An appearance by Rihanna and her art-collector boyfriend on Friday confirmed Art Basel in Basel’s status as the world’s most important contemporary art fair.
#Artfair & #Money & #Rihanna | David Zwirner announced a mammoth sale, even by the standards of the world’s most important art fair: An anonymous collector paid $20 million for Gerhard Richter’s Versammlung (1966)
• ARTISTS: Among the 29 top selling Artists by Value at Art Basel in Basel 2019, I couldn’t help but notice only 2 women and Yayoi Kusama is 13th BUT Non-white artists like Kim Whanki and Kerry James Marshall are in 4th and 6th position !
•GALLERIES: Data compiled by Artsy showed that among the galleries reporting sales, Hauser & Wirth dominated, with a total of more than $49.2 million. The only gallery that came close, Zwirner, with $46.6 million. At a distant 3rd was Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, with a total of $14.8 million. Overall, Artsy’s analysis shows that the 10 highest-grossing galleries - 3.4% of all participating galleries- accounted for 75.4% of all sales reported during the fair.
•COLLECTORS: Despite being a predominantly European fair, dealers said Art Basel had managed to attract a healthy contingent of Asian collectors just a few months after that continent’s leading fair, Art Basel in Hong Kong.
•RIHANNA: She walked into the 2019 edition of the Art Basel fair in Basel, Switzerland, took a spin through the Gagosian booth, and then snapped a picture of a large wooden sculpture by Richard Artschwager in the David Nolan booth. But many failed to notice her companion, her boyfriend Hassan Jameel, a member of the billionaire Saudi art-collecting family that last year opened the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai.
