Art Basel Paris Is Finally Here. Will It Upend the Global Art-Fair Order?

The first sign something unusual was going down at the Grand Palais in Paris was the small wooden house, plopped on the steps of the 150-foot-tall Beaux Arts dome. Things got stranger. The home was actually constructed in a matter of days, and it was no simple abode, but one of the demountable structures designed by Jean Prouvé that exists in the space between conceptual art, modern design, and a thing you can literally move into. The dealer Patrick Seguin was selling it for $2 million, which isn’t even that outrageous for a Prouvé house. André Balazs bought one in 2007 for just about $5 million. But it’s still a bit unreal to walk up to Art Basel Paris at the newly restored Grand Palais and be confronted with an austere Prouvé that was constructed overnight.

And then out of the house stepped Owen Wilson.

Why was the artist-loving actor in the City of Light, hanging out in a seven-figure design-object-slash-art-domicile? Well that’s just the magic of Art Basel Paris. Even before stepping foot inside the main event—the global fair company’s first edition at its permanent home in the Grand Palais, the fulcrum point of a week that is now a vital part of the collecting-as-lifestyle global tour—there are celebrities doing art stuff.

At this moment, in this town, an art fair really seems to be seeping into the mainstream. Art Basel ads blanket the Métro stops on Line 1. Multiple Uber drivers googled “art basel paris tickets” on their phones while driving—eyes on the road, mon frere! All week, the city’s cultural offerings seemed logjammed and bustling, as if the surge in tourists never receded after the Olympics. In fact, a Paris resident told me that October in Paris is actually more crowded than it was during the summer games, when many Parisians retreated. Now everyone’s back and the art tourists are here too.

It was so crowded on Sunday afternoon that Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner coincidentally ended up at the same tiny room for lunch: Bar Vendôme, the posh spot nested inside the warren of luxury that is the Ritz Paris. A cold war went down while each party pretended the other wasn’t there. It was so crowded that, the following night, Zwirner actually teamed with a third mega-gallery, Hauser & Wirth, to do a joint dinner at Loulou to avoid making their clients choose between bashes. Both global powers have outposts in Paris, of course. The French capital has risen as a gallery hub in the years after Brexit and all of the foreigners who planted flags here. And it was so crowded that they all opened on the same night, Monday. Gagosian offered a Harold Ancart show of gigantic landscape paintings, Zwirner new paintings by Dana Schutz, and Hauser & Wirth paintings, sculpture, and video by Rashid Johnson. The latter was the most in-demand show in town, according to private dealers trying to get their hands on some for clients.

All the galleries took over a small strip of Avenue Montaigne. At a certain point in the evening, a mob had formed in front of the Takashi Murakami show at Perrotin—a group of fans were desperately seeking a selfie with the artist, one of the rare few who can spark a photo frenzy. But actually James Turrell whipped his fans into a similar fever right next door at Almine Rech, where he sat behind the desk and greeted gallery goers. White Cube had an opening next door, and I followed Eric Fischl and KAWS up the stairs to Skarstedt, where Per Skarstedt had a Warhol show up.

Upstairs, the collector and music industry vet Josh Abraham introduced me to a friend he had brought along on the gallery hopping: the actor and musician Hilary Duff.

“I’m here on a girls trip and I’m in Paris, and I wanted to make sure Josh shows me all the art,” she told me.

So thank you, Hilary Duff, for making me realize something that’s central to the appeal of Art Basel Paris. Say you’re not a big collector but you buy things occasionally, and maybe you’ve been to Miami Beach for the fair but are kind of over it. The idea of traveling to Paris during Art Basel isn’t a daunting immersion into contemporary art symposia, but suddenly a great idea for a girls trip. Art Basel is just one of the things you do while you’re in town. You book a nice hotel, go to museums, go to an art fair, and have a primo bragging-rights reservation that your concierge or credit card can help you snag. Everybody wins. Art Basel can establish a world-class fair where the dealers bring A-plus work in line with Paris’s vast institutional and gallery landscape (something Miami Beach lacks), but also lure in wealthy folks who want to make an art fair part of a vacation lifestyle (impossible in Basel, Switzerland, with its institutionalized VIPs and dearth of buzzy boîtes and chic places to stay.)

“They have hotels here, they have good restaurants, you can make a reservation, and that’s part of the whole experience,” said collector and dealer Adam Lindemann, who’s shown at various Art Basel fairs and bought from all of them.

Perhaps that’s why the Americans in Loro Piana ball caps and On sneakers seemed at times to outnumber the Europeans in designer loafers. Craig Robins, the Miami developer and collector who helped build the Design District, looked perfectly at ease sitting in a chair with Philomene Magers at the Sprüth Magers booth. The Rubells were there from Miami, and the Horts were there from New York. I spotted a quartet of museum directors—Melissa Chiu from the Hirshhorn, Jeremy Strick of the Nasher Sculpture Center, James Rondeau of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Max Hollein of The Met—all leading museum groups around. The NFL player turned collector Keith Rivers wasn’t just visiting for the fair; he’s fully moved to Paris.

And the actor Natalie Portman was casually taking in a long tour of the Mariane Ibrahim booth from the gallery’s namesake, before a dealer from a booth over grabbed me for an introduction.

“I’m really looking forward to getting to the Jeu de Paume, for the Tina Barney show,” Portman said, and she’s right to, because the Tina Barney show is really that amazing.

Even at the Paris Internationale satellite fair, the venue was packed with collectors such as Prada cocreative director Raf Simons and the Paris-based Susanne van Hagen, plus directors from Gagosian, Lisson, and Zwirner, to see what the young galleries were showing. The Hotel Costes, the traditional after-hours hang for collectors such as the Mugrabis and the Nahmads, was jam-packed late Tuesday, hours before the opening of the fair. (Vanity Fair also had a little party that day, more on that later.)

Rashid Johnson/Walla Walla Foundry.

During the VIP opening day of the big fair, once I got past the Prouvé house, the $500 million renovation to the building really smacked me in the face, the fresh paint job popping and the golden banisters of the dome glistening in the light. Even James Murdoch, whose Lupa Systems has acquired a serious chunk of Basel’s parent company in the last few years, was spotted staring up at the ceilings of a palace so vast it looks almost fake, like AI-generated.

There’s been endless bickering about Art Basel Paris versus Frieze London, and Art Basel Paris versus the original Art Basel, and that line of inquiry kept the chattering classes busy at the opening of the fair. “This is going to bury Art Basel in Switzerland,” one adviser told me. “The idea of London being replaced is pretty ridiculous, the museum shows are better there,” said a collector. And so on.

But more relevant was the fact that right before our eyes, art works were selling for numbers that far eclipsed anything that went down in London, at least at the fair. Dealers brought serious stuff, and there was an appetite to buy. I saw collector Wendi Deng Murdoch and her adviser, the art dealer Xin Li, engaging in a chat with Jay Jopling at White Cube. A massive 2013 Julie Mehretu painting at the booth was eventually sold to another buyer to the tune of $9.5 million. (The gallery declined to comment on the purchaser’s identity.)