Portrait of a Paris Art Week on Fire
On protest, business as usual, and the surreal experience of attending an art fair while smelling burning plastic.
PARIS — “The people in the art world are courageous,” a collector told me at Asia Now, the first of the Paris art fairs that opened early in the week on Monday, in the heat of the protests. “But I would still like to be back at my hotel before 7pm, you know, just in case.”
Anyone who is a regular at Paris Art Week has a collection of stories about something going wrong. In 2022, there were strikes and cost-of-living marches. In October 2023, France was on high terror alert, and one of the bomb threats that emptied the airports of the country’s major cities led to, among other things, my plane landing in the middle of the French countryside. A couple of trains later, and voilà: I was in Paris in time for the vernissages.
This time, when I rolled my suitcase out of the Gare du Nord station late on the afternoon of Saturday, October 17, I was prepared. I breathed in the crisp air and smelled the burning plastic and walked past the black-clad protesters running from squads of police while firefighters put out scattered fires. I was supposed to meet a friend who lives in the Marais later that evening, but she couldn’t get home. She had planned a quiet, aesthetic weekend with her family to see shows and the art fair; she had even planned her outfits. What she found instead on Boulevard de Sébastopol, at the edge of her neighborhood, was the police playing cat and mouse with protesters.
“We had to run!” she told me. “When the police start hitting, they hit indiscriminately.” She had just come back from the Portuguese city of Porto, where local officers charged a peaceful housing-rights camp at 3 am, while people were still half asleep in their tents.
Around 11pm, she and her family finally made it home, closed the door behind them, and breathed a sigh of relief.
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The Eve of Destruction
“I think the art fairs, in this context, are rather grotesque,” French-Moroccan artist El Mehdi Largo, who is skipping them all this year, tells me. “Then again, art fairs are pretty grotesque in any context.”
We are sitting in a café on rue Poissonnière, with a view of smashed glass and clusters of burned bikes that looked like the melted surfaces of Alberto Burri’s Combustioni.
