Katy Donoghue

This week, Basel is the center of the art world, and you feel it the moment you walk in. The 2026 edition of Art Basel brings together close to 290 galleries under one roof, and the density is what gets me every year. Works of museum quality sit a few steps from artists most people haven’t heard of yet, and somehow it all holds together. It is the one fair where you can see a major historical piece, a blue-chip painting, and a young voice making their first real noise, all in the same afternoon.

It is increasingly common to find fashion houses at the world’s art fairs; it is rarer to find a fashion artistic director there as a curator. At this year’s Art Basel in Basel, Camille Miceli, the artistic director of Pucci, has done exactly that, assembling a focused solo presentation of paintings by Yves Laloy (1920–1999) at the stand of Paris’s Galerie 1900-2000.

For nearly six decades, Paula Cooper Gallery has stood as one of the most influential forces in contemporary art. This week in Basel, that enduring contribution received a new form of recognition as Art Basel announced the New York gallery as the inaugural recipient of its Gallery Legacy Award, a distinction created to honor galleries whose commitment to artists extends far beyond exhibitions and sales.