Art Basel Cancels Its $15,000-a-Ticket Abu Dhabi Conference Just Two Months After It Was Announced

The Swiss fair Art Basel has
abruptly called off its planned arts conference in the Gulf next
year. Just two months ago,
the company made the surprise
announcement that it was organizing stand-alone conferences
with a glitzy debut in Abu Dhabi in February. 

The company did not go into
details about exactly why, after at least two years of work, the
event has been axed. “Art Basel Inside in Abu Dhabi in February was
always an ambitious project on quite a short timeline,” a
spokesperson for the fair tells Artnet News. The fair insists
that that the $15,000 ticket
price was not an issue, adding that there has been “a lot of
excitement” in the event.

The three-day conference, which
was an experimental one-off event, was being organized by the
Swiss curator and art
historian Marc-Olivier Wahler. It was meant to bring together influential
entrepreneurs, cultural leaders, and artists to discuss pressing
issues facing the world today, including sustainability and the
environment. In a brief statement online, Art Basel thanked Wahler,
who is the director of Geneva’s Museum of Art and History, and
unnamed artists involved in the project. 

In the statement, Art Basel said
the decision to axe the event was made jointly with its parent
company, MCH Group, and its Gulf partner, Abu Dhabi’s Department of
Culture and Tourism. The government agency oversees the Louvre Abu
Dhabi, the planned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and organizes its own
annual cultural summit. 

Tickets for Art Basel Inside
were priced at $15,000, excluding flights. The fair aimed to draw
around 300 people to the event. (Abu Dhabi’s 2020 Culture Summit
aims to attract around 480 movers and shakers to Saadiyat Island
next April.)

The Art Basel spokesperson says
that its conference was not shelved for budgetary reasons, or
possible low attendance. “From the feedback and the level of
interest we received we don’t believe the price point was an
issue,” the representative said, adding that the company had sold
“a substantial number” of tickets within a short
timeframe.

“The concept of Art Basel Inside
and the building of communities in the art world is something we
strongly continue to believe in and that we have been developing
over the years,” the statement says.

MCH Group has
largely retreated from its
investment in regional art fairs, announcing last year that it
was selling off its stake in several events in order to “stabilize”
the company. The Swiss company’s flagship trade fair for watches,
Baselworld, suffered a major blow when Swatch pulled out of the
2019 edition.  

In its statement, Art Basel
doubled down on its commitment to its other relatively new non-fair
enterprise, the Art Basel Cities
initiative. The Swiss art fair offers its expertise to cities
seeking a bespoke
cultural event that will boost its international profile and local
art scene. Buenos Aires is the first, and so far the only, city to
take up the offer. 

It is unclear whether Art Basel
will try again to organize a cultural conference elsewhere.
“We remain committed to innovation
and will keep exploring new initiatives in the future,” the
company’s statement says. The fair also noted that through its
partnership with Kickstarter, Art Basel has supported more than 70
non-profit visual arts organizations worldwide.

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