Basel defies forecast of art market slowdown

The Basel contemporary art fair last week defied forecasts of a market slowdown, with wealthy collectors buying works with seven or eight-figure price tags.

At its VIP day on June 13, Zurich's Hauser and Wirth gallery sold a spider by Franco-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois for $22.5 million.

While jittery stock markets and soaring interest rates had triggered predictions that the art market was cooling, the gallery sealed a dozen sales of more than one million dollars during the first two days of Art Basel.

An oil on canvass by U.S. painter Philippe Guston went for a total of $9.5 million.

Some 284 galleries representing more than 4,000 artists are represented at the fair in the Swiss city, which for one week every year becomes the center of the global contemporary art market.

During that week, Art Basel serves as "a barometer of the industry," new CEO Noah Horowitz said at the opening event.

Every year, the first two and a half days are reserved for wealthy collectors, before the doors open to the public from Thursday to Sunday.

"We had a lot of people competing over pieces," Marc Glimcher, CEO of New York gallery Pace, told AFP.

Within the first few hours, he sold two fox sculptures from a new series by U.S. artist Jeff Koons, even though one of the works had yet to be finished. They went for $3 million each.

"The art market seems quite healthy here in Basel," he said.

"People are not paying crazy high prices but they are not asking us to sell at crazy low prices either."

U.S. gallery Lehmann Maupin, which sold a painting by Chinese artist Liu Wei for between $600,000 and $700,000, also made "strong sales across the board" from the outset, said Isabella Icoz, head of the London...