Art Basel Paris Opened—Then Closed Early, Due to Protests. What Happened?

I was walking on the banks of the Seine, on my way to meet Jenny Holzer. When I arrived, she was staring at her own artwork, which was being projected onto the facade of the Musée d’Orsay.

“First we came and stalked it,” Holzer said of the museum, which holds some of the world’s greatest Monets, Manets, van Goghs, and Gauguins. “It’s good to walk and look and walk and look. Slow thinking. But after I cased the joint on the seventh time, I go, ‘Oh, I should use the words of the artists and the associates of the period of the museum.’”

She stared at the projections, which spread phrases like “I AM SEEKING THE IMPOSSIBLE” across the old railway station built for the 1900 World’s Fair. Her show inside the museum, “J’ai Vu,” is up through February, and features Holzer paintings installed in a room dedicated to historical works, with one of her signature LED scrolling beams installed overhead. But it’s those projected words that all of Paris will see—until the end of the day today.

As we sat on the banks of the Seine Tuesday, Art Basel Paris had just opened its exclusive Avant Première showing to select collectors at the Grand Palais. By Thursday, the fair would officially cancel its final two days due to planned protests targeting Art Basel, its collectors, and its ownership.

Holzer and I didn’t know any of that at the time, as we looked at the phrases projected on the buildings. They’re lifted from correspondence written by the artists, poets, writers, and curators at the museum.

I asked Holzer to describe the messages she found in that correspondence. Her answer was warm, funny, and characteristically aphoristic: “‘War again.’ ‘I’m broke.’ ‘Everyone hates me.’ ‘I hate myself.’ ‘My work's not good enough.’ ‘I can’t rise to the occasion when things are so desperate.’ ‘Nature is greater than I, because…’ Dot, dot, dot. Ellipses galore. Ellipses abounding.”

No artist has made text-based artwork more famous than Jenny Holzer. Her truisms—PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT—were bold when she started making them in the ’70s. They became eerily predictive of soundbites and meme culture, then became part of the pop cultural swirl.

The artist behind the billboards and the LED lights is not usually one for the spotlight—she gives few interviews and lives in the Northeast, far away from New York art dinner circles. But while Holzer and I talked, another passerby recognized her and approached her, slowly.

“Thank you, Jenny,” she said.

“Howdy!” Holzer responded.

“Howdy! I’m American too,” the passerby said. “To me, this is so fucking prescient. I didn’t get to come yesterday. I wanted to come and sit here and see it.”

Holzer’s work has always been prescient. But it’s uncanny, here in Paris this week, how her charged words seem reflected in and reflexive of the protests and subsequent destruction that happened in Paris last weekend, and will continue tomorrow. She started installing the projections last Saturday, as daytime student demonstrations gave way to fires and looting. I arrived in the city that Saturday evening to texts from friends saying they were caught up in tear gas while riding the metro and walking in front of Christie’s. Dinner reservations were canceled when bonfires came perilously close to consuming the restaurants’ entryways.

I successfully made it to dinner Sunday night and was ensconced in a back room as looters burst through the capillaries of the Marais with police in pursuit. (I didn’t hear about that part till later.) On my ride home, I passed a group of people in masks standing by a pile of burning Lime bikes, throwing lighter fluid onto the pyre, grabbing trash cans to add to the flames.

Holzer told me she couldn’t go to the installation of the projection on Saturday night because she wasn’t allowed to leave her hotel. No one was allowed to leave the hotel.

“So I was like, ‘Oh, okay. I guess if they have the gates down, that means something,’” she said.

When we spoke, on Tuesday evening, the dusk was washing over the Seine. The demonstrations had subsided. Art Basel Paris had opened earlier that day. The anti-ram barriers fortifying the space worked. But according to reports, demonstrations were set to resume imminently. I asked Holzer what she made of this.

“Idealistically, and purely, and of necessity, what the students started was good,” Holzer said as we stared at her words on the Musée d’Orsay.

“I’m not sure ransacking stores is all that hot,” she added, staring ahead. “Or adding to the burning for less holy ends than education.”

Last year at Art Basel Paris, in the days before the fair began, thieves dressed as construction workers broke into the Louvre and stole €88 million in irreplaceable jewelry, forcing the world’s most famous museum to shut its doors. (Certain VIPs still got tours while it was closed to the public.) On the ground at the fair, the heist was all anyone could talk about.

This year, as the art world arrived in Paris, all they could talk about was the protests. The topic dominated every dinner table conversation on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. From what I heard, attendees were largely sympathetic to the demonstrators and their goals, if strongly against the destruction that followed. There were also practical concerns for the art viewer: Demonstrators shut down the Louvre Monday morning. Stan Douglas’s opening at the Jeu de Paume was postponed on Sunday evening.

The Grand Palais shut down Saturday during the worst of the trouble, and reopened Sunday. The fair fanned out beefy security guards through the halls and around the perimeter. And then…the entire facility emerged completely unscathed. Actually, everything in the Art Basel orbit did. No galleries reported damage; neither did the auction houses.

But there were more protests brewing. By Tuesday, different groups were making it clear that they planned to demonstrate the following Saturday again. This time, they would target Art Basel directly and congregate at the fair’s site at the Grand Palais.

According to the Instagram page @Documentations_art, a group calling themselves Pillage de Classe (or “Class Plunder”) published a manifesto decrying, as they framed it, tax laws that allow art collectors to write off their support for contemporary art.

“Last year, the price of the most expensive work sold at Art Basel was €23 million—meaning €14 million could be deducted from taxes if the buyer were French,” it reads. It’s not clear exactly which tax law this is referring to, but it appears that corporations and individuals in France can claim some amount of tax deductions when they purchase fine art. The work mentioned is apparently a Gerhard Richter abstract painting from 1987 that sold off the Hauser & Wirth booth in 2025 for $23 million—dollars, not euros.

The group alluded to some unsubstantiated, alleged nebulous connections—which I have not been able to uncover in any sort of tangible way—between the fair ownership, Palantir, the Pentagon, and the US Department of Defense.

“Gala dinners are no longer tolerable. We can no longer fill champagne glasses in order to buy tanks with the budgets meant for education and healthcare,” the statement from the group said. “Events such as Art Basel perpetuate imperialism and the power of the transnational bourgeoisie by fostering the political and military conditions that enable its enrichment, at the cost of genocide in Palestine.”

Another group, Cultures en Lutte (“Cultures in Struggle”), posted that the collectors at Art Basel had been gathering despite the demonstrations in the city, “gleefully [taking] advantage of tax breaks on millions of dollars that could otherwise be used to fund public services.”

On Friday, Cultures en Lutte posted that they no longer planned to protest. But there’s every indication that Pillage de Classe will march on the Grand Palais this Saturday at 4 p.m.

Sources said the Instagram algorithm was pushing these manifestos to the top of their feeds. Word of the planned Art Basel-targeting demonstrations spread through the fair. By Wednesday night, according to sources, some galleries had begun preparing to pack up the art early, cancellation or not—given the massive insurance liability of having even peaceful protests at the fair gates. By early Thursday, word trickled out that Art Basel top brass was aware of the planned demonstrations and had decided to cancel.

By the afternoon, the official word came.

In an email to the participating galleries Thursday afternoon, Art Basel fairs director Vincenzo de Bellis and Art Basel Paris director Karim Crippa said that the Paris fair would cancel the final weekend of its 2026 edition, shutting down at 7 p.m. Friday “in light of potential demonstrations across Paris this weekend, and in the interest of safeguarding our visitors.”

Inside the Art Basel Paris bubble on Monday and Tuesday, things appeared to go ahead as if nothing bad would happen. Since it moved back to the Grand Palais in 2024, this fair has been the most desirable art-buying destination for collectors—combining the allure of A-plus hardcore masterpieces, à la the flagship fair in Switzerland, with the party-happy circuit of restaurants and hotel lobbies found adjacent to the group’s fair in Miami Beach. Even in the shadow of the demonstrations, Art Basel Paris was exactly that. There didn’t appear to be a single chink in the armor. The museums around town were packed to the point where you couldn’t move.

The morning after the demonstrations, tourists dutifully lined up around the Louvre. Even after bypassing the queue, I had to wait to enter the galleries, and of course to see the Mona Lisa. It was easier to get to the museum’s small show of work by Elizabeth Peyton, made while she was in residence at the Louvre, including portraits of Jennifer Lawrence and Chopin. I had never seen François Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce this crowded before, especially in a room with Irving Penn photographs installed chockablock up the walls. After arriving at the Fondation Louis Vuitton for a show of works once in the holdings of French collector Gustave Fayet, I dutifully stood sentry as visitors took their pictures of the van Gogh self-portrait before getting a blissful minute with The Large Plane Trees, on loan from the Cleveland Museum.

The galleries saw no downturn in visitors. According to sources, the show of Lee Krasner works at Gagosian, presented with the Pollock Krasner Foundation and Olney Gleason, was among the Paris gallery’s best-attended openings ever. Gallerygoers thronged through the Marais Monday afternoon, making their way to see the astounding collection of Cy Twombly works at Karsten Greve. None were for sale—but if overheard chatter is to be believed, that wasn’t stopping a big-pocketed sovereign wealth fund from attempting to make a purchase. David Zwirner also opened a large survey of new work by Oscar Murillo there, while not one but two satellite fairs opened in the neighborhood: Post-Fair, an offshoot of the Santa Monica expo that’s held during Frieze Los Angeles, and Paris Internationale, the longstanding young gallery fair in town.

The spree of meals and parties continued unabated—most prominently a dinner celebrating Alice Diop’s “Geste de Consolation,” an exhibition commissioned by Miu Miu as part of the Art Basel Official Program. The show incorporates a new video by Diop and a wildly inventive installation that will host a series of performances throughout the week. Dinner, as any good Paris dinner should be, was held at Brasserie Lipp, long the fashion world’s preferred old-world bistro, right across from Café de Flore.

Mrs. Prada, who personally oversees all of the art commissions for Miu Miu and Prada—and who of course runs one of the world’s great private art concerns, the Prada Foundation—held court at a table in the back of Brasserie Lipp, sitting with Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist, Neue Nationalgalerie director Klaus Biesenbach, LUMA founder Maja Hoffmann, curator Nancy Spector, artists Francesco Vezzoli and Arthur Jafa and Meriem Bennani; and Art Basel contingent represented by Global CEO Noah Horowitz, director of fairs Vincenzo de Bellis, and Art Basel Paris director Karim Crippa.

On Tuesday, Art Basel let a few select viewers into the fair a day early—part of a special event in its second year called Avant Première. The premise: Each gallery disburses a few passes to its primo clients. The crowd did seem especially hand-selected. I saw Bernard Arnault, LVMH’s chairman and CEO, inside the Nahmad Projects booth, checking out works by Jean Dubuffet. He was one of the few collectors present who could have easily snapped up the fair’s most expensive work: a Modigliani at the Pace Di Donna Schrader booth priced at $100 million—though as of this writing the work had not yet been sold.

Arnault’s daughter, Delphine Arnault, was on hand as well. James Murdoch, who is the majority stakeholder in the fair’s parent company MCH Group, was chatting with Iwan Wirth. I walked in behind George Economou, the shipping magnate with a wildly important private museum in Athens, and once inside, I saw the local collector Patricia Marshall walk past the Paula Cooper Gallery booth as American collector Glenn Fuhrman walked by the exit.

Were they buying the work? Evidently, someone was. Hauser & Wirth sold two different paintings, a Gerhard Richter and a Georg Baselitz, for around $10 million each on Tuesday. David Zwirner sold more than $36 million in work on Tuesday and Wednesday, including a Richter painting for $8.5 million. Gagosian sold a 1987 de Kooning for eight figures. White Cube sold two different Julie Mehretu works for $7.85 million each.

And galleries were happy to provide examples of works by the artist with the most visible work in Paris: the only artwork projected on an entire stretch of the riverbank. Spruth Magers, which first started showing Holzer in 1986, brought a rare Holzer collaborative work with the graffiti artist Lady Pink that declares on canvas, “IF YOU ARE CONSIDERED USELESS NO ONE WILL FEED YOU ANYMORE.” Hauser & Wirth sold Providing, a 2024 work in 24k gold, antique gold, champagne gold, moon gold, platinum and red gold leaf, for $400,000.

Holzer was not actually at this unprecedented brief edition of Art Basel Paris. While Avant Première unfolded Tuesday, she was on the banks of the Seine, taking in the projections, musing about her French artist heroes.

“Monet was doubting whether his work was good enough even after he was successful, and wondered whether it measured up to the times,” she said. “He was agonized. Good man. This is when he was in water lily land. He was nailing it, and he was agonized. Which is why it was that good, because he wasn’t going out for a drinky-poo.”

I watched French text from Monet’s writings scroll up the Orsay.

“Not such a shabby facade,” Holzer said. “And look…”

One of the ferries going down the Seine came into view, in front of the museum. Holzer pointed.