Art Basel’s second edition of the Online Viewing Rooms closed on 26 June 2020, and was the virtual substitute of what would have been the largest art fair in Europe this month, Art Basel in Basel. The art fair had originally been postponed to September, to avoid the all too recent coronavirus lockdowns around the world, and hopefully hold the event once the pandemic had subsided. However, in light of the predictions on how the infections might pick up again after the summer, and how the virus is still very much present among the world’s populations at present, Art Basel cancelled the September fair and decided to hold a second Online Viewing Rooms edition instead.
The June edition featured presentations by 282 leading galleries from 35 countries, with more than 4000 artworks, attracting more than 230,000 visitors from around the globe. The Online Viewing Rooms ran for a slighty more extended period of time compared with the first edition, going public from 19 June to 26 June, with preview days from 17 to 19 June.
The first iteration of the Art Basel Online Viewing Rooms, which substituted Art Basel in Hong Kong this past March, featured presentations by 235 galleries, and ran for a week, from 20 to 25 March 2020, with preview days from 18 to 20 March. The online event was very successful, and the fair organisers received “very strong feedback”, as Marc Spiegler put it, from both collectors and gallerists alike, for the “2000-plus artworks available to explore in one digital space”. The Global Director for Art Basel went on to say:
For many small and mid-sized galleries, our platform offered the first opportunity to explore the approach of an online viewing room and to connect in this way with new potential clients from around the world – which is especially important today.
At the same time, Adeline Ooi, Director Asia of Art Basel, reported “overwhelming” feedback from Asian galleries, saying that
While the Online Viewing Rooms cannot replace the in-person conversations and exchanges that our galleries were looking forward to at Art Basel Hong Kong, our initiative provided a platform to stay connected with collectors and to build new relationships during a very difficult time for many galleries.
As Artnet News reported back in March, it was the mega-galleries that reaped the most benefits from the online viewing rooms, as was to be expected. Often, a lot of the work brought to an art fair by such galleries is pre-sold or is in the process of being sold; seasoned collectors will know the work very well already and it is easy to thus make a sale even though it is closed in the virtual space. Galleries like Hauser & Wirth and Gagosian reported sales of pieces by Jenny Holzer, Paul McCarthy and Pipilotti Rist among other artists going for prices in the hundred thousands (US dollars). David Zwirner, who sold a Liu Ye work during the preview for USD500,000, said that inquiries on opening day came 23% from the United States, 46% from Asia, and 31% from Europe.
According to an article on The New York Times at the time, although collectors logged in from everywhere in the world, most of support and excitement for online sales came from younger collectors, as older, more seasoned ones still tend to be more attached to the traditional form of viewing and buying art.
The Hong Kong edition served as a launch pad for what was to come in terms of virtual fairs, as Art Basel gathered valuable feedback from the platform’s various users, and integrated it in the following event. Art Basel thus, in a very short period of time, further invested in and developed the new digital initiative to better support galleries as well as visitors and collectors on screen and across the globe.
This June galleries were able to experiment with new feautes, including the option to embed a video for every artwork, allowing for 360-views of artworks, as well as close-up shots of the individual pieces and short clips of artists talking about their own works. Additionally, much in the same guise as on social platforms, visitors had the capability to ‘like’ and share their favourite works and galleries in the viewing rooms, providing a more interactive and personal experience of the platform, as if conversing and sharing information with fellow visitors. Bo-Young Song, Managing Director and Principal of Kukje Gallery, was reported by Art Basel as saying regarding the improvements:
Within just three months we saw a visible growth in the quality of the Art Basel Online Viewing Rooms, the most noticeable being the addition of video capabilities in order to enhance virtual viewing experience. This ever-burgeoning emphasis on the online presence bolsters our belief that the art world’s traditional methods of operation have shifted for the better and will most likely endure even beyond the pandemic.
Speaking to Artsy, Corey Andrew Barr, Fair Director of Art Central, which runs concurrently with Art Basel in Hong Kong and had its digital catalogue online on Artsy until 1 May, talked about what he thinks are the necessary requirements for the online art fair to continue to thrive in the future:
The digital catalog should not be seen as a means to an end, so to speak, but rather an alternate fair experience that supports three goals: Discover. Connect. Collect. Each is an important part of the visitor experience, and I believe that, in the future, the success of an online platform for fairs will be judged by its ability to support each of these functions.
Apparently, Art Basel has been able to satisfy all three of Barr’s suggested objectives, as reported by Spiegler after the June edition:
Many collectors shared very positive feedback about our Online Viewing Rooms, noting how quickly and creatively galleries have adapted their presentations to fit a digital platform. For this second edition, many galleries also developed parallel programming, both digitally and physically where possible, that created further opportunities for dialogues, engagement and new discoveries, which have become ever-more pivotally important as we all continue to navigate together through this challenging period.
The second edition of the Online Viewing Rooms was also able to host an events programme of over 100 live-streamed talks, gallery-led tours of their presentations, curator tours, as well as digital events staged by galleries from studio visits to performance. Among the highlights were a virtual studio visit with artist Ju Ting presented by Galerie Urs Meile, live performance of David Lamelas’ historical work Time presented by Jan Mot, as well as intimate talks with artists such as William Kentridge presented by Lia Rumma and John Akomfrah presented by Lisson Gallery.
The more-than-4000 works presented were again all displayed with either an exact price or a price range, spanning from a very affordable USD500 to an uber exclusive USD10 million. At the time of the opening, the overall value of works presented was estimated to be in excess of USD740 million, and hundreds more works were rotated in the Viewing Rooms over the run of the event.
During the June edition, returning participating gallery David Zwirner, who sold a USD2.6 million Marlene Dumas during the March online viewing rooms, reported the sale of a USD8 million Jeff Koons piece, the most expensive work ever sold online by the gallery. Talking to Vogue about the Online Viewing Rooms successes, Adeline Ooi reported somefo the early sales at the June edition, including Tokyo Gallery + BTAP from Japan selling Kishio Suga’s PROTRUSION 925S and Gagosian selling Jia Aili’s canvas-and-glass work Mountain and Line (2020) selling for USD350,000. Lehmann Maupin reported selling, within the first hour of the fair, a historic 1978 Cecilia Vicuña painting to a collector based in Korea for USD375,000. The work will be included in the upcoming 2021 Gwangju Biennale in Korea, which opens in February next year.
Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, Co-owners of Sprüth Magers, had participated in the Art Basel Online Viewing Rooms first edition, and had been very please with it, as it offered them a new platform which was “an engaging and eye-opening tool for communication and collaboration”. They said that “Art Basel has paved the way for what’s to come,” and after taking part in the second edition this June, they were reported in the closing press release as commenting:
The Art Basel Online Viewing Rooms have once again proven to be a vital platform for us to connect with our international peers virtually. An international discourse is more important than ever to help us all make sense of the momentous changes the world is going through.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia