Fun and responsibility: Seeing stars – at Art Basel

If you look at the sun for too long you can go blind. Sometimes you don’t lose your sight completely, but instead the retina is irreversibly perforated. You then literally see holes – that is, in the image that you take to be reality, black dots are arranged at fairly even intervals.

Even when you faint, you see dots, “stars,” as they say. I don’t know exactly what these little stars are all about, but they are familiar to me – they move with the movement of your own head, back and forth, up and down. Sometimes they change color. It becomes clear that they are a shift in perception, a kind of illusion.

When I think of the concept of “seeing stars,” cartoons come to mind: individual cartoon characters sitting on the floor after being punched in the face or getting into a fistfight (shown as a drawn cloud of dust). Stars are sketched above her head, arranged in a circle. They are intended to illustrate their confusion.

My experience is that powerlessness is almost always a relief. When you wake up from it, the stars are gone.

On the way to Art Basel, I smuggle several works of art from Berlin into the small city, which swells to several times its size during the fair – in terms of crowds, that is. The city remains small, you meet people everywhere, like at a festival. The Rhine has also swollen. This year you can’t swim in it because of the flood. I play Tetris on the ICE train in a panic – the bags look so obviously like art transport, like a snake that has swallowed a sheep.

When I arrive home after the first day at Art Basel, I see dots. I didn’t get hit in the face, but I still feel a bit like that. I learn the term: Retinal Information. The eye’s retina can only store a certain amount of visual information – a day at the trade fair clearly contains more images than it can process. At the end of the day, you are somatically close to fainting.

So I’m lying on the bed, colored stars and lightning flashes flying back and forth in front of my closed eyes. I let my thoughts wander; they can hardly be controlled anymore. I spontaneously think about the arbitrary moment of the art market – and the fact that here, too, it is mostly about asserting uniqueness and producing unique pieces. I think of the fact that the halls of Art Basel are set up like playing fields, specifically like a game of roulette. A game of chance in which you don’t know whether the ball will fall into your own hole or choose your own number – or not. Rien ne va plus. I learn that most of the works are sold in the first half hour – then a few more in the last half hour. Not much happens in between. Nevertheless, it is important to be present at all times – you never know.

I think of the theory of the “black swan,” another animal between land and water. The Black Swan is what a Roman satirist from the 1st century AD calls the power of highly unlikely events – today it is also a term from finance: speculation on a very sudden event that has extreme consequences on the market, positive or negative. On the stock market, hope for the improbable is a value in itself, writes literary scholar Joseph Vogl.

I once heard (and have also mentioned it before in this column) that the art market has a prophetic quality – that is, that you can read the development of other markets from it because it always happens a few years or months before.

The people waiting are arranged in a serpentine line in front of the entrances to the trade fairs, at the stands with free drinks and in front of the toilets. But: The queues are not half as bad as at the opening of the Venice Biennale, a good month before. There is a simple reason for this: when something needs to be sold, the organization suddenly functions much better.

As I leave the mess hall, I stumble, half blind, as if looking through a curtain, into a boxing match at the Basel Boxing Club, which is taking place on the square in front of the barracks. I watch the fighters, most of whom are still underage, for hours until they are knocked out. o. go. They look like cartoon characters with stars sketched above their heads. Their trainers give them water through straws and sometimes they have to be carried out of the ring.

I think again of desire, which by definition must remain unfulfilled, and of how another old German philosopher uses the mythology of boxing as an equivalent for love. Two lovers are described here as two equally strong fighting partners: strong enough to kill each other and only therefore able to let each other live.