Art Daddy’s 2025 Basel Survival Guide™
A Spiritually Necessary List of Tips, Tricks, and Emergency Tactics for Art Basel 2025
Reporting live and hard from Brooklyn so you don’t have to spiral in Switzerland alone.
Art Basel 2025 is upon us, and the heat isn't just weather—it’s spiritual, emotional, and deeply logistical. While half the art world is passed out in a salt bath at Les Trois Rois, the other half is falling into VIP quicksand disguised as a Thomas Demand installation. It’s humid. It’s humiliating. It’s art fair week.
Whether you're a booth daddy clinging to your last talking point, a mid-tier advisor faking fluency in German, or just wandering from Schaulager to Fondation like a post-capitalist ghost, the Art Daddy™ Social Club is here. Think of this guide as your emotional carry-on: deeply specific, semi-satirical, and entirely more useful than Basel Social Club’s drinks menu. Plus, it comes with concierge services no VIP card will ever offer you.
Keep reading for the essential survival tips that made Simon de Pury cancel dinner and whisper, “This is better than the VIP preview.”
🧂 1. Salt is essential. So is electrolytic shame control.By day three, your body will be made of champagne, gossip, and the faint smell of Frieze Cologne No. 6 (notes of floor vinyl and cocaine). Pack salt packets, electrolyte tabs, and an Advil chaser. If a curator offers you a mystery tincture in a repurposed eye drop bottle—say yes, but only if you’re within 15 meters of Raymond from The Hole.
Concierge Feature #1: Basel Boo Bag Drop™—a courier will discreetly deliver hydrating elixirs, collagen gummies, eye masks, and a laminated photo of Larry from 1997 to whisper affirmations to. You’re safe now.
🧍 2. Don’t go anywhere with a man who says “Let’s skip Unlimited.”
This is not just a tip—it’s a commandment. He will trap you in a hotel lobby explaining why Dan Colen is misunderstood while you’re trying to get to the Liste opening. Unlimited is your only true escape room: air-conditioned, full of massive installations, and just disorienting enough to ghost someone mid-sentence.
📱 3. If you lose your charger, your power, or your will to live—call it.
Basel is designed to drain. Your battery, your social bandwidth, your self-worth. Bring three chargers: one for your phone, one for your vape, and one for your emotional support Rabbit R1. Concierge Feature #2: Battery Daddy™—one text and we deploy a slick Swiss twink on an e-bike with a portable charger, a Ricola, and a line you can pretend you forgot to respond to. Instant recovery.
🖼️ 4. Never say “I love it.” Say “It’s an interesting install.”
This protects you from three threats: the gallerist, the collector, and the artist (who is always standing right behind you). Basel is a sonic minefield of mid opinions and nervous dealers. Neutrality is your armor, unless you’re talking about a Larry booth, in which case: go feral, go devotional, go full biopic.
🍽️ 5. Eat at least one meal sitting down.
I know you’re “booked.” But half of you haven’t sat since the Hauser dinner. You’re going to faint in front of a Sophie von Hellerman. Sit. Chew. Resist the urge to flirt with the server who’s seen every gallerist meltdown since Tuesday.
Concierge Feature #3: Table Daddy™—we’ll get you into the last booth at Volkshaus, sneak you a non-res table at Elsa, or bring a burrata directly to your emotional support curator. You deserve softness.
🧠 6. If you start dissociating at the Schaulager, lean in.
Basel is a psychological event. By day four, reality will feel like a VR loop of Anna Weyant whispering “institutional context” into your eye. The best thing to do is surrender. Put on sunglasses. Sit on the floor. Text Larry something cryptic.
Concierge Feature #4: Raymond on Speed Dial™—for border mishaps, overmixed nights, or “how do I find MDMA that won’t make me confess to my gallerist” emergencies. It’s Basel. Raymond knows the dark web and how to vibe check a Swiss villa.
✌️ 7. Exit the fair before your soul does.
The true elite leave early, with a sense of quiet drama and a SwissAir upgrade. Do not stay through Sunday unless you're trapped by a gallerist spiral, or you are the gallerist spiraling. Ghost gently. Blame overstimulation. Or just whisper “I’ve seen too much.”
You’re not crazy. Basel is. You’re not dehydrated. Basel is a thirst trap. You don’t need to prove anything. You just need to survive, sparkle, and maybe leave behind a whisper of chaos that smells like Gagosian cologne and regret.
Don’t chase the party. Don’t reenact The Row lookbook at the Rhine. And don’t, under any circumstances, DM Larry at 4 a.m.—unless it’s performance art and you’re willing to die for it.
Look, if you're still standing, still semi-hydrated, and only mildly traumatized by a VIP lounge run-in with a European collector who "doesn't believe in visas," you're doing better than most. Survival isn't glamorous, but it is chic. And if all else fails, blame the lighting at Art Unlimited and claim you were in a conceptual fugue state the entire time.
And when the fair ends—when the booths come down and the sun hits your hangover just right on that overpriced train to Zurich—know this: you endured. You thrived. You hallucinated a better world, then consigned it to a mid-size institution.
From my overpriced sublet in Brooklyn to your overpriced VIP pass in Basel, I see you. And I’m rooting for your return, emotionally intact and maybe just a little unwell. Reapply sunscreen. Exit through the gift shop. And never forget: Art Daddy loves you more than your dealer ever will.
Art Daddy sees all. Even the Basel burnout you haven’t admitted to yet. 🖤