Fair State

Art Basel, the largest international fair of contemporary art, wound up Sunday after registering some major sales but with a suggestion that the overall market may be slowing in reaction to the world's financial turmoil.

The show management's final report said the results were "outstanding" and that all participants "considered it a very good year," but it gave no overall sales figures.

Headlines were chiefly made by Roman Abramovich, the Russian multibillionaire and owner of Chelsea soccer club, who topped the list of collectors present.

Abramovich appeared to have stayed below his spending spree last month in New York, where he paid US$120 million (€77 million) at Sotheby's record-breaking auction, including US$86 million (€55 million) for the top lot, a Francis Bacon triptych.

In Basel, he bought one of Alberto Giacometti's elongated woman sculptures for a seemingly modest US$14 million (€9 million), according to The Art Newspaper's special Basel edition.

The sale of a Lucian Freud, "Girl in Attic Doorway," for US$12 million (€7.7 million) to an undisclosed buyer was also confirmed.

The organizers said their surveys showed that "all the exhibiting galleries were able to find buyers for their works."

The 300 participating galleries offered works by more than 2,000 artists, priced between a few thousand and millions of dollars.

It was left to the individual galleries to disclose sales, and many did not.

Despite the positive report of the organizers, the weekend edition of The Art Newspaper headlined, "Market keeps moving, but the brakes start to go on."

You can read the whole AP report here.

The reports that I have been getting directly from dealers have (as always) been mixed. Later this week I will be going to the Affordable Art Fair New York, the art fair that I consider to be at the front battle lines of the art fair world, since it limits prices of work to be sold to a max of $10,000 per piece.

I should be able to discuss what the state of "affordable" art is once I get a feeling how this fair is doing.