What remains after Art Basel is not what was seen, but what could not be unseen — a thousand Edo-period vessels carrying centuries of survival, airplane windows that open onto nothing, and a Cy Twombly that stopped time in the middle of the market.

There are objects you acquire and objects that stay. The EA 116 — designed by Charles and Ray Eames in 1958, found second-hand, kept six years — has never left Valeria Viollaz's studio in Lucerne. A curator who keeps what she selects. A visit to Vitra Design Museum that was not research, but return. What the museum confirmed is what the object already knew.