Art Basel Diary: guests unwind in the Rhine, puppets rest in bunk beds and Bezos’s yacht gets hot

Bezos’s blazing yacht is hot stuff

A lightbox piece at Liste art fair showing Jeff Bezos’s yacht in flames is stopping people in their tracks and raising eyebrows. The AI work, by the Dutch artist Jonas Staal, is a “fiction and artistic provocation”, says a spokesperson for Laveronica gallery, which is showing the fiery image entitled The Death of Elon Musk and Other Stories (2025). The work, presented as a CNN Breaking News report, is timely, as hundreds of high-profile guests are due to descend on Venice later this month for the wedding of the Amazon gazillionaire to Lauren Sánchez—an event many Venetians reportedly consider an unwelcome disruption.

Art shippers on the ball in Basel

For some Art Basel stalwarts, the highlight of the fair is not the blue-chip art or impressive museum shows around town, but rather the annual friendly football game held at Landhof stadium between gallery and shipping technicians, which has been played since 2018. This year saw a team mainly from the art shippers Crozier play a mixed team from Acumen, Dietl, White Cube and Victoria Miro. The Crozier team went down two goals in the first half, but pulled it back with four goals from Danny Greenway to win 6-3. The event, which took place on Thursday, provides a footie fix before the Women’s Euro tournament kicks off in Basel next month. Back of the net!

Swimming with the fisches

Everyone who comes to Basel feels like cooling off in the Rhine, especially after a sweaty day spent browsing the fair aisles. Alexandra Steinacker-Clark, host of the popular All About Art podcast, plans to take a dip for the first time and is sensibly joining the Basel Art Summer Camp guided group swim (20 June). “For a SFr20 ticket, you can go with the group, and they provide you with a Wickelfisch dry bag, which I want just for the name alone. They are meeting by the Museum Tinguely, so I am guessing that is a good place to get in the water,” she says.

Puppets in bunk beds turn heads

A pair of puppets sleeping on a makeshift bunk bed are a talking point at Art Basel, with multiple mystified fairgoers stopping to peruse the bizarre pair of fluffy beings on show at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi. The shaggy duo, Kwik & Kwak (2024), asleep against the light of a cast-iron lantern, are the creation of the Belgian duo Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, who unveiled the woolly beasts in a 2004 performance in the project space Etablissement d’en face in Brussels. The puppets have lived on and even have their own daily routines outlined on an accompanying wall text. Kwik (50) and Kwak (40) should be fed, for instance, cereals with apples at 9am and German biscuits at 2pm (chicken with chocopasta is another tasty option).

Verse and veal at the Kunstmuseum

One of the most lavish dinners held this week took place in the sumptuous setting of the Kunstmuseum Basel courtyard. Guests dined al fresco on tender veal and chocolate mousse courtesy of Pierre Sigg, the Swiss entrepreneur behind the Sigg Foundation which is showing works on the Digital Art Mile in Basel. An evening highlight was a performance by the Kalmyk-US artist Sasha Stiles who recited a poem generated partially by AI, which was also shown on a screen. Stiles’s verse included the following: “This screen is a mirror that flinches when I look too long, as if it knows I’m not all here.”