BASEL, Switzerland—We have been watching, and mostly applauding, the progress of Alexis Hubshman’s SCOPE operation from the very beginning here at ARTINFO, but—and you read it here first—this Basel manifestation is SCOPE’s best fair yet.

After the mild disappointment of its last showing in New York—let’s face it, a tent, no matter how well it’s heated, doesn’t work terribly well in Manhattan in February—SCOPE has entered into a five-year contract with local entrepreneur (and gallerist) Marc de Puechredon to stage SCOPE in the 27,000-square-foot former industrial building, E-Halle. At this early stage, it looks like an inspired partnership.

SCOPE’s politics are pretty much impeccable. They’ve just gotten 501c3 status, and via the SCOPE Foundation they “help emerging artists through, grants, awards, and acquisitions.” Their mission, Hubshman says, “is to broaden the art world by presenting cutting-edge contemporary art and emerging culture.” In my opinion this is the reason that SCOPE has always been fun. With the attention it devotes to cinema, video, installation art, and performance, it is certainly a lot more entertaining than the main Art Basel fair, where more money may change hands, but it does so in an atmosphere that seems to put the business before the art.

The SCOPE fun starts as soon as you exit Art Basel to find your way there. There’s a shuttle bus, I am told, but much more bracing is the five-minute ride in the back of one of SCOPE’s free pedal rickshaws that takes you the length of the Mattenstrasse. As you approach, you see a big black inflatable structure that looks as though it belongs at a street fair. It turns out to be The Cube, a giant television set on which Berlin artist/gallerists Artists Anonymous are presenting their randomly mutating video piece Kammerspiel.

The E-Halle also turns out to be a delightfully funky space. De Puechredon and his pals have installed there a slightly rough-edged bar and a restaurant. They were still painting walls on the midnight before the opening, and the whole enterprise has a wonderful improvised character to it. This morning there were even a couple of dogs wandering around. The space’s architecture is hardly ideal (it has heat-generating windows running across its roof every few feet), but no doubt this won’t be such a problem next year when “some weird Swiss green law” is negotiated and they’ll be allowed to install air-conditioning. For now, we just have to sweat it out.

Satisfied Sellers

Temperature notwithstanding, I have rarely encountered such a satisfied group of gallerists. And this despite the fact that, as a number of them told me, yesterday was very quiet while most people went to the main fair.

Gallerist Mike Weiss, who described himself as “very, very happy,” reported that he had sold 11 out of the 16 Yigal Ozeri paintings (for between $20,000 and $24,000 each) that made up his one-artist booth. By the time you are reading this, I suspect the others will have gone as well.

Equally happy was gallerist Katherine Mulherin from Toronto. She’d sold eight of ten of the elaborately worked Oscar Camilo de Las Flores drawings that she was showing (for between $3,000 and $5,500). Also going well were Eric Doeringer’s infamous copies of Warhol, Basquiat, Peyton, and others. These works gave Mulherin a moment of embarrassment yesterday, when the Japanese visitor who was showing staring at them turned out not only to have the same name as artist Yoshitomo Nara but to actually be him. “The proportions are all wrong,” he huffed.

Regis Krampf of New York’s Krampf Gallery told me that he’d sold all of Ma Jun’s wonderful sculptures—in which contemporary objects are recast as traditional painted Chinese ceramics—for $10,000 each “within the first hour on Monday.”

Yossi Milo from New York has done well with Loretta Lux (then again, “Loretta always does well,” Milo said). Her Dorothea (2006) had sold three of the four remaining from an edition of 7, at €25,000 each, to collectors from England, Japan, and Switzerland.