Paris Art Week Opens Amid Protests, Tear Gas and Lockdowns

Art Basel Paris was setting up inside the Grand Palais last Saturday when the police prefecture ordered the building locked down. For a time, nobody could get in or out, Hyperallergic’s correspondent reports from Paris. The Grand Palais reopened the next day undamaged. It was one scene from an art week that has played out against a backdrop of street protests, broken glass and burning plastic.

The writer, arriving at Gare du Nord late on the afternoon of Saturday, October 17, walked past black-clad protesters running from police squads while firefighters put out scattered fires. A friend who lives in the Marais couldn’t get home that evening; she told the writer she ran when police began, in her words, hitting indiscriminately near Boulevard de Sébastopol. She and her family made it home around 11pm.

Hyperallergic reports that the cultural calendar has struggled to hold up. On October 15, the Foreign Ministry postponed a design show by Thierry Lemaire and Harry Nuriev at the Quai d’Orsay, judging it ill-timed given the social climate. 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, and that evening students forced the École des Beaux-Arts to cancel its Gina Pane opening.

The unrest has been serious enough that, per the report, the interior minister acknowledged police had “lost control” over the weekend. The Chinese, German and United States embassies told citizens to stay away from protest areas. An overnight curfew from 11pm to 6am was imposed on Place de la République and part of Les Halles, on either side of the Marais.

Still, the fairs opened. At Asia Now, the first of the Paris fairs, which started early in the week on Monday, a collector told the writer that art-world people are courageous but that she’d still like to be back at her hotel before 7pm, just in case. French-Moroccan artist El Mehdi Largo, skipping every fair this year, called them grotesque in this context. Then, he added, art fairs are pretty grotesque in any context. He spoke from a café on rue Poissonnière, looking out at smashed glass and clusters of burned bikes the writer compared to Alberto Burri’s Combustioni.

The writer describes damage that was mostly aimed at large targets. Most of the destroyed windows belonged to Carrefour supermarkets, banks, real estate agencies, luxury brands and government buildings, though small shops were not spared, and there was looting. A Lebanese friend whose daughter is among the marching students found that shocking. Graffiti ranged from a quote from Simone Weil to a blunt message about the police.

An Italian curator who lives in Paris spent Saturday hanging her Marais show, which opened Sunday. She pulled down the shutters, heard banging on the iron doors, running and screaming, and said tear gas seeped inside. Her French boyfriend, she said, told her not to worry because protests are always like this there.

Hyperallergic notes that regulars at Paris Art Week collect stories of things going wrong: strikes and cost-of-living marches in 2022, a high terror alert and bomb threats in October 2023. The piece breaks off as Art Basel’s invitation-only “Avant-Première” opened Tuesday afternoon. For New Yorkers who fly over for the fairs each October, it is a reminder that the week’s glamour sits uneasily next to the city around it.