Crypto News: Different definitions of fair

Welcome back to Pursuits Weekly! This week, James Tarmy in Paris is joined by managing editor Nicole Torres in London for a look at the world’s biggest culture stories, as well as ideas and recommendations around travel, tech and dining. Sign up here to get this newsletter every Saturday in your inbox.

The impervious rich

The work “Mothership, 2026” by artist Prune Nourry is on display in front of the Petit Palais The “Visionnaires” Exhibition is a Carte Blanche Given to artist Prune Nourry at the Petit Palais during Art Basel Paris 2026 on Oct. 21. Photographer: Luc Castel — Despite headlines dramatizing the French protests, VIP days at the fair went by without incident.

This week, even as protests and disturbances across France dominated headlines, Art Basel Paris welcomed a well-dressed scrum of collectors, undaunted by reports of unrest and vandalism. Filing cheerily into the soaring Grand Palais for VIP previews of the almost weeklong annual art fair, they were proof that international collectors can and will travel to buy art when the spirit moves them.

“The fair is a call to action and a galvanizing force at all times,” Noah Horowitz, Art Basel’s chief executive officer, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I think you see it especially now.”

By Thursday the reality of the protests had finally broken through. The fair’s organizers announced it would close on Friday evening — two days early, though well after most of the big collectors had come and gone — because of “potential demonstrations across Paris this weekend.” The fair stated: “This decision has not been taken lightly, and the safety of everyone involved in the fair remains our utmost priority.”

Art Basel began in Switzerland in 1970, co-founded by a group including the powerful art dealer Ernst Beyeler, as a means of drumming up new audiences for their programs of 20th century artists. It was conveniently located on the borders of France and Germany, and set at a time when Swiss bank accounts were still ubiquitous among a certain wealthy milieu. And it was the perfect space for an international group to briefly gather, socialize and buy interesting contemporary art.

But Basel, for all its charm, isn’t a particularly exciting place, and the fair’s canny expansions into Miami, Hong Kong and most recently Paris in 2022 have turned each iteration into a multiday, citywide event amid a circus of exhibition openings and fashionable parties. (What’s on view at each location changes every year, though historically the original Swiss fair has handled the biggest-ticket items. This year’s Paris edition has surely given Basel a run for its money.)

At the moment, the art world is obsessed with the bifurcation between healthy secondary-market sales of ultrahigh-end 20th century works (think Picassos, with prices stretching past the tens of millions of dollars) and the emerging market of new works by contemporary artists, which isn’t doing well at all.

If initial sales reports at Art Basel Paris are to be believed — and they should be taken with a healthy grain of salt, because dealers self-report sales and sales prices — this week did little to change the narrative.

Put simply, expensive art was on a tear. Mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth says it sold a painting of a table by Gerhard Richter and a painting of a shepherd by Georg Baselitz — both dated 1965 and each priced “in the region of” $10 million. David Zwirner gallery, which, like Hauser, has outposts around the world, reported selling a Richter for $8.5 million and a painting by Robert Ryman for $4 million. And Pace Gallery (slightly less mega these days but still a major player) says it sold a 1964 work by Jean Dubuffet for “over $5 million.” Many other galleries combined to report dozens of sales priced at well over $100,000.

There were leaner early reports from the smaller galleries selling cheaper art located on the fair’s second level. It’s a sign, perhaps, that despite various claims from protesters that they’d interrupt an art fair that “perpetuate[s] imperialism and the power of its transnational bourgeoisie,” the status quo is still very much in effect.

By the numbers

A mountain above the resort of Gudauri Photographer: Tomaso Clavarino for Bloomberg Businessweek — The good kind of slippery slope.

7,398

The acreage of Gudauri, the largest of the Republic of Georgia’s ski areas. (Park City, the biggest ski area in the US, checks in at 7,300 acres.) It’s a mix of bumped-up expert slopes and long, gentle groomers that’s worth trekking to if you’re looking for a skiing experience that feels genuinely new, Gordy Megroz writes.

$4,500

What it costs to set up a home on solar power in Nigeria, according to Yinka Ibukun. The country’s shift to solar is transforming how people shop, spend and live. Solar energy equipment is even turning up on wedding registries alongside traditional gifts such as bed linen and microwaves.

$600

The lodging credit Amex Platinum cardholders will receive after stays at certain Airbnb luxury rentals that last two nights or more, Paige Smith and Natalie Lung report.

$300

The starting price for the 8-inch model of Amazon’s new Alexa Tablet, which Chris Welch calls “the best sub-$1,000 Android tablet.”

€89

The price of the ramen tasting menu at Fuku Ramen in Amsterdam is just under $100. A bowl might include a course of torched fatty mackerel with slivers of barbecued leeks and burnt garlic oil. Kate Krader and Celeste Perri call it one of the best ramen bowls outside Japan, Los Angeles or New York.

Tech tycoon contempt

Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) in Columbia Pictures’ The Social Reckoning. Source: Sony Pictures — Jeremy Strong as the guy who invented Facebook.

There’s a new motif popping up in cinemas these days. While captains of industry have long made for easy movie bad guys, the difference now is how often the go-to villain is a real-life billionaire (or trillionaire), John Bowker observes. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman all feature prominently in new movies that are unambiguously negative about them. (In Musk’s case, twice: Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary, Musk, and Luca Guadagnino’s fictionalized tale of the early years of OpenAI, Artificial.)

That’s not even counting You Can See Everything, which was off to the races at the box office last weekend and opens wider in North America this weekend. The film, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, is a portrait of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes that feeds the “public’s collective fascination with grifters,” Miles Surrey writes for Bloomberg Opinion.

Nonfiction catnip

Several celebrities with new autobiographies — Readers will always love them.

Nonfiction book sales tend to be gloomy these days, but the celebrity memoir represents a rare exception, Alice Robb finds. The honor roll of recent or coming star autobiographies is impressive. Among the heavy hitters: Sylvester Stallone, Willie Nelson, Judi Dench, Danny Meyer, Dustin Hoffman and the late Gloria Steinem.

Few genres are as AI-proof as this one. “You’re buying that book because the author exists in the real world and you’re a fan of that person,” says David Kuhn, co-CEO of Aevitas Creative Management.

Maximum sax

Kirk Whalum Photographer: Evelyn Freja — Kirk Whalum, meme inspiration.

Forget the old stereotypes of a guy with a feathered mullet and sunglasses blowing his heart out. It took a long, long time, but Mike Jordan reports that saxophones are back. Yes, it’s safe to blast “Careless Whisper” again without anyone making fun of you.

He heard from amateurs who say the once-maligned woodwind helps them unplug from an overly digital world; Masego, a singer-saxophonist with hundreds of millions of listens on Spotify, on how the rise in popularity of African music aided this renaissance; and Kirk Whalum, whose blistering sax is at the root of this year’s “saxophones are getting louder” meme.

Victoria’s victorious

A Victoria’s Secret store in New York City. Photographer: Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg — Brick-and-mortar lives.

“Not so long ago, it was pretty easy to write off Victoria’s Secret as another past-its-prime mall brand destined for the dustbin of history,” writes Amanda Mull, in a look at the brand’s surprising turnaround over the past two years. This week, Victoria’s Secret basked in the afterglow of its once-again-annual runway show, but the brand has thrived under CEO Hillary Super, who took the helm in 2024. Foot traffic has returned, discounting has decreased, and year-over-year revenue is up for five consecutive quarters.

“Competitors like Skims have begun to experiment with brick-and-mortar, but they’ll likely never reach the broad accessibility of the Victoria’s Secret fleet on a pure numbers basis,” Mull argues.

One Very Specific Recommendation: Toggle Switches

toggle switch Source Getty Images — You’ve got only two choices.

Of all the knobs and buttons I encounter on a regular basis, by far my favorite is the on/off toggle switch on my KitchenAid burr coffee grinder, which clicks decisively in both directions.

It reminds me of my favorite light switch, in the guest room I was fortunate enough to stay in once at Ballynahinch Castle in Ireland. A good toggle switch is digital in the most physical and tactile way: It’s on or it’s off, and it jumps almost magically between the two states.

You’re unlikely to ever meet a pilot, or even a car driver, who doesn’t like having some toggle switches in the cockpit. It’s a design that’s lasted unchanged for well over a century, and it will never be surpassed.

The heart of what makes the toggle switch so satisfying is its bistable snap action, the way in which it has two stable states, with a very unstable zone in the middle. There’s no squishiness here: The minute you push it out of one state, it jumps immediately into the other, almost faster than your finger can move.

With a toggle switch, you never need to look to see whether you’ve flipped it; you can feel it and even hear it. It’s clean and unambiguous, and it comes with an undercurrent of space-age nostalgia, as though we’re all pilots on an Apollo mission. If it’s good enough for rock stars — the famous three-way pickup selector on Les Paul guitars has been toggled by all the greats — then it’s more than good enough for the rest of us. —Felix Salmon

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