Art Basel Is Shaping Up to Be a Roll of the Dice

When the Swiss edition of Art Basel opens to VIPs on June 17 (public days are the 19th through the 22nd), Pace gallery’s booth will feature a 6-foot-tall Picasso priced “in excess of” $30 million.

Oftentimes, with a work this expensive (and even far less expensive), galleries do their utmost to secure a buyer well before the fair opens, soliciting offers in a phenomenon known as pre-selling. The fair opens, the collector shows up, and the work is officially sold then.

But a week before the fair, the gallery had yet to nail down a buyer for the Picasso. “We have a very good idea about who we think is going to buy it,” says Marc Glimcher, Pace’s chief executive officer. “But we have not ‘sort of’ sold it. And that is part of the secret family recipe: If you feel confident and you know [the buyer] is going to be there, and you know where they are in their head, do you want to offer it before the fair, or have them bump into it at the fair?”

Glimcher is opting for the latter. And he says this dash of serendipity is more common than outsiders might think: “If I took all of the over $10 million sales that we did in Basel, I’d say that three-quarters of them were a surprise,” he says.

This year ultra-expensive consignments are more of a roll of the dice than usual, several dealers acknowledge. “I think this insecurity is a bit more on the higher end of the market,” says Thaddaeus Ropac, whose booth at Art Basel will include a Georg Baselitz painting from 1968 priced at about €3 million ($3.45 million), as well as a Robert Rauschenberg work for $1.5 million. “In the main market, at least from a European perspective, it feels solid,” he continues. “We’ve turned now into a buyer’s market, where the buyer can say, ‘I’m taking my time and thinking about it.’”

The overall art market was down 12 percent last year, according to a recent Art Basel and UBS Group AG market report, with $10 million-plus sales at auction falling 39 percent year-over-year by volume and 45 percent by value. The bellwether May auctions in New York didn’t help much, as the overall results were lacklustre; at the high end, totals were anaemic.

“It’s not easy at the top of the market, but it’s not easy at the bottom of the market either,” says the dealer Emmanuel Di Donna, who’ll be bringing a $9.5 million triptych by Leonora Carrington, along with a Joan Miró from 1953 priced at about $20 million. “So for us it’s better to focus on the top-end material, as opposed to the rest. There is still a real appetite for museum-quality works when you have the right thing at the right price point.”

It’s a state of affairs that dealers profess to relish. Ropac says that “2022 was too easy, it went too fast,” meaning “in times that are more challenging, you concentrate on collectors who are in it for the right motivation, and it cleans out a bit of speculation. I think it’s not bad at all. To be honest, I feel rather relaxed.”

Glimcher, who’s also bringing a Joan Mitchell priced from $15 million to $20 million, acknowledges that “this is a more questionable time to be selling at the high end,” but he remains sanguine about his gallery’s prospects. “We think some new data is going to come out of Basel,” he says. “It’s going to be the place that will show that there’s new energy in the market.”

By James Tarmy

Learn more:

Explainer: Making Sense of Art Basel’s New Qatar Fair

The world’s largest organiser of art fairs will launch its fifth annual event in Doha in February 2026. What does it mean for Art Basel, Qatar and the evolution of an art market desperate for growth opportunities after more than two years of shrinking sales?