As Art Basel enters its public days, Cruse spoke to ARTnews about the challenges of staging such a monumental art fair while the market is in a questionable state and interest rates are high, why Art Basel continues to be successful, and offers the slightest of hints at what might be in store for next year’s edition.

ARTnews: Opening day has come and gone. What can you tell me about the energy on the ground?

Maike Cruse: The energy has been great. You know the art market here in Basel has proven to be very resilient. We were very confident going in, but what we’ve seen so far has really exceeded our expectations, and, I think, also the expectations of many of the galleries. The pace is much more normal, as opposed to last year when little bit more cautious behavior than what’s happening right now.

That’s good to hear. There has been lots of talk about the market softening or losing its froth, euphemisms to say that people aren’t buying as much as even a few months ago. Many people were unsure what to expect, especially with the fair being so close to the May auctions in New York, which had less than stellar results. 

Absolutely. We were all aware of this and, as I said people were nervous going into the show, I think. But as we see, the market is about human-to-human relationships and about unique objects. And so those relationships can also change and develop very fast and that’s what’s happened here.

What were some of the approaches that you took this year considering that overall feeling of trepidation regarding the market?

We basically do what we’ve always done. We observe the art market very closely, and we adapt to it. That really involves more long-term planning as opposed to just reacting to the current state of the art market or what people are saying. The goal this year was to really further rejuvenate and diversify the fair. We have 285 galleries coming from 40 countries, and 22 of these galleries are newcomers to the fair, which is quite a high number. So it’s really interesting to see so many new faces and all new approaches on the show floor and so many high quality booths.

We also extended the citywide program this year by bringing [Agnes Denes’s] Wheatfield: A Confrontation (2024), where it takes up nearly the entire Messeplatz, as well as bringing the Parcours sector, which [this year] is curated by Stefanie Hessler, director of the Swiss Institute, closer to Messe Basel on Clarastrasse, the regular shopping street that connects the Messeplatz and the Rhine. There’s also a music and performance program at the Hotel Merian, which is very exciting.

What are some of the more under the radar things that people shouldn’t miss at the fair?

I think for me one of the big highlights of the show are the more tightly curated works in the Statements sector. This year presents very emerging artists like the Sandra Poulson from Angola with Jahmek Contemporary Art or the Norwegian-Sudanese artist Ahmed Umar, who brought 15 sculptural works that represent personal prayers; [Umar] is represented by a first-time participant to the fair, OSL Contemporary. The Features sector is also wonderful. There, we are showing 16 historical projects like Parker Gallery’s presentation of works by Gladys Nilsson or oil paintings by artist Irène Zurkinden, who was born in Basel, by the New York gallery Meredith Rosen Gallery.

Are you already thinking about next year, about things that you might want to change?

Oh yes, I’ve been thinking about next year for quite a long time [laughs], but I can’t tell you anything specific yet. I have a lot of ideas, I can say that. I’m really waiting to analyze what the re-contextualization of Parcours presents and how the [Denes] project works. I really look at every single detail, the conversations program, Hotel Merian, and then we really look into how we can further improve it or what new inventions we will bring next year. It’s too early to say, but there are a lot of ideas in my head.

The fair happens every year. How much prep time is involved in that on your end?

Here’s an example. When I first came on I had the idea to change the Parcours sector right away. And I’m so glad that I immediately had the thought and the support because it needed to be an implemented immediately for it to really work. It took the whole year. So, you really have to start changes well in advance, maybe one and a half years before the next show.

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk, especially here in the States, that Art Basel Paris, launched in 2022, might be more attractive, particularly to American collectors, than Art Basel’s Swiss fair. What makes the two fairs unique?

Well, first I have to say that we’ve profited very much from Paris. Otherwise, we wouldn’t do it. [Laughs.] Every fair that works well for our galleries really broadens our network. We profit from that and vice versa. So since we launched the show in Paris, we have many more French collectors also coming to Basel. And that happens all over the place, especially since we opened Miami Beach [in 2002] and Hong Kong [in 2013]. Each fair attracts a different kind of crowd. The Paris show is more concentrated. It’s a little bit smaller. But of course it’s taking place in the major art metropolis of Paris. We’ll have around 190 galleries, and a third of those are from France. In Basel, we have 285 galleries, 60 percent  of which are European, with the rest coming from other countries from all over the world.

The program in Basel [this year] is very ambitious and complex. It won’t exist like this for a second time. It’s very modern and broad—and it should be. Basel is where we come from. It’s our mother fair, our flagship. It’s our center.

When Noah Horowitz rejoined Art Basel a little more than a year ago, there were questions about what exactly the fair’s prodigal son had in store for the business. Horowitz’s newly created title, that of CEO, seemed to provide some indication of Art Basel’s growing corporatization. But that corporate structure had already begun under his predecessor, Marc Spiegler, whose role had been global director.

Several months before Horowitz returned, Spiegler named Vincenzo de Bellis, a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, to the newly created position of director, which gave him oversight of all Art Basel’s fairs and exhibition platforms globally, a role in which he continues today. Then, this year, Horowitz restructured the company further, naming a dedicated director for each fair, all reporting to de Bellis, and a dedicated head of business and management who reports to Andrew Strachan, a 12-year Basel veteran now serving as general manager of fairs and exhibition platforms.

But a more important indicator of the Swiss fair’s future may lie in its announcement in September that it had hired Hayley Romer, former publisher and chief revenue officer of The Atlantic, as chief growth officer, and Craig Hepburn, former head of digital at the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), as chief digital officer. Reading corporate tea leaves can often be a fool’s errand, but those very not–Art World hires would appear to augur a new approach, a point not lost on Horowitz.

“When you’re in a leadership role, that role has to change as the business grows,” Horowitz told ARTnews last week. “Of course, I want to make sure that we are working closely with our gallery clients and collectors, both emerging and established, but the day-to-day maintenance of that has been passed to our team. My job as CEO is to put people like Craig and Hayley in place and to make sure our teams, internally, work well with each other.”

Romer has spent her career courting luxury and high-end corporate clients, at Forbes Media as head of luxury advertising, at media giant Condé Nast as executive director of corporate sales, and at Atlantic Media, where she was initially hired as the head of luxury advertising. Two decades’ experience in those roles builds a deep rolodex, not to mention proficiency in building media brands.

Hepburn, meanwhile, worked at Microsoft, Nokia, and Indian telecom company Tata Communications in various high-up roles manning digital marketing and consumer engagement prior to joining UEFA. But it was at UEFA that Hepburn created a “digital-first mindset,” along with building interactive services, a streaming platform, and the company’s nascent Web3 strategy.

Hepburn described his digital philosophy at a 2019 conference hosted by SportsPro, which covers the business of sports. Hepburn lamented that the proliferation of streaming services had made it difficult for consumers to find the sporting events they wanted, even if they subscribed to the service that streamed them. The future, he went on, was for the sector to consolidate so that streaming could become truly “frictionless” in the way that dominant apps like Uber or Airbnb now are.

“These are problems that, quite frankly, consumers and fans will not put up with,” Hepburn said at the 2019 conference. “We need to figure out a way in the industry to make OTT [over-the-top] frictionless to fans, where it feels really smooth. That will be the biggest challenge.”

Horowitz’s appointments have not gone unnoticed among the art dealing community. “I think what you’re seeing under Noah is a kind of next level professionalization of the art fair business,” Sean Kelly, who founded his eponymous New York gallery in 1991, told ARTnews. “He’s brought in art world experts who are well respected in the gallery circuit like Bridget Finn and Maike Cruse, and people like Romer and Hepburn who are bringing a level of professionalism to the business side. It’s very analytical. He’s strategically putting building blocks in place that will benefit the future of the fair.”

What does all that mean for Art Basel? It would appear we’re heading toward a world where Art Basel the brand is as important as Art Basel the fair. It wouldn’t be out of step with the rest of the art world.

After all, the line between fine art and luxury has been all but erased in recent years. Every season of fashion week offers abundant artist collaborations; a slew of startups are developing platforms to turn paintings into other luxury investment vehicles; Hauser & Wirth is hard at work building out a luxury hospitality business; and Gagosian famously flirted with a sale to French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is enjoying a licensing bonanza, producing everything from Édouard Manet–inspired Amish furniture to Dr. Martens boots emblazoned with Hokusai’s Great Wave. And it’s not just businesses, artists too are riding the wave: Kehinde Wiley is selling a limited-edition soccer ball this holiday season, while the Museum of Modern Art Design Store is selling Yayoi Kusama pumpkins.

Then, consider that Art Basel has become one of the largest media platforms in the art space almost by default. Its 2.4 million followers on Instagram may be a far cry from the hundreds of millions following Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but it’s nearing striking distance of the Met (4.2 million), the Louvre (5 million), and MoMA (5.8 million), which top the list for art. As longtime gallerist Wendy Olsoff put it recently, “Art fairs are big business now.”

“It’s a completely different industry than when I started 40 years ago,” Olsoff told ARTnews (she cofounded PPOW Gallery in 1983). “I think the fairs, and the galleries and the museums are grappling right now with how to adjust to the pressures—financial, sociological, and political—of the new digital era.”

However, if Horowitz has an Art Basel streaming service in the works, he isn’t letting on. When asked if there were designs for a new Art Basel media outlet, Horowitz mentioned that the company already publishes the annual UBS Art Basel Report.

“With the assets we already have, there is so much potential. When you bring on someone as talented as Hayley, it’s all about giving them access to our assets and our clients and seeing what we can accomplish,” he said.

The changes then appear as a strengthening of Art Basel’s underlying structure, setting the foundation for what comes next, whatever that may be. It speaks to Horowitz’s reputation as an astute critical thinker and his too-often-overlooked background: he’s an art historian and an economist.

“A fresh lens is a great way to have somebody reevaluate the same thing, and Noah, who stepped away from Art Basel for a short while to work at Sotheby’s, has that, on top of an intimate knowledge of the fair,” art dealer Anthony Meier told ARTnews, noting the similarities between Horowitz’s restructuring and Larry Gagosian’s formation of a board of directors in 2021. “It’s about the legacy of the brand. The goal is for the brand to outlast any one individual.”

Marc Spiegler, who has been with Art Basel for over 15 years, will depart his role as global director, and he will be succeeded in the newly created role of CEO by an Art Basel veteran, Noah Horowitz. The news was first reported by Artnet News.

Spiegler will stay on through the end of the year, including for the run of the 20th edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, which is scheduled to take place November 29–December 3, while Horowitz will rejoin the company on November 7.

“As the outgoing Global Director, Marc Spiegler will hand over the running of the business to Noah Horowitz at this juncture,” according to a release.

In 2007, Spiegler joined MCH Group, Art Basel’s parent company, as co-director of the fair, and was named global director in 2012. During his tenure, he staged 43 art fairs, including the first editions in Hong Kong and Paris, which launched in 2013 and 2022, respectively.

“Under the leadership of Marc Spiegler, Art Basel has developed into what it is today—one of the most prestigious and valuable brands in the international art market,” Andrea Zappia, MCH’s board chairman, said in a statement. “Our thanks go to Marc for his great personal commitment, his networking in the global world of art and his notable successes in the development of Art Basel.”

Spiegler’s departure comes nearly two years after Art Basel’s parent company, MCH Group, received an $80 million investment (resulting in 49 percent stake) from James Murdoch and his Lupa Systems, which saw Murdoch and two others from the firm join MCH’s board.

“I am leaving Art Basel on a high note,” Spiegler said in a statement, referring to this month’s launch of the Art Basel fair in the French capital, titled Paris+. “Leading the next stage of Art Basel’s evolution will take many years and a different set of skills. … [I]t has come time to pass the baton. Fortunately, my friend Noah Horowitz—the perfect person to carry Art Basel forward—will be leading that development.”

Horowitz headed up the Art Basel Miami Beach fair as the firm’s Americas director beginning in 2015; he previously served as the executive director of the Armory Show in New York for four years. He returns to Art Basel after having left a year ago to join Sotheby’s as the auction house’s worldwide head of gallery and private dealer services.

His abrupt departure shocked the art market and, at a time when large-scale, in-person events were only beginning to resume, cast doubt on whether art fairs could successfully be restaged during and after the pandemic.

“We are convinced that Noah’s business acumen, digital experience and extensive relationships within the international gallery and collecting community will be instrumental in further developing Art Basel and delivering on the company’s ambitious growth plans at its home base as well as internationally,” Zappia said.

Added Florian Faber, MCH Group CEO, “Noah is held in high esteem in the industry, uniting an in-depth understanding of the art market and its players with a lifelong passion for the visual arts, business knowledge and digital transformation. Together with Noah, we will consolidate the position of Art Basel as a globally leading platform for modern and contemporary art and forge ahead with our innovative initiatives.”

In a statement, the fair said that Horowitz would be leaving the fair “to pursue other opportunities” and that it would immediately begin searching for his replacement. The statement continued, “We will work closely with Noah to ensure a smooth transition and handover of responsibilities, in particular around the staging of Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2021.”

Horowitz joined Art Basel as its Director Americas in 2015 after serving as director of the Armory Show in New York, beginning in 2012. Prior to that he served as the first director of the VIP, an online art fair that launched in 2010 but only hosted two editions. He also published in 2011 Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, which explored how the art market operates.

During his tenure at Art Basel, Horowitz was responsible for the fair’s continued prominence within the U.S. art market and helped oversee the fair’s launch of its online viewing rooms last year in the midst of the pandemic. The news comes a day after Art Basel said it would adjust the dates of the Miami Beach fair later this year. That fair will now run from November 30 to December 4.

In a statement, Art Basel’s global director Marc Spiegler said, “We are deeply grateful to Noah for his tremendous contribution in the six years that he has worked with Art Basel. His many achievements include the ever-growing renown of Art Basel Miami Beach, the establishment of our presence in New York, the launch of the Art Market report and most recently the spearheading of our digital efforts.”

The letter also informs exhibitors that Art Basel has revoked its original deadline for withdrawal, which had been scheduled for August 1. If they had canceled after that date, galleries would be responsible for paying 75 percent of the total booth fees. Now, galleries have until October 1 to decide as to whether or not they will participate. If the fair is ultimately canceled, Art Basel said it would fully refund all previously paid fees.

The letter didn’t provide details as to how the fair—scheduled for December 3–6—might be reconfigured to accommodate social distancing measures and cleaning protocols but stated that updates on such matters will be relayed to exhibitors by early September.

Florida has been among the states to see high levels of new coronavirus cases in the past few weeks, according to data published by the New York Times. The state has reported a total of more than 213,000 cases with 3,840 confirmed deaths as of Wednesday morning, and Florida’s Department of Health reported more than 7,300 new infections for Tuesday. Miami-Dade County, where Art Basel is staged, has been the hardest hit in the state with more than 51,000 total cases and 1,057 deaths, about 27.5 percent of the state’s total death toll. Elsewhere in Florida, moves toward reopening have continued, with Walt Disney World in Orlando planning to open its gates to the public on Saturday.

“We very much hope that you will remain committed to participating in Art Basel Miami Beach in December,” the letter from the fair’s organizers continues. “However, please know that if you ultimately decide to withdraw, this will by no means impact your relationship with Art Basel or your participation in future shows. We fully recognize the complexities of the current situation and value above all else our long-term relationship with you, as part of Art Basel’s global community of gallerists.”

Clare McAndrew.

COURTESY ARTS ECONOMICS

It’s not so often that a bit of news about a market report can overshadow the opening of Art Basel, the cornerstone of the fair circuit that’s become so integral to the business of buying and selling works. But the most-talked-about bit of news on the Messeplatz Monday afternoon was the announcement that Clare McAndrew, who for eight years has published a hugely influential deep dive into the statistics of the art market for TEFAF, will bring that same study to Art Basel, where its publication will be commissioned by the fair and the Swiss bank UBS. The first report under the arrangement will come out March 2017, right in time for Art Basel Hong Kong.

This represents a major coup for Art Basel, which will now have in its arsenal the art market report that, by all accounts, is the most effective at reflecting and, inevitably, influencing the global trade winds of the industry.

“Clare is the world’s leading art market economist,” said Noah Horowitz, Art Basel’s Director Americas, when I ran into him between booths at the VIP First Choice preview of Art Basel Tuesday morning. “And her report is the bedrock of the global art market study.”

Horowitz would know: He’s been a disciple of McAndrew’s for 15 years, and she helped him out while he was pursuing a Ph.D. at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. Horowitz, who joined Basel last year after serving as the director of the Armory Show, was integral in stealing McAndrew away from TEFAF, the old-world fair in Maastricht, which is known just as much for its famous market report as it is for its actual art expo. She also pursued various other investigations into art market machinations through her consulting firm Arts Economics.

On Wednesday, I met McAndrew at the Art Basel VIP lounge. She wore a black gown more suited for a gala than a fair. She spoke with a slight Irish lilt, as she lives with her family in Dublin. After walking through the lounge, where she was repeatedly greeted by starstruck Art Basel employees, true fans of her intrepid number-crunching, we arrived at a room where the fair’s director Marc Spielger, a former journalist, was drinking a green juice in a pink shirt and purple tie.

“This conversation started 15 years ago, when you and Noah first started talking together,” Spiegler said once we all sat down.

“We knew each other when he was doing his Ph.D.—he actually sent me his thesis on this big disk,” McAndrews responded, indicating it could have been a disk of the floppy variety. “I think I still have it somewhere.”

The move seemed like a surprise only because McAndrew has been so closely associated with TEFAF, a fact that Spiegler and Horowitz realized before they reached out to her with the potential plan.

“It was one of those pie-in-the-sky, wow-what-if-we-could things,” Spiegler said. “I’ve just been a huge fan of the work that she’s done for TEFAF and other places. I was never an academic in the field, but I was a social scientist in college, and I always had a pretty academic approach as a journalist—I’ve studied the art market in many ways. And it’s the same themes—how are the galleries evolving, what are their relationships to the auctions, what are the different tiers of the galleries, how is the art world internationalizing—and it was always great to read Clare’s analysis to get hard numbers around things you’re feeling in your gut.”

Spiegler explained that, unlike TEFAF, Art Basel has 500 galleries that the organization works with through various fairs. The data provided by these galleries can help make the upcoming reports more thorough, detailed, and definitive, he said. And the collaboration with UBS allows for McAndrew to access troves of more information than art market analysts are used to.

“I can use the network that Basel has, and also I’ve been finding out even more today about UBS—they have a huge client base of individuals who are worth $50 million plus and they’re the people who are most hard to get in surveys,” McAndrew said. “They’re a very hard group to analyze. And it’ll still be independent research, but I’ll be able to access a broader and a more direct network. They have access to the billionaires, and it’s really important.”

Spiegler insisted that Art Basel and UBS have no involvement beyond commissioning the work and providing McAndrew with data, meaning there will be no influence from the banking bigwigs and the art-world head honchos on the findings of the report. McAndrew does not work for Art Basel, just as she did not work for TEFAF—in both cases she was an independent contractor. Horowitz told me she would never agree to this arrangement unless she had total freedom. Though it should be noted that UBS, a Zurich-based bank with assets around $943 billion, is the lead sponsor of Art Basel, and we were sitting near the UBS Lounge, and—coincidentally—just that day there was a lunch at Volkshaus where Swiss Institute director Simon Castets announced that his art space would continue to be supported by, you guessed it, UBS.

Art Basel dominates the art-fair economy, and having McAndrews involved will likely mean other fairs will have to commission their own research and survey arms, or at least beef up the ones they have.

“Most fairs do some exhibitor survey, but in reality the sample size is so, so small—I can say that a lot of these, they’re more or less written on the back on an envelope and then put onto Survey Monkey,” Spiegler said. “Obviously Clare is going to bring a whole level of sophistication to that.”

That sophistication, Spiegler said, will make McAndrew’s research more inclusive, and perhaps change the overall perception of the generally shadowy market as a result.

“Such a small percentage of works and a small percentage of artists make up 50 percent of the auction sales,” Spiegler said. “The classic metric of the state of the market is only reflective of a few dozen artists. So the general perception of the art market isn’t just the tip of the iceberg—it’s a floating wing off the edge.”

And just as McAndrew’s report has influenced the makeup of art fairs for years, it will now influence even more profoundly the ways in which Art Basel evolves. Spiegler said he hopes that a more contextual view of the market can help illuminate ways in which certain marginalized groups—young collectors, international collectors, smaller galleries, emerging artists—can be seized upon by Art Basel and emphasized in future iterations of the fair.

Noah Horowitz photographed on October 23 in New York City.

©KATHERINE MCMAHON

This past September, Noah Horowitz, clean-cut, in his mid-30s, and with a mild professorial mien, arrived on time for our interview at Cookshop, a restaurant in the heart of New York’s Chelsea art district. He unbuttoned his suit jacket, sat down, and ordered a lemonade.

We were meeting to talk about his new gig, director of the Americas for Art Basel, the world’s largest and most prestigious contemporary-art fair—a role that could be instrumental in shaping how the global art market advances into new corners of the world. By further establishing its hold on emerging artist-dealer-collector cottage industries in, say, South American boomtowns, Art Basel can ensure that dealers in those cities stay dependent on the fair’s four-day sales saturnalias—whether it’s the 45-year-old flagship event in Basel, Switzerland, the recently formed Art Basel Hong Kong, or, most likely for this region, the 13-year-old Art Basel Miami Beach. It all hinges on the carefully massaged relationships between the fair and emerging targets—collector bases, young art scenes, and new institution meccas—that are popping up in the United States, Canada, and Latin America.

Horowitz’s new job is the product of the global expansion of the art-fair industry over the last 15 years. Many dealers now make a larger proportion of their sales at these events than in their galleries. Last year, the Wall Street Journal counted 200 art fairs on the art world’s annual calendar, and industry leaders like Basel, Frieze, and Paris’s FIAC have themselves expanded over the past decade or so—Art Basel to Miami and Hong Kong, and Frieze to New York and a second fair in London. FIAC has announced a forthcoming Los Angeles edition, though plans for it have been stalled for a year.

“If you find a region, or a city, and all of a sudden one or two galleries from that part of the world get into Art Basel, that’s a big deal,” Horowitz said. “Is that something that’s going to be done overnight? No, absolutely not, but there’s a great precedent. And I think being a fair in Miami Beach, which is easily accessible, is a really, really important part of that. Getting to Miami is a little challenging from Asia, but slightly less challenging from Europe. And it’s eminently easy from really anywhere in the U.S. or South America.”

But Horowitz’s function isn’t really to recruit galleries for the fair. “For the Art Basel show in Miami Beach, the reapplication rate is always somewhere between 98 and 100 percent,” said Marc Spiegler, the global director of Art Basel and Horowitz’s boss. “So the big challenge for Noah is no longer getting galleries to apply to the show, it’s making sure they’re successful once they’re there. It’s working with galleries on what they bring, and also making sure that the great collectors and museum directors—from everywhere from Tierra del Fuego to Montreal and Vancouver—are connected with the right galleries.”

Horowitz’s appointment, in July, came as a surprise to many, including staffers at the Armory Show—where, at the time, he was director and drawing praise for having saved the faltering art fair in just three years. Be that as it may, hints of an imminent departure were apparent to anyone on the art-world social circuit in June.

Just weeks before the announcement, Horowitz cut a swath through the parade of social functions at Art Basel in Switzerland, today the most important art-market gathering on earth. In Basel, Horowitz was seemingly everywhere: standing near Takashi Murakami on a docked yacht as the artist posed with neon-clad Harajuku girls; in the lobby bar of the Trois Rois, the epicenter of late-night Basel hobnobbery; at the Kunsthalle long after the dinner guests had switched from wine to Campari-soda; attending former Art Basel director Sam Keller’s ritzy Fondation Beyeler lawn party, snacking on pâté canapés.

Horowitz would soon be overseeing a fair with outposts on three continents. But with Art Basel courting collectors and dealers in burgeoning art centers—Dallas, São Paulo, Mexico City, Los Angeles—while possibly scouting across oceans for locations to open the next tent in its empire, what makes this Ph.D.-clad intellectual the right guy to lead the armada?

Art Basel in its second year, in 1971.

KURT WYSS/COURTESY ART BASEL

Consider the directors, past and present, of Art Basel. The fair was founded in 1970 after Swiss art dealers Ernst Beyeler, Trudi Bruckner, and Balz Hilt thought Switzerland should have a contemporary-art fair on par with Art Cologne in Germany, perhaps with a bit less Germanic self-seriousness. After Beyeler’s directorship, Lorenzo Rudolf, another Swiss dealer, took over the fair and toward the end of his term conceived of Art Basel Miami Beach. Keller, also Swiss, had been communications director under Rudolf and then, as director, turned the fair in Miami into the biggest art-based spectacle in the history of the United States. Spiegler, the fair’s first American director, came from magazine journalism (including contributing to ARTnews) and oversaw the opening of yet another fair after Art Basel’s parent company, MCH Group, purchased Art HK and rebranded it as Art Basel Hong Kong.

In short, Basel’s top brass do not typically arrive from the academy. Horowitz’s very appearance strikes a contrast. Spiegler favors shirts on the brighter end of the spectrum, wears a diamond stud in his ear, laces up spats each morning, and has a guy in Hong Kong with measurements on file. Horowitz is given to conservative dark-shade suits.

After studying at the University of Virginia, where he was admitted into the elite fraternity known as St. Elmo Hall, and a stint working on Wall Street, Horowitz earned a Ph.D. from London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. His doctoral thesis, which took on the contemporary-art market, was published in 2011 by Princeton University Press as the appendix-heavy tome Art of the Deal. The book, written mostly during the global recession, is a deeply informed if dry pop-academic jaunt into the start of an art bubble that now appears both prescient and dated. Inevitably, there are musings on the exploding phenomenon of the art fair, including a not-so-veiled critique of Keller’s deco-glow vision for Art Basel Miami Beach. Horowitz quotes Keller as saying, by way of explaining the new fair’s location, “There are some wonderful hotels and good restaurants, and it is hot there in December.”

“One may even suggest that contemporary art fairs constitute near perfect embodiments of the experience economy’s penetration into the cultural sector,” Horowitz continues in his book, his tone bordering on contempt. “Not only do they adjoin buyers and sellers of contemporary art goods and services, but they streamline the contemporary art experience into a tightly packaged event—a lifestyle—for the international business elite.”

The penetration that Horowitz refers to has, of course, only become more intense in the last half decade—witness, for instance, the rise of the massive, eye-grabbing work that invites thousands of selfies. This is a reality that Horowitz will have to wade right into this month, when Art Basel hits Miami for its 14th edition there.

In many ways, Horowitz has already proved his mettle. In 2008, when he was defending his thesis, he took a job at the Serpentine Galleries in London, working as an associate while being mentored by its co-director, the ubiquitous curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Horowitz was then in his early 20s. “He did an interview with me for his thesis, when he was still a student, and we were very impressed by him from the beginning,” Obrist recalled of Horowitz, on the phone from London. “He has so many talents,” Obrist went on. “He’s a great researcher and writer, a great interviewer, but also a great organizer. We were aware that he had an amazing skill for fundraising, but he made a brilliant contribution to the scholarly side of things at the same time. And it’s very rare that someone can work in this double capacity.”

This combination of rigorous intelligence regarding market currents and fluency in the less-rigorous cocktail-party talk of collectors pushed Horowitz toward the hustle of the art-fair circuit. Obrist, who admitted to having little knowledge of, or interest in, art fairs, said the shift made sense for Horowitz. In Obrist-ese, it all has to do with the art world’s “polyphony of centers.”

“From the very beginning he had this interest in the geographic expansion of the avant-garde,” Obrist said. “So it made sense that he went to run an art fair.”

The scene at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2014.

COURTESY MCH MESSE SCHWEIZ (BASEL) AG

The first fair Horowitz ran was a virtual one. In 2009 the art dealers James and Jane Cohan, along with business partners from the tech world Jonas and Alessandra Almgren, were gearing up to launch the world’s first online-only art fair, VIP (which James Cohan jokingly told journalists stood for “Viewing in Pajamas”). They hired Horowitz to run it. Breathless, anticipatory press flowed in from art websites hooked by the idea of “walking” into the Gagosian “booth” and the novelty of buying work over chat.

But the first iteration of the fair, in 2010, was rife with glitches and overwhelmed servers. After a mediocre second year VIP dropped the “Fair” from its title and became an online platform for art galleries. Here, however, it faced competition from a scrum of newly minted online marketplaces like Artsy, Paddle8, and Auctionata. Eventually it was purchased by the market site Artspace, after which VIP dissolved. (James Cohan did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

By then Horowitz had already landed at another fair, one perhaps equally beleaguered. In the fall of 2011 he was hired as the director of New York’s Armory Show. The Armory Show, founded in 1994 as the Gramercy International Art Fair and renamed in 1999, had been purchased in 2007 by the Chicago company Merchandise Mart Properties, which had scaled up the booth count, and dealers had been abandoning it in droves. And the British were coming: Frieze New York’s arrival on Randall’s Island, just a few months away when Horowitz assumed his post, further threatened the Armory’s standing.

“It’s no secret that Frieze was presented as competition to the Armory Show,” said Manuela Paz, the director of VIP relations at the Armory Show when Horowitz came on board (and now a membership director at New Art Dealers Association [NADA], an Art Basel Miami Beach satellite fair whose New York edition coincides with Frieze). “And it was a blessing in disguise for the Armory Show, because it was a game changer in terms of the experience of the fair. It kind of helped the Armory Show to take a harder look at what we were doing and how we could better the fair.”

As director of the Armory Show Horowitz built a VIP lounge with the Pommery flowing. He cut the fat from the bloated exhibitors list. He hired architects from Bade Stageberg Cox to rejigger the space at Piers 92 and 94 on Manhattan’s West Side. He personally convinced megadealer David Zwirner—one of the fair’s dropouts—to buy a booth again. By 2013 Larry Gagosian had also taken a booth and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was on hand to open the doors.

“Noah was dealt a very bad hand at the Armory—it was pretty much left for dead when Frieze New York launched,” said Spiegler. “But he succeeded by doing what [Los Angeles gallerist] Jeff Poe always calls ‘walking the yard’: talking to all the gallerists and delivering what people need.” The consensus among 2015 fairgoers was that Horowitz had shocked the Armory Show back to life. In an interview with the Art Newspaper, which described Horowitz’s tenure as a “quiet rehabilitation,” Horowitz said, “We think we can be the marquee fair in New York, and one of the best fairs in the world.”

That has now become someone else’s job. Horowitz has left a fair that sold $85 million worth of art in its 2015 iteration for one whose Swiss iteration alone sold $3.4 billion in the same year. “One of the main differences between Art Basel Miami Beach and the Armory is that, at the end of the day, the Armory is a New York institution with an international voice—but it’s still a New York institution,” said Horowitz. “Art Basel Miami Beach is the only true major international fair, certainly in terms of what we can do in the entirety of the U.S. and South America.”

“Of course it was a surprise,” said an Armory Show communications manager who had to spin Horowitz’s departure. “But it’s a fantastic career move for him. His contribution to the fair was tremendous, but he felt that the Armory Show is poised in a good place. He helped put us back on track and it was time for a new leader.” (Who that will be is still not clear. Horowitz left the top spot in July. When ARTnews went to press in early November, the Armory Show was nearing a decision.)

To many, Horowitz’s move made a lot of sense. “Noah is the right choice; he’s by far the best choice,” said David Hunt, who has worked with both Art Basel and Horowitz as a curator. “He comes out of a new era where you actually have to have some bona fides. You can’t be just some guy who came out of the fair industry: you need to come out of a background where you’re committed to art, where you study art.”

“I’ve known Noah for years because we were going to a lot of the same fairs and events all over the globle,” said Spiegler. “What struck me about Noah is that he loves art, he has a great knowledge of art both historical and contemporary, and he has a very international vision of the art world. And, of course, he has a really analytical view of the art market.”

The Miami Beach Convention Center has hosted Art Basel Miami Beach each December since 2002.

COURTESY MCH MESSE SCHWEIZ (BASEL) AG

At Cookshop, Horowitz, when asked how things were going, said he was settling in, shuttling between New York and Art Basel’s headquarters in Switzerland and taking a few trips to Mexico and South America to meet with collectors. “I think the brand power of Art Basel as an organization is really second to none in the art-fair landscape,” he said. (One fair’s continent-hopping footprint, however, does loom: Frieze, with its 12-year-old flagship in London and that fair’s three-year-old addition for older art, Frieze Masters; a sleek white tent on Randall’s Island that is Frieze New York; plus a new director for the Americas and Asia, Abby Bangser.)

The speculation about Art Basel launching another event somewhere in the world is consistently denied, though it ramped up again when the fair hired Horowitz. The potent rumor going around is that its sights are set on Los Angeles—now squarely in Horowitz’s domain. If so, Art Basel could be the first international fair to take advantage of Tinseltown’s white-hot gallery circuit. Adding fuel to the talk was the tony shindig, thrown by Art Basel in Horowitz’s honor and coinciding with the September opening of the Broad Museum, that was attended by Julian Schnabel, LACMA director Michael Govan, talent-agency heavyweight David Gersh, art flipper extraordinaire Stefan Simchowitz, and a slew of L.A.’s most prominent dealers.

Still, this is no proof of any Basel-related incursion into the City of Angels. Though he has indeed been in L.A. recently, Horowitz has also been to a dizzying number of foreign ports of call. In an e-mail in late October, Horowitz said that, in the last few weeks, he’d been to Miami, Bogotá, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Basel, and back to New York. “I look forward to a lot more of this in the future,” he wrote, from where on earth, I have no idea.

Nate Freeman is senior staff writer at ARTnews.

A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2015 issue of ARTnews on page 58 under the title “The Doctor Is In.”

New York’s Michael Rosenfeld Gallery will offer Norman Lewis’s Peep of Morning (ca. 1960).

©ESTATE OF NORMAN W. LEWIS/COURTESY MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY LLC, NEW YORK, NY

The 2015 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, the last major art fair of the calendar year, opens on Thursday, December 3, with previews beginning Wednesday, December 2. Comprised of nine different sections, the fair will include 267 leading international galleries from 32 countries. The main sector, called Galleries, features 191 of those galleries with a large portion coming from the United States and Latin America.

Highlights from the Galleries section include Norman Lewis at New York’s Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, Ivan Grilo at São Paulo’s Casa Triângulo, and Katie Paterson at Ingleby Gallery of Edinburgh, Scotland. (See our highlights from the other eight sectors in part 2 of ARTnews’s Art Basel Miami Beach preview.)

Click the photos below to see works on offer at the fair.

01

Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, New York

Robert Rauschenberg, Lobby Luck (Urban Bourbon Series), 1988, acrylic, enamel, and silkscreen on aluminum.
©ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FOUNDATION, LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY/COURTESY EDWARD TYLER NAHEM FINE ART

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Norman Lewis, Peep of Morning, ca. 1960, oil on paper.
©ESTATE OF NORMAN W. LEWIS/COURTESY MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY LLC, NEW YORK, NY

Meyer Riegger, Berlin and Karlsruhe, Germany

Eva Kotatkova, Emil, 2015, welded metal, plywood, and shoes.

Casa Triângulo, São Paulo

Ivan Grilo, Chico Rei [ou a verdade tropical está nas entrelinhas] (Chico Rei [or tropical truth lies between the lines]), 2015, print on cotton paper and engraving on Plexiglas, iron, and wood.
COURTESY CASA TRIÂNGULO

Sean Kelly, New York

Los Carpinteros, Duo Rojo, 2015, wood and metal.
©LOS CARPINTEROS/COURTESY SEAN KELLY, NEW YORK

Mazzoleni, London and Turin

Alberto Burri, Bianco CN 4, 1966, plastic, acrylic, and PVA glue.
©FONDAZIONE PALAZZO ALBIZZINI, COLLEZIONE BURRI, CITTÀ DI CASTELLO/COURTESY MAZZOLENI

Jorge Mara - La Ruche, Buenos Aires

Kazuya Sakai, Painting No. 49, from "Tokio Series," 1960, oil on canvas.
COURTESY JORGE MARA - LA RUCHE

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

Julia Dault, Moon Unit, 2015, acrylic on paper.
JASON WYCHE/©JULIA DAULT/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY, NEW YORK

Anton Kern Gallery, New York

Dan McCarthy, Rip Tide, 2015, low-fire clay and glazes with Lascaux paint and gold leaf.
©DAN MCCARTHY/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ANTON KERN GALLERY, NEW YORK

Mary Boone Gallery, New York

Laurie Simmons, Walking Toilet II (Color), 1989, pigment print.
COURTESY MARY BOONE GALLERY, NEW YORK

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Untitled (No. 395), 1956, oil on board.
COURTESY ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland

Katie Paterson, Candle (from Earth into a Black Hole), 2015, scented, layered candle.
BLAISE ADILON/COURTESY THE ARTIST, FRAC FRANCHE-COMTÉ, BESANÇON, FRANCE, AND INGLEBY GALLERY, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND

Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels

Lucas Blalock, Given holes and holes and houses and birds, 2014, archival inkjet print.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND RANDOLPHE JANSSEN, BRUSSELS

Hammer Galleries, New York

Pablo Picasso, Le joueur de clarinette, 1932, ink and wash on paper.
©2015 ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Nick Cave, Soundsuit, 2015, mixed media.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN, NEW YORK

Annely Juda Fine Art, London

David Hockney, Big Stone, 1962, oil on canvas.

Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Sean Scully, Yellow Junction, 1992, oil on canvas and steel.
©SEAN SCULLY/COURTESY GALERIE LELONG

Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy | Beijing | Les Moulins, France | Havana, Cuba

Ai Weiwei, Colored Vases, 2014
, Han Dynasty vases (206 BC – 220 AD) and industrial paint.
COURTESY GALLERIA CONTINUA, SAN GIRMIGNANO, BEIJING, LES MOULINS, AND HAVANA

Galeria Millan, São Paulo

Thiago Rocha Pitta, Ocean/Atlas, 2014, color photograph.

Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin and Leipzig, Germany

Carsten Nicolai, Zukunftsangst (Fear of the future), 2015, aluminum.
COURTESY GALERIE EIGEN + ART, LEIPZIG/BERLIN

CRG Gallery, New York

Alexandre da Cunha, Amazons (Painting XI), 2015, fabric dye and beach towel.

Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami

Maria Martinez-Cañas, Untitled 001, from "Vestigo Series," 2015, sanded gelatin silver print.
COURTESY THE ARTIST

Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York and Zurich

Brassaï, Nu, bas de résille, 1932, gelatin silver print.

Galeria Raquel Arnaud, São Paulo

Waltercio Caldas, A Tale, 2013, stainless steel, glass, and resin.

Sperone Westwater, New York

Frank Stella, "Ihr name war Mariane Congreve", 1998, mixed media on cast aluminum.
COURTESY SPERONE WESTWATER, NEW YORK

Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo

Yun Hyongkeun, Umber Blue, 1976, oil on linen.
COURTESY YUN SEONG-RYEOL AND BLUM & POE, LOS ANGELES, NEW YORK, AND TOKYO

Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Hassan Sharif, Ladies and Gentlemen, 2014, mixed media.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES, NEW YORK

Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich

Raúl Cordero, FR (II), 2013, oil on canvas.

Washburn Gallery, New York

Leon Polk Smith, Correspondence Red Blue, 1964, oil on canvas.

Noah Horowitz.

ERIC T. WHITE/THE ARMORY SHOW

Today Art Basel announced that it has tapped Noah Horowitz, the director of the Armory Show fair in New York since 2011, to be its Director Americas, which will put him in charge of Art Basel’s annual December edition in Miami Beach, Florida. (The company also runs fairs in Basel, Switzerland, in June, and Hong Kong, in May.)

Horowitz, who previously served as director of the ill–fated online-only VIP Art Fair and who penned a strong book about today’s art market, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, will be based in the United States and work alongside Adeline Ooi, Director Asia; Marco Fazzone, Director Resources and Finance; and Patrick Foret, Director Business Initiatives.

“I am delighted that Noah Horowitz will become Art Basel’s first Director Americas as we work toward our 14th edition in Miami Beach,” Art Basel’s director, Marc Spiegler, said in a statement released to press.

Horowitz joined the Armory Show as managing director and became its leader after co-founder Paul Morris departed in 2012. As director, he cut the number of exhibitors in the fair, which many felt was bloated, and worked to attract more top-shelf galleries to compete with the upstart Frieze New York fair.

“I am honored to join the Art Basel team and look forward to directing the fair in Miami Beach,” Horowitz said in a statement. “The Americas have been a leading center in the art world for many decades, and the region continues to show distinctive and ongoing growth in many different countries. I look forward to working with collectors and arts institutions throughout the two continents—from Canada to South America, and across the entirety of the United States—in an effort to bring the fair in Miami Beach to ever-greater heights.”

MARK WRAGG / iStockPhoto

NEW YORK—Over its 14-year history, the annual Armory Show art fair has grown into one of the biggest events in the art world. Now the fair has turned to online art marketplace Paddle8 for what organizers describe as a “virtual complement” that they hope will further expand its global reach and boost sales.

Similarly, the Association of International Art Photography Dealers (AIPAD) is teaming up with online sale site Artspace for its upcoming AIPAD photography show that runs from March 29–April 1 in New York. Artspace has also announced e-commerce and marketing arrangements with Expo Chicago, the Texas Contemporary Art Fair, artMRKT San Francisco and artMRKT Hamptons.

Other recently formed websites that aim to show and sell art include 1stdibs.com and artlog.com. Website art.sy.com (still in private beta testing) counts among its investors: Dasha Zhukova, founder of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow and girlfriend of billionaire art collector Roman Abramovich; Wendi Deng, wife of Rupert Murdoch; and Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter. Among its advisers are dealers Larry Gagosian and Marc Glimcher, president of the Pace Gallery. Art.sy’s senior advisor is John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Despite efforts at making major improvements for the second version of the online only VIP art fair, reviews of the recent edition (Feb. 3–8) were still mixed, with some dealers reporting solid results and follow-up, while others expressed disappointment at the lack of actual sales. A major difference in the recently announced Armory and AIPAD collaborations is the fact that the online aspect is an extension of the physical fairs.

Of the 221 galleries showing at this year’s Armory Show, which will run March 8–12 on Piers 92 and 94 on the far westside of Manhattan, 100 galleries, or slightly less than half of the total exhibitors participating, have joined Paddle8 in a collaboration that will bring the art fair online. Paddle8 recently announced that it has received $4 million in Series A funding from a group led by technology and luxury venture capitalists.

Collectors who sign up for Paddle8 can view, reserve and acquire work directly online. There is no cost for galleries to participate in this virtual aspect of the fair, though Paddle8 managing director Osman Khan explained, at a press conference, that for all sales actually made through the online platform, galleries will pay Paddle8 four percent of the overall sales price. Once a collector makes an offer on the site, a dealer has 72 hours to accept it. Buyers also have the option of purchasing insurance and shipping services when they acquire a work.

Paddle8 co-founder Aditya Julka explained that galleries have the freedom to showcase both works that they are bringing to the fair as well as works that are in their inventory. And while there is no limit on the number of works that a gallery can display on its respective page, he notes that “beyond 20 or 30 works, it becomes difficult for collectors to browse.”

Noah Horowitz, managing director of the Armory Show, said the fair hopes to reach new audiences and expand the presence of both its galleries and programming through the Paddle8 collaboration.

A week-long preview of the show opened on Paddle8 on March 1 and will run through March 18, thus running for a full-week after the physical fair wraps up.

Paddle8, which was launched last May, has participated in previous collaborations with NADA Miami Beach fair, in December, and Art Los Angeles Contemporary, in January. While Kahn described NADA results as “excellent,” he said Paddle8 also aims to maximize and “track interaction,” with collectors, as a measure of its success.

Artspace Aims to Expand AIPAD Audience

Artspace also views fairs as an important part of the art market. “We’ve been very focused on which fairs to associate with,” says Chris Vroom, co-founder of Artspace, which recently closed $2.5 million in Series A funding. “Photography is a fantastic medium for the web and a good kickoff for this part of our process.”

Artspace already has dozens of partnerships in place with high-profile museums and galleries such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim, ICA Philadelphia and galleries such as 303 Gallery, Marianne Boesky and White Cube, London.