The $12 Warhol and the $120,000 Art Fair Booth

Switzerland’s summer art bonanza begins today. Zurich Art Weekend opens first; from Sunday, Basel’s fairs follow.

Leading them is the fifth edition of Basel Social Club, this year in an office block near the train station – a nightclub in the parking garage, a wellness centre, fine dining and 160 galleries showing everyone from Marina Abramović and Maurizio Cattelan to Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Andy Warhol.

“We're hard to define because we're a new model,” says co-founder Robbie Fitzpatrick, a gallerist with a nomadic practice. “Because we're independent, we can rewrite our own rules.”

“A nightclub that doubles as an art-market platform is as radical as it gets,” says Fitzpatrick. “It's meant to provoke questions, to seize this moment of transformation: the crises we're living through geopolitically, socially and financially, all of which affect the traditional models of the art world.” Swedish pop star Robyn performs on Tuesday night.

Switzerland’s art market is full of surprises. The world’s fifth-largest – behind the US, UK, China and France, ahead of Germany – it accounts for roughly 3% of the global market, with a population of 9.1 million. Last year it enjoyed stronger growth than any major market, up 13%. Dealers posted a 25% upswing, according to the 2026 Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report. Eva Presenhuber, who runs galleries in Zurich and Vienna, says the figures match her experience: “When global crises hit, Switzerland is a safe harbour most of the time.” Auctions grew more sedately, up 6% to $828m; German auction sales fell 17% to $626m over the same period. The growth is unevenly spread. “The euphoria in the lower and middle segments is gone,” says Cyril Koller, director of Koller auctions, who hammered down last year's top sale, a $7.7m Signac.

Valentina Vaccarella, Casino, 2026, inkjet, oil, acrylic, holes and gel medium on canvas, 193 × 127 cm. Photo: Silke Briel. Courtesy the artist and sentiment

The strength is structural, not cyclical, underpinned by private collectors and Switzerland’s largely domestic approach to institutional collecting. “The mix of a strong collecting tradition, first-rate institutions and political stability has kept us steady compared with the more volatile global market,” Presenhuber says. James Koch, Partner and Executive Director at Hauser & Wirth, says in an email: “As a Swiss-founded and Swiss-owned gallery, our roots here run deep, and so do our relationships. Many of our collector friendships extend back decades, and we are also seeing new generations of international collectors for whom Switzerland is equally formative: people who have been travelling here since childhood, for whom this country is part of their own history.”

The country appeals to the younger generation of collectors too. Sentiment, a Zurich gallery founded in 2025, benefits directly. “Being a Swiss gallery with Swiss artists helps – the Canton and City of Zurich buy from us, and Pro Helvetia is supporting our Liste booth,” says Sentiment’s co-director Olga Generalova.

A top-heavy answer

Among dealers with turnover below $500,000, the Art Basel and UBS report notes 30% reported declining sales, up from 23% in 2024.

“For us, 2025 was a year during which we had to almost try new things and see what sticks,” says Lorenzo Bernet, founder of Zurich’s suns.works. “Sadly, we haven't found out what has stuck yet.”

“I’d say we’re breaking even. I’m earning enough to grow the gallery. If I'm being precise, I'm losing money, because I'm not counting my time and not paying myself,” adds Pier Stuker, founder of Blue Velvet, which joins Art Basel for the first time this year with a Monika Meys solo in Statements, a monumental Marius Steiger in Unlimited, plus a presentation at Basel Social Club.

Switzerland is not immune to the structural disparity that besets markets worldwide: headline growth does not always reach the next generation of gallerists. Two markets, one country.

suns.works presents, The Midsummer Game Show, 2o26. Courtesy: suns.works

Where are the buyers?

For years, the art market drank the Kool-Aid that bigger meant better: more locations, more artists, more collectors, more staff. It copied the luxury industry’s mass-distribution model without a mass-market product or a scalable business model. Demand didn't keep pace; new buyers proved hard to find. Last week the blue-chip dealership Pace Gallery cut 50 artists and 50 staff. CEO Marc Glimcher called the system “too big, too commercial, too impersonal and too corporate.” Pace had already retreated from Superblue, its experiential venture aimed at the perma-scrolling millennial crowd, in 2022.

In a 2025 Texte zur Kunst roundtable, Glimcher laid out the maths.

“When our Instagram account passed a million people, we were just flabbergasted. We might have [a] thousand clients who are really active. Maybe we have 8,000 or 9,000 people in a database, and maybe we're selling 2,000 objects a year... Or we used to. But we have a million followers now, maybe 1.2 million or something like that.”

“At the top end – which ultimately decides whether an auction year was good – it comes down to a few significant pictures and collections, just as at Sotheby’s or Christie’s,” Koller says.

“The [Pace] model is dangerous for the system as a whole, because it ramps up commercial pressure on small and mid-sized galleries. The costs are enormous. Many are forced to close, which drains artistic diversity,” says Presenhuber.

Stuker is blunter: “They turned a gallery into a corporate industry and a lifestyle company.”

Next-generation woes

What does this mean for the pillars of the artworld: the white-cube vernissage, the gallery dinner, the art-fair booth? All are under pressure. Bernet sees “a younger, affluent generation increasingly alienated by the gallery world.” Fitzpatrick adds: “The established order maintains the status quo by doubling down on traditional models. Art fairs tend to look one way with little adaptation. Galleries operate with a strict linear formula. Very few spaces have an appetite for a new direction.”

Art buying comes with age and increased purchasing power, which explains the lower price points that younger collectors are spending at, despite changed habits. “It's hard to buy when you're 40. At 50, it can happen, but in a normal career, if you haven't inherited much, the house and the family come first – and art somewhere at the end,” Koller explains.

Established Swiss and European collectors take longer to decide: tastes are set, walls are full. “The younger generations are much easier. You're on the same level, the same age, you share interests,” says Generalova, who has dropped the gallery dinner for more intimate formats. “Dinners are too expensive, and people buy without having been invited [to the dinner],” she says.

The contemporary fair emerged in the 1970s to expand a gallery’s buyer base and put cities on the map. At the first Art Basel in 1970, founders Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt insisted on international participants. It was informal: works hung higgledy-piggledy on booth walls and in poster racks, collectors threw beer-and-sausage parties in their gardens, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle performed. Today it is regimented, with tight selection, high costs and a strictly segmented VIP clientele. The most expensive booths run to $120,000 for six days, before bespoke electricity, lighting and walls. For a large gallery, that is a small investment that offers a large return. In 2025, Hauser & Wirth reported sales of $30m per the Artnet Art Basel sales report – a highly profitable booth. Presenhuber is more guarded: “Fairs matter for winning new clients and raising your profile. But they’re no longer just venues for quick sales; they’re meeting points. Taking part is expensive and exhausting, so we choose carefully.”

Karen Kilimnik, the Swedish workroom, 2010, water soluble oil color on canvas, 20.5 x 25.5 cm. Photo: Lance Brewer © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and Sprüth Magers

The younger gallerists – Bernet, Stuker, Generalova – sell works priced between $5,000 and $25,000. That makes an art fair a necessary gamble: at that price point, “you have to sell a lot of work to finance the gallery's infrastructure,” says Generalova. Raising an artist’s prices depends on demand, exemplified by shows in other cities, early museum interest and critical notice. “An uphill battle,” says Bernet. Fairs buy visibility as much as sales. Stuker built Blue Velvet’s client base through them: “Since the beginning we were all in — New York, Brussels, Italy, Artissima, ARCO,” he says. “The quality of the fair matters.”

Is the model right for the next generation of buyers? “Traditional fairs are losing their punch, because we all now know how it feels to browse pictures on a neutral background,” says Bernet. “Visiting a fair ten years ago was ecstatic. Now, for most people, it might feel like browsing your phone.”

Basel Social Club (BSC), in its fifth edition, is emphatically not a fair but – as the name says – a place to mingle with a network. “There’s a whole new generation of collectors the art world needs to adapt to,” says Fitzpatrick. “They feel at home in our space in a way they might not at traditional fairs, which can be intimidating and hard to penetrate.” The experiential angle – wellness, a nightclub, informal dining among the art – tracks a broader shift: “People don't necessarily want to consume more stuff, but they're willing to spend exorbitant amounts on experiences.” At BSC there's no salesperson to dodge: booths carry QR codes and browsing is discovery-led.

Suns.works runs its booth as a lottery stand — 10 Swiss francs, about $12, a ticket. “We might be one of the first galleries to introduce the model of a game show to our sales model. With us, you could win a Warhol,” says Bernet.

Bernet also backs Gallery House, a ten-day showcase of young Swiss galleries in a former office building near the Löwenbräu art centre, mixing curated exhibitions, wall-less booths and a magazine-sponsored hangout. “It's a nod to the social club, where you can meet billionaires, families, kids, dogs and cool art kids all at once,” he says. “Zurich, to my knowledge, never had a proper fair – or never one that spoke to the community internationally and locally.”

The most expensive work at Art Basel in 2025, the late David Hockney’s Mid November Tunnel (2006) at Annely Juda Fine Art, sold for between $13m—$17m; in 2022 the top work, Louise Bourgeois’s monumental spider sculpture at Hauser and Wirth fetched $40m. Still, Koch resists the year-to-year scorecard: “It is tempting to measure the health of a market year on year, but the deeper story of collecting culture in Switzerland is found elsewhere – in institutional history, in generations of progressive international engagement, in the figures who shaped how the world understands art.”