As the “Olympics of Art” (New York Times) the Art Basel is a must for collectors, gallery owners, art experts and critics, curators and art lovers throughout the world. Its attractiveness for investors can be explained by, among other things, its special quality as a “market for symbolic goods” which always hold out the promise of “cultural capital”, symbolic profits and an increase in social capital alongside the expected economic returns.
The Art Basel offers the unique and hitherto unused opportunity to study the global art market ethnographically on the spatial and temporal planes and to illuminate it by means of a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods.