Art Basel Paris, the French iteration of the Swiss art fair, is now in its second year at the Grand Palais, where under an ethereal glass-and-iron vault, the international art world materializes for a week in late October. More than 200 galleries from 41 countries, as well as thousands of collectors, advisers, curators and market-watchers, convened. So enthusiastic were the buyers that the usual Oct. 22 VIP opening was preceded by a VVIP sale the night before, which alone generated what market-watchers cheered as a healthy $90 million in reported sales. Before the fair closes on Sunday, that number is expected be in the hundreds of millions.
It’s a commercial frenzy, but in contrast to other art fairs, the Paris event stands out for the quality and quantity of its public programming. Call it a French thing, a civic investment in culture, or focus on the fact that galleries benefit from presenting their artists in the prestigious sites that Paris can offer (Place Vendôme and Palais Royal)—a page out of the Fashion Week playbook. Yet the public and private aims of the fair seem to pull in different directions, serving completely different populations: Can a fair conceived of for art-world insiders really work like a public festival?
Clément Delépine, director of the fair for the past two years, takes the public “responsibility” of the fair seriously—he described himself as an “idealist working within the constraints of the art market.” The reason I tend to believe him when he claims to be “not cynical at all” is that the curatorial experiments that constitute Art Basel’s public program are far more than afterthoughts. The proximity of the intensely commercial event seems to have pushed the artists working in public venues toward what a fair suppresses: contemplation, inclusion and open questioning of the transactional underpinnings of art.
Make no mistake, the experience of Art Basel Paris is dominated by the transactional, and it can feel sort of dehumanizing. The gallerists are there to make money and they will look right through you to the person behind in full Prada armor. Their ruthless triage of potential buyers is nothing but rational: One gallerist told me that with exhibitor fees, shipping and staffing, he’ll spend $300,000 for his gallery’s six days at Art Basel. The social life of the fair is intensely purpose-driven.
That transactional intensity was almost the perfect foil for British artist Helen Marten’s generous multimedia performance 30 Blizzards at Palais d’Iéna, one of Art Basel’s public programs and a smash hit. It’s a touching, sprawling, literal trolley ride through a human life, from youth to old age. The ensemble musical with some 30 performers celebrates incomplete thoughts and messy moments, and the myriad ways people care for each other: “Remember to drink water,” said the loudspeaker at one point.
This kind of programming, supported by Miu Miu, is no sideshow. One of Marten’s performers handed me a printed strip of poetry, with both hands, like a Japanese receipt, nodding as if to seal the deal of our common-law marriage, and it was as stark a contrast as I could imagine to the cold, interpersonal calculus of the fair. The only downside is that it closes Oct. 26.
What draws most non-collectors to Art Basel Paris is the fact that, among the thousand-plus works, some treasures will surface briefly before changing hands: This year, notably, the Gagosian gallery made waves by showing an Old Master painting, the Rubens masterpiece Virgin and Christ Child, with saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist from 1611-1614. The London dealer Richard Nagy showed an unusual, subdued Toulouse-Lautrec Young boy and his dog from 1900. Among the contemporary works, viewers could see a cluster of graphic-comic paintings by the Rotterdam-based artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang at the London gallery Carlos Ichikawa. All these to take in before getting dispersed among collectors.
Finding those treasures may well be worth the $44 ticket to the fair, but the overall experience is a slog. All art fairs, even well-run ones, present tough conditions under which to view art. At Art Basel Paris, you navigate a 21,000-square-meter maze, swatting away the unfiltered sunlight of the Grand Palais, and get pulled endlessly forward by the large crowd. It requires an almost perverse force of will to stop walking and engage in some aesthetic appreciation.
So visitors may be that much more delighted to stumble into Chromoscope at the Cité de l’architecture, a museum of mostly plaster casts of medieval sculpture and miniature architectural models. (It also has the city’s best view of the Eiffel tower.) As part of the public program, large abstract canvases by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, among $120 million worth of work loaned by gallerist Dennis Yares, hang in a reconstructed 14th century gothic chapel, where they will stay until mid-February. In this dark, circular room out of time, your powers of concentration come back. Make no mistake, the canvases on display are for sale. But we’re being given a very different experience— maybe not a sacred contrast to the profane, but a contemplative contrast to the insane.
Part of the success of Art Basel’s public program stems from the fact that the city has so many historic locations—including largely forgotten venues like Chapelle des petits-augustins, a deconsecrated chapel inside the Ecole des beaux-arts, in Saint-Germain-des-près, for which designer Harry Nuriev specifically conceived his public installation, Objets Trouvés. The chapel is dark with centuries of candle smoke, unrenovated, and usually locked. The only giveaway that you’re attached to an art school is that the sooty walls are covered with plaster casts of once-prized European relief sculptures that nobody cares about anymore, a reminder of the caprices of valuation.
Visitors can enter Objects Trouvés and deposit any object—a shoe, a tennis racquet, a vase—into a grid of stainless-steel boxes, in return for any other object. This is of a piece with Nuriev’s prior work, which draws attention to consumerism and waste with a sentimental, communitarian spirit. The show is inclusive not only in terms of who enters the building but in who makes the art. “It’s funny seeing women with Hermès bags rifling through garbage,” said one student while I was there. But here Nuriev has created a place where money has no role—unlike at the fair, where his boxes of used stuff can be bought at Sultana, his gallerist, for $2,500 each.
According to art market watchers, one reason global art sales have been on a downward trend, falling 12 percent in 2024 from the year prior, was the fact that Millennial and Gen-Z buyers have turned away from collecting. One hope for such a high-quality public program is that it helps encourage a sense of ownership and excitement for contemporary art—even works that criticize or question their own value. Another of the students at the Harry Nuriev show told me his friend found a designer swimsuit in one of the boxes. “He got it for free and sold it for €200!” Perhaps Art Basel is not only creating future buyers, but a few gallerists, too.
By Julia Langbein
