“They’re Schiaparelli,” she said.
Then Jewel revealed to me that, in her new career as a visual artist, she has a show in Venice during the Biennale, presented by Crystal Bridges.
“It’s right near the Prada Foundation,” she said.
Next up was the Art Basel preopening breakfast, which is called, in Basel-speak, the “Prelude.” It’s in the collectors lounge, which is its own kind of ecosystem. A string quartet played a languid orchestral version of “Mas Que Nada” as some Florida socialites schmoozed with on-duty Miami Beach cops. The Casa Dragones booth wasn’t open yet, but the Ruinart was flowing. The vibes? They were good.
Jorge Pérez, the billionaire developer who opened his own museum across the causeway in 2013, was lounging on a couch in white linen reading the Financial Times, looking incredibly relaxed, chatting with an adviser, declining a canapé of a mini eggs Benedict with yuzu hollandaise. The private NetJets bar inside the invite-only collectors lounge was getting ready to start serving cocktails before noon.
The fair opened at 11 a.m. and it became immediately clear that galleries had brought ambitious stuff, both in terms of price points and quality. The mega-dealers were not phoning anything in: Larry Gagosian was seated at the table directly next to his booth, Iwan Wirth was standing between sculptures by Paul McCarthy and Rashid Johnson. Jay Jopling was at the White Cube booth chatting with Fuhrman, and David Zwirner spent most of the morning near the Richard Prince joke painting he brought to the fair and hung on the front of his booth.
There were a lot of Prince jokes: a big diptych at Gladstone, a small triptych at Skarstedt, another at Acquavella. And plenty of Jeff Koons too. Was any of it selling? Evidently sales were happening. Not as many as Paris, but not a disaster either. And definitely better than Miami in 2024. Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said that in the first few hours of the fair, sales were up 40%—compared to not just the early hours of 2024, but to what Hauser sold in the entire week last year. A George Condo painting sold for just under $4 million, while two Louise Bourgeois paintings sold for $3.2 million and $2.5 million.
