Things have come to a pretty pass when the chief Paris arts fair, FIAC, held in its present form for almost half a century, gets kicked out by the Swiss.
Art Basel, now owned by a conglomerate, won a surprise tender offer from the French National Museum Authority, and will take up FIAC’s slots at the Grand Palais off the Champs Élysées for the next seven years. This stands on the very location where Manet held his 1863 “Salon des Refusés” for his daring Impressionist fellow-painters, including Pissarro and Courbet, then rejected from the grand annual Académie des Beaux-Arts Salon.
Art Basel grew out of a well-regarded 1970 event launched by three gallery-owners in Switzerland’s third largest city, where the first art museum in history was created in 1661. It now gathers close to 300 galleries and representatives from 400 museums worldwide: the Swiss, untroubled by wars, revolutions, and economic crises in recent centuries, are noted collectors with taste and deep pockets.
But experts fear the fair’s current iterations (they opened in Miami Beach and Hong Kong before setting their sights on Paris) have created a monster whose Paris post-victory press release, written in flawless PR-ese, featured buzzwords like “investment dynamic” and “market”.
Some French gallery-owners, who are promised pride of place by the newcomers, are unhappy. “Paris, unlike, say, London, has a real, lively market, with a diverse and original offer, from the very accessible to museum quality pieces. This will bring uniformisation, with a more business-like but standardised offer, highly financialised,” says one of them, the noted art adviser Cyrille de Gunzburg.
To Parisians, this is but the latest instalment in a long saga of official neglect. When the fair moves back to the revamped Grand Palais, visitors and exhibitors will pass the symbol of the city’s careless acceptance of self-marketed art: Jeff Koons’s 41-ft tall, 27-ton “Tulips”, an ugly contraption of aluminium, bronze and epoxy paint where a realistic (some say “obscene”) massive pink hand holds the stems of a multi-coloured bouquet of oblong balloons. The sculpture was given to the city, supposedly to commemorate the 2015 terror attacks; with the work’s €3.5 million actual construction and upkeep costs borne by unhappy Parisian taxpayers.
Where noted architects once produced controversial but important works, like the Louvre’s glass pyramid entrance, cultural policy in Paris has become a mix of performative woke laziness and spendthrift subsidies.
Take the beautiful 18th century Rotonde by the classical architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, now made into a rat-infested, graffitied “Hybrid Cultural Area” in City Hall’s newspeak, grandly called a “trattoria-lounge ouverte au clubbing et au design” (where is the Académie Française when you need it?) Or the concrete and plywood “sheep” penned by rusty railings at the Parc Monceau, once one of Paris’s most beautiful “Parcs à l’Anglaise”.
Take the projected 180m-high Tour Triangle skyscraper, which even Unesco warns will change the Parisian skyline. Or the Art Déco Palais de Tokyo, overlooking the Seine: its modern art galleries have been reduced to make space for a compendium of contemporary “art” featuring skateboarding performance artists, concrete girders and “artistic interventions”, all supposedly providing, in Meghan-Markleish lingo, a “convivial and challenging, generous and cutting edge, inviting and radical, poetic and transgressive space to learn, to experience, to feel, and to live”.
Meanwhile, monuments, from the 1547 Fontaine des Innocents to the unique, listed 1896 Pagoda, are first left to degrade, then replaced by modern horrors, or sold off, like the Italianate Hôtel Dieu hospital opposite Notre Dame, to become luxury hotels.
The City of Light, once the world capital of culture, has become a battered old lady on her way to a dismal care home.
