Participants in this June’s ArtBasel were dismayed to learn that the fair’s charismatic director would be calling it a day after Art Basel Miami in December 2007. Sam Keller, forty this year, has run the fair since 1994 – a 12-year stint that has seen it become easily the world’s biggest and most important international art event, spreading to the US in 2002. Keller will be leaving this behemoth to run the Fondation Beyeler: a small-ish modern art museum in his hometown, that is most famous for showing Bacons and Cézannes alongside primitive artworks. Keller denies that he is deserting Mammon for the god of public art, insisting that “Art Basel isn’t just Sam Keller, it’s a whole team” and that the Renzo Piano-designed Beyeler is “one of the world’s most beautiful museums of modern art”. Whether Art Basel’s sponsors will share his enthusiasm remains to be seen.