David Velasco went to ArtBasel for ArtForum’s Scene&Herd column where he discovers a few who don’t want to follow the crowd:

Thea Westreich was sitting next to me at the dinner thrown by Standard (Oslo) and Johann König at Ristorante Roma. “You’re a dude,” she told Standard’s Eivind Furnesvik. “You’re a clever, smart, sexy guy. But you also know how to communicate the context of a work. I’m tired of hearing who bought something or for how much. Fuck it! That doesn’t tell me anything about whether it’s a great work of art.”

We were eating our grilled turbotin with lemon sauce and debating the hive mind of collectors, the bloodbath of the auctions. “It’s possible that there are people out there thinking on their own, calibrating things according to their own intellect,” Thea’s husband, Ethan Wagner, considered, shaking his head. “If there aren’t, I give up.”

Plug n’ Play (Scene&Herd/ArtForum)