The Beyeler Foundation has for the first time turned its museum and park into an experimental exhibition, where individual works are connected to the collection, thereby developing an exceptionally daring and alluring approach.

It started as Summer Show, soon switched to Dance with Daemons, then Home of the Stranger and now, as I write, the Foundation’s website announces it as The Lateness of the Hour. And others to come: Melting Mirrors, Echoes Unbound, Ghost Dreams, All My Love Spilling Over…

There has never been a show whose title has shifted so many times, but the communication in this case fully embraces its originality; in fact, the show is not at all concerned with the rigid boundaries to which we are all accustomed and within which the majority of the world’s institutions operate, terrified of failing to achieve a positive impact or any kind of favourable public reception.

We are in Basel, where the Beyeler Foundation is putting on – formally until August 11, but nobody knows if that deadline will actually be met – the best 2024 exhibition up to now – or so I believe, having discussed it with several peers who have not found the Summer Show (I like to call it that) to be a well-rounded one. However, in the wake of a liquid society that is already carbonated, please do tell me: what are the standards for defining a “well-rounded” exhibition?

Adriano Pedrosa, the reigning curator of the Venice Biennale, has also wondered about this, opting to keep his exhibition wide open when it comes to reflections, possibilities and juxtapositions between works and subjects.

Melting Mirrors, at the Beyeler, stands for all of this to the fullest, as we find ourselves in affluent Switzerland, among one of the most splendid collections in the world, whose curatorial assemble – in this particular instance – contains the best the global art world has to offer: Sam Keller, who has directed 20 editions of Art Basel and was appointed by Ernst Beyeler himself as the head of his foundation, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mona Mekouar, the Spanish collector Isabela Mora and the artists Tino Sehgal, Philippe Parreno and Precious Okoyomon.

The concept? “Stimulating artistic freedom, interaction between fields and collective responsibility”. This exhibition would be something bizarre if it had not been perfectly implemented in real life, or rather in the magical life that may be experienced by those who wish to hone their senses in each of the museum’s rooms.

As a matter of fact, Dance with Daemons requires our time, patience and the ability to leave the rush and feelings of déjà-vu outside Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ green pearl curtain, elements that have haunted the eyes and brains of anyone who has grown accustomed to viewing too much art.

The organisation states that “the exhibition has been devised as a living, mutating and intricate organism, in which the participants provide their suggestions for each stage of the project’s formation and development”.

On entry, several nails are seen on the walls – “Unbelievable, such carelessness,” one famous critic remarked. It could have seemed like a performance staged by Tino Sehgal. Next, a trolley pulled by two men in white gloves goes by, monitored by a guard. It carries Max Ernst’s Humboldt Current, from 1951/52. They hung it on the nails, immediately concealed, but there is more: all of a sudden, landscapes by Monet, Van Gogh, Hodler arrive, setting up a horizon line between wheat fields and mountains. “Just think of the insurance fees,” someone says.

There are those who follow the trolley, filming it with their phones; others stand in front of such a spectacle, meditating: did I just see a montage of one of the world’s most iconic artworks?

Two minutes later, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Pablo Picasso are taken off the wall, leaving the nails bare. Marlene Dumas, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys resurface, compiling yet another row of analogies. I was reminded of an old work by American photographer Zoe Leonard, pondering the encounters between images, but she is not included in this group.

I post a story on Instagram.

The works rotate, waltz-like; they create and recreate spaces for us to consider similarities and inspirations; meanwhile, outside the window, out in the garden, a thick mist engulfs the ticket office, the building, blurring the light in the room: Fujiko Nakaya, a Japanese artist who is almost 90 years old, has crafted Untitled following the archetypes of a shifting, ephemeral piece of work and, in true contemporary fashion, defined it both as a phenomenon and as an artefact.

After spending a prolonged period of time witnessing the transformations of the first rooms, I can only say that Francis Bacon and Rudolf Stingel staring at each other with Alberto Giacometti’s withered women is a bit of a stretch.

One more story.

I keep going, but I simply cannot: the dialogues surrounding works by Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Pawel Althamer, Constantin Brancusi, Thomas Schütte, Jeff Koons and Jean Tinguely make me stop, upset even, for all the combined sheer beauty.

The magic culminates with a message on my phone screen, as a reaction to the story: “Hans Haacke held a similar exhibition in 1996 at Rotterdam’s Boijmans. Memory is becoming shorter and shorter. Enjoy.”

As everyone is taking photos, I silently look around, stunned, surprised; as I walk past Adrián Villar Rojas’s The End of Imagination, realising how perfectly that title implies my ignorance, I open Google: “In Viewing Matters, Hans Haacke was invited not to display his own works, but to re-exhibit some of the museum’s permanent collection. The pairing of old masters and modern and contemporary works is just one of Haacke’s strategies to encourage the viewer to regard these works in a new light.”

The “exquisite corpse” methodology, in the year that the Surrealist Movement is celebrating its 100th anniversary: perhaps Yaldabaoth (yes, another name to come) could be viewed as an unofficial tribute to the movement that eclectically melded real life with its deeper side?

Another possibility: are we looking at the umpteenth “amusement park exhibition”, an effect pursued by the whole of Western society, as two smug gallerists told me when defending the Venice Biennale 2024, because I felt it to be a cold, out-of-time survey?

Should we experience a sinful sensation when exhibitions, even if they contain bits of art history, are not boring or pretentious? We absolve ourselves, particularly when the fluidity of the present age meets the wonders of yesterday’s culture and brings them up against the theory of Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier: “Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed”.

It could be yet another grand title for the Summer Show, but not just yet.

THE LATENESS OF THE HOUR runs until August 11, 2024 at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel.