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# I read a column by Marc Spiegler, who ran Art Basel from 2007 to 2022
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/prochital-kolonku-marka-shpiglera-cheloveka-kotoryi-vozglavlial-art-basel-s-2007-po-2022-god/
- Published: 2026-06-27T12:55:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:46.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: In the Press, Art, Observations, Society, Humour

I read a column by Marc Spiegler, who ran Art Basel from 2007 to 2022\. A comical piece. He laments that galleries are struggling, that the market shrank by some ten per cent in 2024, and that young investors are buying bitcoin instead of paintings. Duremar, having caught a pond full of leeches, only to find the young have gone over to homeopathy.

For decades the fairs and their grandees trained artists and collectors to speak the language of money-commodity-price-capitalisation. Galleries were forced to open branches, to churn out meaningless news hooks, to wander endlessly between ever more lucrative fairs and to chase turnover. And now, when the consumer raised in this culture chooses, in place of children's drawings and other scribbles at hundreds of thousands of dollars, an asset with measurable returns, its creator throws up his hands: how did this happen? Just so, that is how.

Drone on about profit to a man for thirty years, and in the end the moment comes when he buys something that at least lends itself to being counted. And with crypto, at least, there is no need to pretend that it is about beauty and lofty ideas.

When Art Basel opened in Hong Kong in 2013, the story goes, the collector Uli Sigg, whose collection later formed the basis of the M+ museum, joked about the galleries storming into China like deodorant salesmen dreaming of the two-odd billion armpits. And in the end, when the fair's arrival in the Celestial Empire did not bring up the subject of the censorship under which local artists work, this was confirmed. Market conditions never envisaged raising any awkward questions. The art capitalists simply concentrated on the proverbial billions of armpits rather than on any eternal meanings and abstract ideals. M+ itself, even before opening, launched a debate on whether it was permissible to show Ai Weiwei with his photograph in which a middle finger is raised at Tiananmen. What if someone scolds us?

Many have already poked fun at Spiegler. Critics have plenty to object to, and not only opponents from the other camp. James Murdoch, who stands behind Art Basel's owner, was already calling this model a touring circus in 2023, in which the fair, like a Formula 1 grand prix, stages an expensive festival in a city and moves on. Talk of zombie art, hastily slapped together specially for the fairs, has likewise been going on for years.

But still it is unclear why Spiegler should suddenly start repenting, calling the commercialisation of art thrice dangerous and railing against art's transformation into an asset. He built this system, earned handsomely from it, and in retirement has decided to call it a catastrophe and to advise artists to seek salvation in independent, self-organised spaces far from the fairs. Literally Yakubovich against "Field of Miracles".

I do not quite believe it. In our time there are still independent communities and artists' institutions not drawn into "the market", however vile that word may sound when applied to the world of art, but the Spieglers, of course, would like to make those too their resource.