Art Basel Sales Report 2018

New and interesting takes on the sales at Art Basel keep coming even though the fair is now over.

Here's Sam Orlofsky on Twitter talking about a major shift in demand:

The thing NONE of these Basel postmortems have identified is the impact of the END of the private foundation boom. We had a 15+ year run of dozens of collections using these fairs like “Supermarket Sweep.” Every single booth could get bailed out by a visit. No mas.

— sam orlofsky (@SamOrlofsky) June 18, 2018

Artsy wraps up the fair with some more PR work by Marc Spiegel trying to deflect the issue of whether Art Basel is responsible for the pressures on independent galleries, including the first mentions of the fair's editorial initiatives which have added cost to the firm with dozens of new hires but yet to really leverage the fair's massive social media footprint.

Here are the sales Artsy gathered:

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

• one new collector had seen a painting by Sadie Benning featured on Art Basel’s website, then came and bought it
• sold four other Sadie Benning paintings
• three Charles Gaines tree works
• a painting by Nicole Eisenman
• three paintings by Samuel Levi Jones
• a large selection of over a dozen photographs by Pope.L that all went to a single collector in Vancouver.
• Prices in the booth started at around $10,000 and went up to around $200,000

Kate McGarry Gallery

• three sets of Samson Kambalu’s Mboya Series (2016) for £15,000 each
• some of B. Wurtz’s pan paintings for £4,000 to £7,500
• Francis Upritchard’s Octopus with Fish (2017), which had appeared in last year’s Venice Biennale, for £30,000, as well as several works not on the booth

Pilar Corrias

• a corner painting by Madani
• a glass mosaic work, Zarina, from a new series by Sikander for $90,000
• a set of Ian Cheng drawings; a painting by Self
• another painting by Quarles, with prices in the booth from $20,000 to €250,000

Melanie Gerlis had these sales in the Financial Times:

Maureen Paley

• Rebecca Warren’s painted bronze “Aurelius” (2017) to a foundation in Spain (£380,000)

Paula Cooper

• Christian Marclay’s “80 East 11th Street” (1990-91), a painted wooden door and sound recording, which went to a US collector ($500,000)

A confusing mix of impressions continue to come out from Art Basel as dealers plump for this year's fair. Observers inside the fair like Josh Baer have remarked upon high asking prices which, he concludes, may have offset diminishing sales, especially for second-tier or ancillary objects like drawings or preparatory works.