After a lockdown and new ownership, where does Art Basel go from here?
For MCH Group, it was a summer of dread. In spring 2020, the Swiss holding company had postponed indefinitely what had once been its cash cow: the struggling Baselworld watch and jewelry fair. Meanwhile, Art Basel, the world’s most important modern and contemporary art fair and MCH’s crown jewel, was on lockdown, able to offer only online viewing rooms to art dealers who would normally pay upward of $100,000 for physical booths.
In June, the Swiss press was reporting that capital was urgently needed at MCH, and that it looked like a private investor was the company’s only hope. Slowly it emerged that executives were in talks with one: news broke in September that James Murdoch, heir to a controversial media fortune, had swept in, and would get a controlling stake in MCH Group, its Swiss convention center, its live-marketing firm, and a world-famous art fair.
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