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.
Ready for Art Week?
The Eve of Destruction
“I think the art fairs, in this context, are rather grotesque,” tells me French-Moroccan artist El Mehdi Largo, who is skipping them all this year. “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.
Largo continued, noting that while art wouldn’t exist without the bourgeoisie and the rich patrons of the Renaissance, in today’s art world and economy, what really matters is taxes and how to move money around: “For the elites, it could be art, or it could be thoroughbred horses; it won’t make any difference!”
It was the day after the clashes on Saturday, and there is still excitement, bewilderment, and disarray in the air, the kind you feel when something is about to change. Everybody was filming the destruction, and you couldn’t sit next to a group of people, or walk past one, without hearing about the protests. “I’m flabbergasted.” “Have you seen what went down in Marseille?”
In the heat of the revolt, small shops were not spared, but the majority of the windows I saw destroyed belonged to Carrefour supermarkets, banks, real estate agencies, luxury brands, and government buildings.
And of course, there was the looting. “It’s quite shocking,” said a Lebanese friend who moved to Paris to escape the bombing of Beirut, and whose daughter is among the students marching. “In Lebanon, people were so hungry, but they still have their dignity; they would never loot.” She paused. “Here, people are really, really angry.”
Le peuple, the people, are a Dionysian force, made up of individuals with different motives, agendas, and energies, with different responses to oppression and repression. Over the past few days, a protest this widespread has had a bit of everything, from those taking food and tampons for the homeless to the kids who are just smashing windows. It’s a gradient.
The mix is in the people and in the writing on the walls. On a street corner, a handwritten cardboard sign propped up among the bird control spikes quotes the French philosopher Simone Weil: “Il est donné à très peu d’esprits de découvrir que les choses et les êtres existent.” (“Very few minds discover that things and beings exist.”) A few blocks away, the message is more straightforward: “Nique la police,” “fuck the police.”
An Italian curator who lives in Paris spent that Saturday in the Marais setting up her show, which opened on Sunday. “I pulled down the shutters, and it was surreal to put up the works when outside there was basically a civil war!” People banged on the iron doors; she heard running and screaming outside, and tear gas seeped in.
Her unbothered French boyfriend, clearly used to the Shiva dance on the French people, reassured her: “Nothing to worry about, chérie, protests are always like this here!”
Back to Business
Across town, the Grand Palais had gone through its own lockdown. At 5pm on Saturday, while galleries were installing Art Basel Paris, the police prefecture ordered a lockdown of the building, and for a while nobody could get in or get out. It reopened the next day without a scratch.
Around it, the cultural calendar was struggling to hold up. On October 15, the Foreign Ministry had already postponed a design show by Thierry Lemaire and Harry Nuriev in the salons of the Quai d’Orsay, judging it ill-timed given the social climate. Its title: PASSAGES. Pas sages, a French pun on “disobedient.”
On Sunday, the Jeu de Paume called off the VIP opening of its Stan Douglas show. On Monday, students from the École du Louvre blocked the entrance of the Louvre museum, and that evening, students forced the École des Beaux-Arts to cancel its Gina Pane opening.
The interior minister acknowledged that the police had “lost control” over the weekend. The Chinese, German, and United States embassies told citizens to stay away from protest areas, and an overnight curfew, from 11 pm to 6 am, was imposed on Place de la République and part of Les Halles, on either side of the Marais.
By Tuesday afternoon, when Art Basel’s ultra-VIP “Avant-Première” — a preview of the preview — opened, the Grand Palais was ringed with concrete anti-ram barriers, and police and private security patrol around the clock. Inside, the fair went on, business as usual; no one was talking about the protests anymore.
“I bet no one is talking about them!” exclaimed one of my editors, whom I caught frantically typing in a corridor of the Grand Palais. “They’re too busy selling works for millions of dollars!”
By Wednesday, the streets around the Grand Palais, largely spared, have been cleaned up. The burned cars and gutted shops are further east, around Bastille and République, safely out of sight, and cleaning crews are all over the city, painting over the graffiti and repairing shattered windows.
Collector Selim Bouafsoun had come for the Avant-Première, already bought a few pieces, and saw nothing of the protests beyond the debris of the breakages. Inside the Grand Palais, “it felt safe and like a good environment to do business.”
“I come from Tunisia,” he told me. “We do not get scared by manifestations. Manifestations are a right, and we respect their rights.”
Outside, on Avenue Winston Churchill, Alicja Kwade’s “L’Élévation des Mondes” (2026), a 14-foot stack of stone spheres that her gallery described as evoking the Tower of Babel and the failure of universal systems of order, came down on Friday instead of Sunday, among other works removed ahead of the weekend protests. On Instagram, Kwade wrote, “Protest is good, but why everything has to be smashed and destroyed is beyond ……It certainly doesn't help the cause.”
An Incredible Happening
On Thursday afternoon, I’m at Offscreen, the fair held in the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, when an email from Art Basel lands in my inbox: The fair will close on Friday at 7 pm, two days early, “in the interest of safeguarding our visitors” ahead of the weekend protests.
“In any case, the sales have already been made, so the business is done,” noted Marina Vinogradova, director of NIKA Project Space in Dubai. The gallery represents Iraqi-Finnish Adel Abidin, whom I had come to interview at Offscreen.
We sit on a bench in front of the chapel of the old Salpêtrière hospital, where Paris once confined its mentally ill. Our conversation about what painting means in today’s world is interrupted by helicopters and sirens. A long line of police vans pulls up in the street just outside, and armed officers take position.
I ask Abidin how it feels to participate in an art fair in such a context. “While I condemn the vandalism and the violence, I think it’s inspiring to see that people can protest and have a voice,” he told me. “I wish I’d had that when I was living in Baghdad.” He doesn’t think art is useless at a moment like this. “Art, like every other gesture, is part of something bigger. Making art, like protesting, is a way of challenging what’s happening. They’re not really opposites.”
He laughs. “I know I might sound naive or idealistic, but I do believe that change comes from the sum of all these gestures.”
This kind of attitude is not necessarily shared by everyone. Thursday at lunchtime, I meet one last time with El Mehdi Largo in my neighborhood, the 9th Arrondissement.
“They instrumentalize our suffering,” he said. “I’m sure at the fairs you have seen plenty of works dealing with social issues. In the end, they’re only there to decorate. To decorate the conversations of the people who can afford them: ‘Look what I found, look at my sensibility.’”
“Honestly, I’m still hopeful there’ll be some smashing. For me, it would be the ultimate art form, an incredible happening: les casseurs walking into the Grand Palais, or in any of these art temples.”
He stopped for a second, then added: “But then, of course, this will become the aesthetic of smashing. Damn. There is no way out, isn’t it?”