Paris+ by Art Basel, which has replaced the Paris International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) for the second year running, welcomed 40,000 visitors in 2022. The director of Paris+, Clément Delépine may have been pleased with this, while still nursing worries about the current edition, which received its invited visitors on Wednesday, October 18 and opened to the public on October 20.
Indeed, the fair takes place during troubling times. So much so that Noah Horowitz, head of the four Art Basel fairs (Basel, Miami, Hong Kong and now Paris), felt obliged to send an e-mail to his VIP list deploring the Israel-Hamas war, while reassuring those who may be hesitant by pointing out "the rigorous security measures implemented by public authorities" and the similar procedures taken by the fair itself.
In order to visit the stands of the 154 galleries – 60 of which are based in France – selected from 700 applications to be installed in the Grand Palais Éphémère on Paris' Champ de Mars, visitors must show their credentials, go through a number of detectors (although access is much smoother than at Basel), and pay an entrance fee of €40 (online purchase mandatory).
This is a hefty sum, and is likely to dissuade onlookers: while in the city, access to their galleries is free, at a fair, the dealers prefer well-off customers. However, admission is free to the six events that Paris+ organizes outside its walls: the "Conversations" at the Musée Picasso, the works installed in the Tuileries gardens, Place Vendôme, the Petits-Augustins chapel at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, the Palais d'Iéna and in front of the Institut de France.
The economic context is also uncertain. "Start-ups are struggling, real estate is plummeting and shares on the stock market are fragile. For people, art is the only thing left to them in order to escape the slump and invest their money," said Parisian art dealer Georges-Philippe Vallois. Judging by the line of limousines parked outside the fair on the day reserved for professionals (and especially large collectors), some of which cost more than many of the works on show, money worries don't concern everyone. Neither the bloody escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor the war in Ukraine, nor the real estate crisis in China, nor the rise in interest rates that has put an end to free money, nor rumors of a bedbug infestation have deterred Art Basel's VIPs from the Paris+ fair.
Since the niche occupied for 40 years by FIAC (whose first edition was held in 1976) was taken over in 2022 by the Swiss giant Art Basel, globetrotters have been pretending to discover the charms of Paris. Argentine collector Patricia Verges has never missed an edition of FIAC, but as Art Basel's "global art patron", she now looks at the French city in a new light: "Paris is much more open to the world than it used to be." "The capital is having its moment," said Delépine.
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