“It is better to envy than pity”said our grandmothers, who, as everyone knows, are always right. After years of very French masochism, Paris is regaining color on the international artistic scene thanks to a combination of factors: favorable taxation, which now makes France the gateway to imports into Europe, public institutions and private, organizing at the same time exhibitions which, in quantity, have no equivalent anywhere else, and the arrival of a major player, the Swiss group MCH, which organizes the Art Basel fairs.
The first, in Basel (Switzerland), is rightly considered the best art fair in the world: flawless organization and an ability to attract the greatest public and private collectors on the planet, the fruit of hard work. several decades originally launched in the 1990s by one of its visionary directors, Lorenzo Rudolf.
Read the interview (2020): Article reserved for our subscribers Lorenzo Rudolf, former director of Art Basel: “The slump is an opportunity for art”
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Its branches created successively in Miami, then in Hong Kong, have benefited from this label, while each having its own regional specificity. After unceremoniously dethroning the FIAC from the niche it occupied for forty years, it modestly chose a convoluted (and unpronounceable) name, Paris+ by Art Basel, for its first edition in 2022. Today, it no longer fears highlight its brand and integrate Art Basel Paris and its 195 exhibitors into the portfolio of its other shows.
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But Paris is not like Basel, any more than Miami, and even less like Hong Kong. As we have said, the museum offering is incomparable, the number of palaces and starred restaurants unrivaled. And nothing replaces the setting of the Grand Palais, reopened after three years of construction. Wednesday October 16 in the morning, during the opening, exhibitors and collectors looked up to the sky, not in search of divine help, but to admire the immense glass roof overlooking the nave. “Do you know such a beautiful setting? »we heard echoing in French, English, Korean or German.
“We are delighted to be back here, it’s a real vitamin boost at a time when the art world spends its time complaining”confided, all smiles, the powerful Swiss merchant Iwan Wirth, partner in the multinational Hauser & Wirth. “The return to the Grand Palais plus Art Basel, it makes a perfect mix”summarizes his Italian colleague Massimo De Carlo. Others, more pragmatic, were sorry not to have installed a canopy above their stand: the insolent sun of this Wednesday cast shadows and lights, which greatly hampered the visibility of the works.
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