The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: Art Basel Paris

Displacing the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC) in 2022, Art Basel Paris was initially met with resistance from the Parisian art community, which feared the fair would lose its French identity. Parisian gallery director Philippe Boutté even went so far as to call the move ‘sad and violent’.

Indeed, Art Basel Paris felt much more international than last week’s Frieze, which has retained its distinct London-centric identity. Thaddaeus Ropac seems to agree, commenting that Art Basel Paris already feels like ‘it’s the most international art fair of the year’.

What might such a globalist outlook leave behind? France has been gripped by weeks of student-led protests over school conditions, which reached a turning point last weekend, when fringe mobs took over much of Paris and proceeded to burn and loot parts of the city. Yet much of the unease felt on the streets was nowhere to be found inside the fair, where the exclusive early preview for VVIPs, ahead of the official VIP opening, was crowded and buzzy. Is everyone just a VVIP now?

Sales matched the optimism inside. Hauser & Wirth reported two major sales, each in the region of $10 million: Georg Baselitz’s The Shepherd, 1965, and Gerhard Richter’s Rokokotisch (Rococo Table), 1965.

However, by Thursday, exhibitors were noticeably more tense as another weekend of protests loomed and calls to demonstrate outside the Grand Palais itself spread on social media. By early evening, organisers had decided to close the fair on Friday ahead of its two days open to the general public. As the saying goes, although perhaps not in prediction of the shuttering of Art Basel Paris, ‘all good things must come to an end’.

So here’s our verdict on the Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Art Basel Paris edition. We count ourselves lucky to have been among the few who had the chance to see it.

Georg Baselitz, Der Hirte (The Shepherd), 1965. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth. 

The Good

Our two favourite booths were those of the Brazilian gallery A Gentil Carioca and the Norwegian gallery Standard. A Gentil Carioca presented the theme ‘Dreams and Nightmares’, with the aim of showing works in which dreams assume ‘multiple forms and scales, becoming a political matter and a confrontation to imagine other forms of living’. Ana Silva’s À contemplação do vazio…, 2025, embroidered with glitter and stiff crinoline fabric, commanded our attention as we walked by. It was a breath of fresh air after hours spent walking through booths filled with the same big-ticket names which began to resemble one another. But more on that later.

Standard showed a solo presentation by Pakistani artist Suleman Aqeel Khilji. Perhaps we simply enjoy sustained attention on one artist, but Khilji’s paintings on linen and their muted colours made for a beautifully focused booth. They allowed us to meditate on the nature of memory – until we heard an American collector mispronounce Champs-Élysées and remembered where we actually were.

Honourable Mentions: While there has been no news of whether it actually sold, the Amedeo Modigliani nude presented by Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries was striking to see up close, especially after the headlines announcing that it was being offered for more than $100m.

In a very different vein, we enjoyed seeing work from Lebanese artist Walid Raad’s fictional foundation, the Atlas Group, created in the late 1990s to contextualise a growing body of work documenting the Lebanese Civil War. Ghanem Mansour Raad’s photographs, donated to the Group and presented by Paula Cooper Gallery, included a diary detailing the collapse of the Lebanese pound, the price of construction materials and the types of bombs that had fallen near the diarist’s home. With politics at the forefront of our minds, this felt like one of the few works that gave us something to think about after we left the fair.

Ana Silva À contemplação do vazio..., 2025 embroidery, natural pigments, glitter on interlining and crinoline 420 x 450 cm. Courtesy the artist and A Gentil Carioca.

The Bad

While the art on view had been planned before the previous weekend’s unrest, the lack of work able to engage meaningfully with politics felt like a hard-to-ignore omission. One noticeable exception was AEZ, 2026, part of Klara Lidén’s Junction Box series, presented by Sadie Coles HQ. The graffiti made us feel as if we could be somewhere else in Paris, a jolt against the gallery’s sterile white cube.

Other attempts to engage with larger issues fell flat, such as Andrea Bowers’s People’s Initiative Poetic Protest on Paper, 2020, shown by Capitain Petzel. The Kurt Tucholsky quote on the painting’s leaves – ‘old trees should remain standing-against the foolishness of the petty bourgeois in spirit and in execution’ – felt too abstract to offer anything applicable.

But perhaps no work missed the mark as much as Maurizio Cattelan’s watercolour of a duct-taped banana over a picture of Hitler. The accompanying text explains that the banana does not explain or cancel Hitler, but hopes to ‘show how little can be removed’. Some figures, though, seem beyond needing a banana duct-taped over them to make the point.

Honourable Mention: The Art Basel gift shop was easily the most out-of-touch section of the fair. Nothing symbolises art as a cultural commodity more than miniature Art Basel tote bags, hats and T-shirts. For the more politically conscious, there was also a ‘Can Art Change the World’ bag for €87. If only it were that easy.

Installation view, Art Basel Paris, Sadie Coles HQ, Booth B41, Grand Palais, Paris. Courtesy the Artist/s and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.

The Ugly

Walking through the first floor of the fair, there were enough heavyweight artists to make it feel as though you were in a museum. Every gallery seemed to have its own Calder, its own Miró, a Richter, a Warhol, a Kapoor. But once the excitement of recognising a star name subsides, you realise why you’re seeing this Picasso at a Ropac booth instead of in an actual museum.

And while ‘ugly’ may come with negative connotations – you philistines – we found ourselves obsessed with the wonderful weirdness of Marc Kokopeli’s Inspired Music Playset -Trip Hop, 2026, and Inspired Music Playset - Drummer, 2026; black-and-white South Park dolls inside white television circles. Part of New York-based gallery Reena Spaulings’s debut presentation at Art Basel Paris, Kokopeli’s video installations were darkly funny. “In a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to dream,” a little Stewie said to me. I found myself strangely touched.

Honourable Mentions: While we know this is an art fair, we couldn’t help noticing how badly dressed many of the visitors were. I love my fellow countrymen, but it seems the blame lies with us Americans. How did On sneakers become the new collector shoe?

Speaking of collectors, the collectors’ lounge is where dreams went to die. My friends and I entered, foolishly thinking food and drink would be free, only to pay €26 for an average glass of wine and some stale popcorn. The cork stools were not only uncomfortable but unstable: I managed to fall off one just five minutes after sitting down. Average wine? In France? Art Basel Paris is clearly not representative of the capital at large.