For her annual artist interview at Art Basel, the exuberant editor and media doyenne Tina Brown had a tough nut to crack in Tino Sehgal, who is renowned for his “constructed situations”. On Tuesday, at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst before a crowd that included the artist and brewing heir Daphne Guinness, the collector and hotelier André Balazs and the irrepressible British curator Sir Norman Rosenthal, Sehgal set a sober tone from the start when he declared: “I don’t think of myself as a person with humour.” They went on to discuss his love of the Russian choreographer George Balanchine, why humans are the best medium (we are “the most complex material on the planet”) and why he hates the kind of “theatre lighting” that was blazing down on him that night. After 20 minutes, Brown drew things to an abrupt close by saying: “We could talk all night, but now I think we’re going to construct a situation called dinner.”
Selfie-serving?
No one understands the art of self-promotion quite like Emmanuel Perrotin and Takashi Murakami. The dealer-artist duo invited a Manga-fied gaggle of “cosplayers”—people dressed as their favourite characters—from Japan to pose with guests on Tuesday night at an Instagram-ready party on the Rhine. The artists Daniel Arsham, Wim Delvoye and Gregor Hildebrandt were among those who boarded “Das Schiff” to hear the announcement of Murakami’s forthcoming show at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum (31 October-6 March 2016) and his solo stand at Galerie Perrotin. The man of the hour even snapped selfies with a few lucky guests—including this diarist.
Eat dirt
The French artist Davide Balula is a tastemaker in every sense of the word, and his ice-cream project for this year’s Parcours may make the old tune You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream ring true for all the wrong reasons. The artist has teamed up with the Michelin-starred chef Daniel Burns to create a menu that is an “edible retrospective” of recipes inspired by Balula’s earth-toned paintings. The all-natural ingredients used to create these unique varieties of icy treats include algae, sediment, scorched wood and dirt. Guten Appetit!
Say cheese
If you go down to the woods today… you may find a cheese-box factory. The artist Alexandre Joly is showing a sophisticated sound piece in the Audemars Piguet lounge at Art Basel that was recorded in the woods and shrubbery near the watchmaker’s headquarters in Le Brassus. “It was fun, running around the small rivers,” he says. Among the birds, bees and brooks, he discovered a small studio that manufactured wooden boxes used as containers for Vacherin Mont-d’Or cheese. “I like cheese, so I bought some,” he says. And, in the best Swiss tradition, he melted the tasty treat in a fondue (and everyone lived happily ever after).
All loved up
Basel is bringing the love this year with three romance-themed events. On 21 June, the Art Basel Salon will host “What’s Love Got to Do with It”, a discussion about artist couples who collaborate, with the writer Stephanie Bailey and the artists Paul Kneale, Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano. Today, the local gallery Salts is inviting a dozen artists to perform a work with their romantic partners for “WLGTDWI”, an acronym for the aforementioned song by the singer—and Swiss citizen—Tina Turner. And those with a more cynical view can see the travelling Museum of Broken Relationships, on show at the Historisches Museum Basel until 30 August.
Tea with a toxic twist
The UK artist Dexter Dalwood has tackled a rather delicate subject—the poisoning of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko—in his latest series of paintings, which are on display with Simon Lee Gallery at the fair. Litvinenko died of radioactive poisoning in November 2006, after drinking tea containing a fatal dose of the radioactive substance polonium-210 in a London hotel. One image, Green tea (2015), shows an exquisite tea set smashed to smithereens. “It’s not a political statement so much as a rumination on an apparent London assassination. I call it a disrupted tea,” Dalwood says, adding with a touch of candour: “Just like the Last Supper.”
Courbet 2.0
Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World is without doubt a key touchstone for painters today. The latest artist to be inspired by Courbet’s no-holds-barred masterpiece is London-based Jason Brooks, whose more abstract Origin VIII is on display with Marlborough Contemporary at Art Basel. So how has the artist reinterpreted the greatest ever picture of a woman’s genitals? “Brooks seeks to escape a linear relationship with this history by yielding up control of his source material in order that the works [do] not present one single perspective, but bring others’ subjective desires of form and colour into his field of vision,” reads a terribly illuminating press statement.