On the Mark: Art on the Sidelines

On the Mark: Show Me the Money

Damien Hirst Paul McCarthy Mark Rothko Tony Oursler Philippe Parreno Luc Tuymans Subodh Gupta Carsten Holler

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There’s talk among locals here that the beginning of the UEFA Euro 2008 soccer championship in the city tomorrow night (it's hosted by Austria and Switzerland this time around) will be so disruptive that it will be impossible to get in and out of the Messeplatz to visit the fair. One dealer told me that a client had announced that they wouldn’t even be able to come in to collect work that they had already paid for!  

Show Me the Money
As Pink Floyd once put it, “Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.” While dealers and journalists alike were aflutter with talk of the weak dollar and the fluctuating exchange rates, and on and on, it was impossible not to notice that a handful of works in Art Basel handled currency. Or perhaps it was just impossible not to think about it on this rainy day, when a writer and curator in New York wrote to me in an email “enjoy the money fest and the art funeral.” With that in mind, and another thing—“Money and How It Gets that Way,” a rather obscure pamphlet on matters financial that Henry Miller once wrote at the urging of Ezra Pound—I decided that I would defiantly enjoy the money fest, and find out how much the money cost and whether or not it had sold.

My first stop was Art Unlimited, where I found video artist Tony Oursler's room-size installation Untitled Currency, 2008, which involves a very large projection piece that is essentially a talking one hundred dollar bill. Typical of Oursler's approach, it is really only Benjamin Franklin's mouth that is animated, and the sinister-looking Franklin mumbles, among other things, "I beg you not to destroy me." He also sticks out his tongue. Other elements of the piece suggest alternative uses for cash: there's a video of a hand making origami from a one-dollar bill. But the whole installation is made a bit more ominous, and also a good deal more humorous, by a two-part sculpture of a rolled up Washington and a mound of blow, accompanied by an audio of someone sniffing. And, to top things off, there are actual dollar bills pasted willy-nilly to the walls. The whole ensemble is gleefully irreverent, and, not surprisingly, a collector has put it on reserve from Bernier/Eliades, Oursler's gallery in Athens, Greece. For how much? $400,000.

Franklin looks far sunnier, and more sympathetically disposed to his artistic treatment, over in the booth of Magazzino D’Arte Moderna from Rome. Sislej Xhafa has made a carpet—hung on the wall like a painting—out of a hundred-dollar bill. Entitled Kahlen, 2004–08, and in an edition of 2, it too is on reserve, for €36,000.

Downstairs from Magazzino, at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, is a 1997 Gilbert & George picture, Spunk Money, depicting the two British artists cavorting in the buff before a blood-red sea of bills of a number of different currencies. It has a rather ludic feel to it, and one wants to dive into the piles of cash. Or one could just own it! Hurry, because it's already on reserve, for €275,000.

Though it would destroy the piece, it would be entirely possible to plunge one's hand into the pile of cash that is Young British Artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster's 2002 mixed media sculpture, Made of Money, at Jeffrey Deitch's booth. Noble and Webster arranged 5-, 10-, 20- and 50-pound notes inside a glass-walled slot machine, such that when a light is projected on it, the resulting silhouette on the wall shows two faces kissing. How sweet! Ahh, for love or money. The piece sold for $350,000. It must have given new meaning to the concept of fabrication cost.

For more on the subject of money and art, see my article on art about the art market from the November 2007 edition of Art+Auction.

On Location
Brad Pitt wasn't the only actor on hand for the fair. Spotted ducking out of a taxicab near the Messeplatz was The Darjeeling Limited star Owen Wilson. Wilson has become something of a regular on the contemporary-art circuit. He was seen at last fall's party for Damien Hirst at New York's Lever House, then at Art Basel Miami Beach in December and now at Art Basel. If you squinted at a paparazzi pic of him in one of the celebrity gossip magazines a few months ago, you could see that the cover of the book he was clutching read "Duchamp." One wonders what the man has been buying.