Art Basel announced on Thursday that it would close the Paris edition of the fair early “in the interest of safeguarding our visitors, exhibitors, partners, staff and artworks.” It was scheduled to run through Sunday but will now end on Friday evening, the organizers said in a statement.
Paris is bracing for another weekend of unrest after protests, riots and looting flared up on Saturday amid weeks of mass demonstrations across France by students angered by conditions at their high schools. Their numbers were swelled by groups protesting the cost of living and other issues, and by Sunday the protests had splintered into some of France’s worst riots in decades.
The news of Art Basel’s early closure is “tragic for the organizers and exhibitors who have put so much effort into the fair,” said Andrew Fabricant, a co-founder of the New York-based art advisers Paulson Fabricant. “Going forward, it will have a deleterious effect on Art Basel Paris,” he added.
Art Basel opened on Tuesday for with an exclusive “advance preview” for a select group of collectors on Tuesday and for a wider group of V.I.P.s on Wednesday.
Jeffrey Deitch, a contemporary art dealer with spaces in New York and Los Angeles, said that although there had been some cancellations, most of the key collectors, advisers and curators he expected had been at the fair. He said that the billionaire collector Alice Walton and her Crystal Bridges museum team had visited his booth on Wednesday morning.
Several major galleries issued lengthy lists of sales during the first two days. Hauser & Wirth sold paintings by Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz, both from 1965, for about $10 million each. David Zwirner found buyers for paintings by Richter, Robert Ryman and Joan Mitchell for $8.5 million, $4 million and $3.8 million.
After the advance preview and V.I.P. days, Art Basel is usually open to the public from Friday through Sunday. But most of the sales have already been made by the time the public arrives.
“It will make absolutely no difference,” Philip Hoffman, the founder of the Fine Art Group of art collectors, said of the decision to close the fair early. “All my clients have done their deals. The transactions have been made. Most of them will be leaving Paris by Friday, and so will I. The only impact the closure will have will be on tourists,” he said.
Around the edges of Art Basel Paris, a rich menu of satellite fairs take place during what has become known as “Paris Art Week.” The Paris Internationale fair was varying its schedule in light of demonstrations planned for Saturday and would close at 1 p.m., “just before the protests start,” its organizers said in an email.
“I lost my Airbnb on the weekend as it was attacked by rioters,” said Sergio Molina, the founder of the Llano gallery in Mexico City, in an interview on Monday at the opening of Paris Internationale. He was showing works by two young Mexican artists, Débora Delmar and Enrique Lopez Llamas, and had made sales at price points around $10,000, he said.
Molina was unfazed by the experience of trying to exhibit thought-provoking contemporary art in a climate of civic unrest.
“Seeing hundreds of people protesting about things they care about is part of being in Paris,” he said. “This is how the French demand things.”
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