“It is better to be envied than to be pitied”said our grandmothers, who, as everyone knows, are always right. After years of very French masochism, Paris is regaining color on the international art scene thanks to a combination of factors: favorable taxation, which now makes France the gateway for imports into Europe, public and private institutions, while organizing exhibitions that, quantitatively, they have no equivalent anywhere else, and the arrival of a major player, the Swiss group MCH, which organizes the Art Basel fairs.
First, in Basel (Switzerland)is rightly considered the best art fair in the world: a flawless organization and an ability to attract the greatest public and private collectors on the planet, the fruit of several decades of work originally launched in the 1990s by one of its visionary directors. , Lorenzo Rudolph.
Its branches successively created in Miami, then in Hong Kong, benefited from this label, each with its own regional specificity. After unceremoniously dethroning FIAC from the niche it had occupied for forty years, she had modestly chosen a complicated (and unpronounceable) name, Paris+ by Art Basel, for its first edition in 2022. Today, it is no longer afraid to highlight its brand and integrate Art Basel Paris and its 195 exhibitors into the portfolio of its other exhibitions.
It revives a struggling market
But Paris is not like Basel, no more than Miami and even less like Hong Kong. As I said, the museum offer is incomparable, the number of palaces and star restaurants unmatched. And nothing beats the setting of the Grand Palais, reopened after three years of construction. On the morning of Wednesday, October 16, during the opening, exhibitors and collectors looked up to the sky, not in search of divine help, but to admire the huge glass roof overlooking the nave. “Do you know such a beautiful setting? »I heard echoes in French, English, Korean or German.
“We’re delighted to be back here, it’s a real vitamin boost at a time when the art world spends its time complaining”confessed the powerful Swiss merchant, still smiling Iwan Wirth, partner in the multinational Hauser & Wirth. “The return to the Grand Palais plus Art Basel makes a perfect mix”his summary Italian colleague Massimo De Carlo. Others, more pragmatic, regretted not having installed a canopy over their stand: the insolent sun of this Wednesday cast shadows and lights, which made it very difficult to see the works.
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