I finally got a moment to catch a breath as my time at Art Basel 42 is coming to an end. First thing first, the work that caught my eye and that I would have liked to walk out of Art Basel with is this drawing (poor phone photo below) by Piet Mondrian. I didn’t dare inquire for the price. I still vividly remember a Mondrian show I saw in 2002 at d’Orsay that retraced his entire career.

We have an iPhone app at Art Basel, part of our technology preview. You can download it by searching for “art.sy” in the app store. If you’re at Art Basel, find a painting, for example a blue untitled painting by Joan Mitchel at the Gallerie Thomas (Hall 2.0, Booth F13) and try to identify it with the app. If you aren’t at Art Basel, you can just use one of the works that loads on the front page. Tap a work and use the little six-arrowed strange icon to see related works at Art Basel. It’s doing a genome search - a much more fun way to navigate the fair than A-Z! Here’s a screenshot by someone who identified a Richard Serra work.

Talking about Serra, we had an incredible dinner at the Beyeler Foundation yesterday, home to a jaw-dropping Brancusi and Serra show.

The event was hosted by Dasha Zhukova and Wendi Murdoch and sponsored by Credit Suisse and with a performance by Christian Marclay [read this and this]. The food was particularly delicious, the wine very good (the red was a St. Julien) and the desert melted down as hot chocolate was poured over it. The attendees included the crème de la crème of the art world, and we had the nerve wrecking privilege to introduce Art.sy with a couple of hours of live demos. We put the site in the hands of our guests and let them play with the genome search. I saw a lot of people really excited about what they saw, but I will let them speak for themselves. This morning we continued with more demos to our gallery partners at the Trois Rois before everyone headed to Art Basel. I talked non-stop and answered a ton of questions related to genome search technology, while the art team was being grilled on complex connections between contemporary art movements. Both were tough and incredibly knowledgeable audiences, I continue to be humbled about how little I actually know about art.

It was super exciting to see a whole bunch of people actually use the product that my team has worked so hard on in the past few months. We’ll probably continue to be in a closed alpha for a little while, but I think we’re on a good trajectory for opening the site up for an initial user base soon.