On a sunny Thursday in Basel, Switzerland, art fair Art Basel hosted a ceremony celebrating the 36 shortlisted medalists for its newly created Art Basel Awards, developed in partnership with Boss. Hosted at the city’s medieval town hall Rathaus Basel, followed by a reception at Kunstmuseum Basel — which houses the oldest public art collection in the world — the awards hope to establish a platform to celebrate excellence in the art world, while differentiating Art Basel from its competitors.
The awards have pulled in more visitors than usual, the organisation says, especially as there is currently no existing major art awards platform. The city was buzzing as the art world descended on Basel to see works from Picasso and Duchamp to emerging talent like Ukrainian artist Sana Shahmuradova Tanska and Iranian artist Armineh Negahdari. Art world insiders jumped on trams to see a new Steve McQueen exhibition at art museum Schaulager and to pop by smaller fairs nearby including Basel Social Club and Liste — and some even started their days by floating down the Rhine river amid the summer heat.
Anonymous industry observers nominated candidates who were then reviewed by an internationally renowned jury of art curators and museum directors that selected the shortlist, including Sharjah Art Foundation’s Hoor Al-Qasimi, Kunstmuseum Basel’s Elena Filipovic and Serpentine’s Hans Ulrich Obrist, chaired by Art Basel’s director of fairs and exhibition platforms, Vincenzo de Bellis, who spearheaded the awards.
Among the shortlisted medalists are fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, British Black arts pioneer Lubaina Himid and Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei. Those shortlisted will peer review each other and vote to select 12 gold medalists, who will be revealed in December during Art Basel Miami Beach. It’s uncommon to see a peer review process for an awards ceremony, but Art Basel was keen to create a structure that’s less top-down and more democratised.
In recent years, Boss has ramped up its sports sponsorships spanning Formula One, tennis, cycling and golf, among others, but the brand has an art history as well: from 1996 to 2022, it hosted the Hugo Boss Prize for contemporary artists in partnership with New York’s Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. Awarded every other year, the prize consisted of $100,000 and the opportunity for artists to showcase in a solo exhibit at the Guggenheim. The Art Basel Awards mark the company’s return to art prizes.
For fashion labels, partnerships across the art world build cultural cachet and help expand the brand’s legacy. Fashion designers have a long history of collaborating with artists, dating back to Elsa Schiaparelli’s partnership with Salvador Dalí in the 1930s. Some of the most iconic fashion and art tie-ups throughout history include the 1965 Yves Saint Laurent collection paying tribute to Piet Mondrian’s abstract paintings, the 2003 collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami (which was relaunched this year), and Alexander McQueen’s collaboration with Damien Hirst on limited-edition skull scarves in 2013.
Aside from collaborations, fashion brands from Miu Miu to Dior have been expanding their presence at art fairs like Art Basel and Frieze in recent years, hosting onsite pop-ups and installations. As opposed to an external partnership that generates buzz, presence at art fairs signal fashion’s place within the art world while tapping into a high-spending demographic.
At the Art Basel Awards, two gold medalists in the emerging category and two artists in the established category will receive $50,000 in unrestricted funding, with emerging artists receiving the chance to showcase at an art institution and established artists receiving large-scale commissions for Art Basel Switzerland. The winner of the Boss Outstanding Achievement Award will receive $100,000, with half going towards a cause or a community chosen by the recipient and the other half funding a future project co-developed with Boss. The Icon Award winner will receive $50,000 to donate in their name to a cultural or educational organisation of their choosing, and those industry heavyweights will also serve as mentors to rising talent. There are also prizes celebrating curators, museums and institutions, media and storytellers, patrons, allies and cross-disciplinary creators.
Here, Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz and Hugo Boss CEO Daniel Grieder discuss the awards, their partnership and how the worlds of fashion and art can learn from one another to overcome a challenging market.
Vogue: Noah, why did Art Basel decide to launch the Art Basel Awards?
Noah: We’ve been searching for our North Star vision and thinking about the role we play, not only today, but the one we want to play in the future. For us, that tethers around creating opportunities for artists, makers and other actors in the arts ecosystem more broadly through our platforms and channels. It became acutely clear that there is not a global platform for recognising excellence in our industry, and we felt we could meaningfully and organically fill that.
Vogue: What were the considerations when setting up the awards?
Noah: We wanted to be able to provide very tangible and tailored support to the individual medalists through media campaigns, content created around them, and then prizes and a system that materially contributes to their day-to-day through different grants for the gold medalists. The other thing, which was important regarding our conceptualisation, was trying to reinvigorate the art fair weeks themselves through the creation of these moments. In a world where there’s more and more fairs and events, we wanted to create something that felt singular.
Vogue: Daniel, tell me more about why Boss decided to join as a partner. What drew you to the awards?
Daniel: I think that art, fashion and music come together well in general because they’re about creativity and culture. Boss had been connected to art for 30 years with the Guggenheim presence, which we lost over the past few years. We are a heavy sponsor in sport and music, but we felt the element of art was missing. As an international company, we were also looking for an international partner, so who could be better than Art Basel?
Vogue: Noah, from your side, why choose a fashion brand as a partner?
Noah: Boss has real pedigree here. This isn’t just any partner, it’s a partner who delivered what was, at the time, the industry leading prize. That memory recall in our world is very real. Boss is a brand that is very active in the space. We looked at the types of brands we could work with in a world in which younger people are coming to the art space and a landscape in which they are also looking at the worlds of fashion, sport and other outlets for creative inspiration, so it felt natural to bring on a brand like Boss to co-create this.
Vogue: You’ve both been touching on this idea of the art and fashion worlds colliding. As the two continue to overlap, how do you see the roles of heritage fashion brands and art institutions evolving?
Daniel: I think those worlds can learn from each other. I always think about this Ed Ruscha painting that’s hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York that says “Boss” — clearly our brand can come together with art! It’s not just about partnerships, but also about getting inspired. We do a lot of collaborations with individual people like Naomi Campbell or David Beckham, but we’ve never had an artist who helped create our capsule collections. There are endless opportunities for us to link up, and by doing this, we will learn where it can take us.
Vogue: And how do you see the role of art institutions evolving, Noah?
Noah: I think we have to be thoughtful and agile about understanding where our audiences are these days and where they’re coming into contact with contemporary culture. Formerly, it was about simply going to museums or galleries, but contemporary culture is lived and breathed beyond that. There are younger people coming to the table through social media or their favourite musicians or athletes. The zeitgeist has shifted and for many years the post-war contemporary art market has really been setting the agenda in our industry from a value standpoint. So we have to be agile and think more laterally. With the Art Basel Awards, we’re really excited about the potential to get in front of new audiences and inspire new people along the way.
Daniel: And if I could add, when we talk about more accessibility, we have 600 stores around the world — so maybe we could even offer one of these medalists a pop-up store, or we could turn one of our stores into an art gallery for a certain time.
Noah: I’m going to hold you to that!
Daniel: This is what I mean, the opportunities for creativity are endless and there’s plenty that the world hasn’t seen yet.
Vogue: This idea of adding more touchpoints for the customer is interesting, especially because we know that the luxury fashion market and art market both experienced a slowdown in 2024. What do you think each market could learn from the other, and could partnerships like yours help market conditions moving forward?
Noah: Fashion offers a lot for us in terms of scale and speed, it’s a very agile industry in ways that sometimes the art market can feel a bit slow and conservative. What Daniel mentioned a moment ago about lowering the barriers to entry is a very important point, and I think the art world can really learn from that — how to be more agile, think more broadly and understand our audiences better. Buyers of art are getting younger and younger, and general consumers of contemporary culture are also more diverse than they’ve ever been, so the art world can learn a lot from fashion around how to navigate that.
Daniel: What fashion could learn from art is to create more icon pieces that stand for a certain character or inspiration. Fashion changes every season — that’s good and bad. Every season you get to create a new story for the customer so it’s a storytelling business, but I think there are some iconic pieces in art where I’d say they stand for more than just a seasonal collection.
Vogue: Reflecting again on the awards, what is the significance of creating a platform that uplifts talent within a market that is experiencing more subdued conditions?
Noah: It can be a bit of a lightning bolt in the market in terms of focusing attention — the media campaigns and excitement around what’s happening is fundamentally important in raising awareness. But there are also the financial benefits. At all times, money talks, but especially in a softer market, providing material benefits can really support an artist’s life, career, work and practices. One of the things we’re most proud of is when artists have exhibited at our fair in one part of the world and then 12, 18 months later they’re in a gallery in another part of the world. Sometimes, the opportunities don’t manifest in a day or a week, but they point to the power and the possibility of the platform.
Daniel: For me, it’s about giving someone a platform where they can show what they’re capable of. Even in business, you have to give employees a stage to demonstrate business development, and we get a lot of inspiration from people who share their ideas. We also work with universities who give young talents the opportunity to create capsule collections for us. If you give people that chance, new stars will arise and that’s my hope with this platform: to give people the opportunity to be visible globally.
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