“Things are going to get better!”
Patti Smith
On a beautiful night in Switzerland, Patti Smith performed for four hundred VIP’s and invited hagglers at the one hundred and fifty year old Elisabethenkirche—a neo gothic church located in the heart of Basel city. Theoretically, there was nothing out of the ordinary about this event. As is generally the case with large scale exhibitions or art fairs, hip musical acts or aging rockers with semi-credibility break up the artworld myopia with a concert or two. But Patti Smith? Was she making some sort of comeback? Had she ever really gone away? Does it really matter if it’s free?
It was not until I sat down that I realised what I was in for over the next hour or so. It wasn’t the hazy persona of Patti Smith that I was going to be sitting through but the slightly pathetic Ramones meets Bob Dylan meets Ron Wood musical act that is Patti Smith. Although musically her credibility has been waning over the years, Smith’s carefully managed persona made it difficult to really notice if you weren’t buying the albums.
But something weird was happening here. The church was filled with dealers, curators, collectors and all manner of people doing the hard yards at Art Basel ’08—all probably exhausted from the walking and the talking—three days into the fair. Smith came out to polite applause and read a poem. Now, while I read poetry as a teenager I’ve never been a fan of the romanticism which seems inherent to the medium. Smith’s love for William Blake and her revival of old beat generation stereotypes were lost on me. Didn’t Charles Bukowski make