front of something that substantial in a relatively intimate setting,” said Marc Payot, Hauser & Wirth’s president. The painting, Payot continued, was on hold, meaning someone had reserved the right to purchase it but hadn’t yet pulled the trigger.
In the back of the hall, a grand double staircase leads to the Grand Palais’s upper floor, where smaller and often younger galleries are. There, perhaps because of the schlep—the building also has elevators, although they aren’t easy to find—the crowd seemed to be younger, and the pace slower. Standing in the booth of Commonwealth and Council, the Seoul-based investor Tony Lyu was admiring a work by the artist Nikita Gale. That slower pace, he said, was to his benefit.
“For collectors it’s a better opportunity, because it’s not as competitive and you have more time to think about it,” said Lyu of the fair’s upper floors. “The prices are more attractive.”
But by the end of the first day, it seemed that even clients of the biggest galleries felt the same way. “It’s been a pretty phenomenal day,” Lisson Gallery’s Logsdail said. “We sold an extraordinary amount of work, really across the board, and there’s a lot more to do—people are coming back to see more things tomorrow.”
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