Who The evening began with a staged interview between the artist Theaster Gates and the Newsweek/The Daily Beast editor Tina Brown. This preceded a dinner hosted by Brown with Urs Rohner, the chairman of the board of Credit Suisse; Daphne Guinness; Bryan Lourd; and Dasha Zhukova. Their names drew other names: the collectors Eli Broad, Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour, Diana Picasso and Jean Pigozzi; the architects Jacques Herzog and Fernando Romero, his wife, Soumaya Slim, the directors and curators of several museums (including the Andy Warhol, the Whitney and the Museum Ludwig) and blue-chip dealers galore — Larry Gagosian, Vito Schnabel, Alberto Mugrabi and Patrick Seguin, among them.  What Zhukova, the founder of Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Art, chose Gates as the subject of the evening. Asked why, she said, “I’ve been to Chicago! And I’ve seen the Dorchester Project.” She was referring to the artist’s rehabilitation of the depressed neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side where he grew up roofing with his father. Taking a page from Barbara Walters, Brown asked, “Are you first an artist and then an activist, or are you an activist first and then an artist?” Gates replied, “I’ve never imagined myself as an activist. The work that I’m doing with neighborhoods is work we should all be doing.”  Where Basel is no Miami, but the display of glamour, wealth and celebrity at the Kunstmuseum Basel, where the event was held, felt more typical of South Beach. There was a Picasso exhibit on view upstairs, which a few guests, including Brant and Maria Baibakov, slipped out early to see.  When A cocktail hour preceded the interview, during which I asked Gates about being the only black face in the room. “What I always say is that wherever I go, I turn the whole room black,” he replied. He wasn’t the only one doing that last night in lily-white Basel. After the dinner, Gates just missed Solange Knowles’s set at Volkshaus, where the artist Mickalene Thomas has been running 1970s-style house parties every night this week within a two-room apartment that she shipped from New York, with support from Absolut. Later, Kanye West held an impromptu “listening party” for his for his forthcoming CD, “Yeezus,” in the new Herzog & de Meuron-designed building for the Design/Miami section of the fair. After an a cappella performance of “New Slaves,” an angry rap that electrified the audience, West stood at the door and shook the hand of every single person who exited the hall. “That’s class,” said the fair’s director, Marc Spiegler.  Why Everyone present in the Kunstmuseum knew about Gates, a rising star out of Chicago. But not all were familiar with his art, a prime example of which has been featured this week at Art Unlimited, the section of Art Basel devoted to works of enormous scale. Titled “BNKUDRWTR,” it includes a long, raked platform tarred with roofing paper and fronted by a teller’s window from an abandoned Chicago bank. “When I started to recount where art came from for me,” he told Brown during the interview, “I thought I could tie it to ceramics but in fact it was tinkering with buildings and working with my dad. Roofing with black tar in Chicago, in 100-degree heat, isn’t very glamorous.”  This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:  An earlier version of this article misstated the title of Urs Rohner. He is the chairman of the board of Credit Suisse, not the C.E.O.
Dasha Zhukova&#8217;s dinner at the illustrious art fair drew the likes of Peter Brant, Stephanie Seymour, Daphne Guinness, Vito Schnabel and more.