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.
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.
“The annual June edition of Art Basel in Switzerland is a lodestar—for Hauser & Wirth and the entire art world,” says Marc Payot, the co-president of Hauser & Wirth. “Given all the indicators and the continued intensity of pandemic, we actually anticipated the postponement and planned accordingly by developing a series of exceptional late spring exhibitions for our gallery spaces.”
Art Basel, for its part, is planning three online viewing rooms (OVRs).