Basel ballet
The lilting sound of a violin playing a passage from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella suite is not what
you’d normally expect to hear drifting through the ground floor of Art Basel’s Messe. But at
regular intervals throughout the fair, Luxembourg & Dayan’s stand is playing host to the Greek
artist Jannis Kounellis’s 1972 work Da inventare sul posto (to invent on the spot). For 15
minutes at a time, a violinist repeatedly plays the fragment of the Stravinsky score that is written
across a pink-painted canvas hanging on the wall, while a ballerina dances her own multiple
improvised interpretations of the music. One of art history’s most elegant live works, it is a
calming and civilising respite from the surrounding cacophony.