‘Pab Picasso’ makes a killing at Art Basel, along with Kanye and Bianca

Every year, the small Swiss city of Basel is taken over by the world’s most expensive art fair. Beautiful people with perfectly blow-dried hair arrive in droves to wine and dine each other and spend obscene amounts of money on art. On offer is everything imaginable: exquisite paintings, performance art, NFTs, and enough champagne to make even the most hardened collector feel optimistic about the market.

This year, everyone at the fair was telling me to see one thing: a melting ice sculpture designed by the British artist Hamish Pearch. He had hired a man who looked remarkably like his father to pose for him, then sculpted his model entirely in ice and left him to slowly disappear. Throughout the day, visitors gathered around to watch the figure drip and collapse. “It’s all so Freudian,” someone nearby suggested. Their friend disagreed. “I’m much more aligned with Jung, really.” I discovered the hard way that if you didn’t make it to the booth in time, no psychoanalysis could save you. All that remained was a puddle… It was certainly one way to break the ice.

Even more surprising was the sight that awaited me just outside the gallery: Kanye West and his lingerie-clad wife, Bianca Censori, wandering through the fair. Censori had appeared in a video artwork on display, depicting the mythological Persephone’s descent into hell. Having spent the past few years attached to Ye, perhaps she was uniquely qualified for the role; in this version, however, the underworld was a quite nice looking spa hotel in Japan. Dealers and gallerists flocked around the pair as if they were another installation, snapping photos and videos. By Basel standards, they were certainly generating enough attention to justify a seven-figure estimate.

‘You can be Marina Abramović and kill people!” At Basel Social Club, an abandoned office building transformed into the fair’s night-time playground, I was easily persuaded to participate in a performance artwork involving a violent video game played on dusty office computers. But this was not just any version of Grand Theft Auto. Onlookers gathered as famous artists battled each other with alarming enthusiasm. “Jeff Koons” sprinted through corridors clutching an assault rifle. “Rauschenberg” lay in wait around corners. Somewhere in the distance “Damien Hirst” was causing chaos.

This, I thought, was my chance. My Guerrilla Girls moment. I would fight back against the canon. My feminist intervention quickly failed – within minutes, I was sprawled dead on the virtual floor, having been shot by “Pab Picasso”. My only consolation was that Picasso had also been responsible for the fair’s most outrageously expensive sale, reportedly fetching around $35m. Perhaps I had been rightfully vanquished.

Even the most serious and stylish in the art world seemed to have one thing in common: they just wanted to play. At the Kunstmuseum, where dealers decamped to decompress after making their eye-watering purchases, the moneyed and the mighty splashed around in artist Cao Fei’s colourful ball pit, which was overlooked by a giant octopus. Before long, financiers, curators and collectors were hurling themselves into it with surprising excitement.

But a problem quickly emerged: sunglasses and wallets were disappearing into the balls like quicksand. I encountered a lovely pair of Gucci shades as I sank into the colourful sea. If you’re tempted to scavenge, there could be no better place – just don’t tell them I sent you.

Photograph by Harold Cunningham/Getty Images