Art Basel Paris Closes Two Days Early as Protests Ring the Grand Palais

Art Basel Paris announced it would close two days early, on Friday at 7 pm, "in the interest of safeguarding our visitors" ahead of renewed weekend protests. By then, as one Dubai gallerist put it, the business was already done. The fair's cancellation was the neatest summary of a week that began in smoke.

When the correspondent arrived at Gare du Nord on Saturday, October 17, the air smelled of burning plastic. Black-clad protesters ran from police squads; firefighters extinguished scattered fires. A friend in the Marais, who had planned outfits for a quiet art weekend, instead found police "playing cat and mouse" with protesters on Boulevard de Sébastopol. "We had to run!" she said. "When the police start hitting, they hit indiscriminately." Her family reached home around 11 pm and shut the door.

How grotestque can an art fair be?

"I think the art fairs, in this context, are rather grotesque," French-Moroccan artist El Mehdi Largo said, skipping them all this year. "Then again, art fairs are pretty grotesque in any context." Sitting in a café on rue Poissonnière, with a view of burned bikes like melted Alberto Burri Combustioni, he argued that for today's elites "it could be art, or it could be thoroughbred horses; it won't make any difference!"

The destruction had its own hierarchy. Most shattered windows the writer saw belonged to Carrefour supermarkets, banks, real estate agencies, luxury brands and government buildings. A Lebanese friend whose daughter marched said: "In Lebanon, people were so hungry, but they still have their dignity; they would never loot. Here, people are really, really angry."

An Italian curator spent that Saturday installing her Marais show behind shutters while tear gas seeped in. "It was surreal to put up the works when outside there was basically a civil war," she said. Her French boyfriend reassured her: "Nothing to worry about, chérie, protests are always like this here!"

What did the lockdown change?

At 5 pm on Saturday, the police prefecture ordered a lockdown of the Grand Palais while galleries installed the fair; nobody could enter or leave. It reopened the next day without a scratch. Around it, the cultural calendar buckled:

• On October 15, the Foreign Ministry postponed the design show PASSAGES. Pas sages by Thierry Lemaire and Harry Nuriev at the Quai d'Orsay, judging it ill-timed.
• On Sunday, the Jeu de Paume cancelled the VIP opening of its Stan Douglas exhibition.
• On Monday, École du Louvre students blocked the Louvre's entrance; that evening, students forced the École des Beaux-Arts to cancel its Gina Pane opening.

The interior minister conceded police had "lost control." An overnight curfew, 11 pm to 6 am, covered Place de la République and part of Les Halles. Yet by Tuesday's ultra-VIP "Avant-Première," the Grand Palais was ringed with anti-ram barriers, round-the-clock police and private security — and, inside, nobody discussed the protests. "They're too busy selling works for millions of dollars!" one editor shouted.

Collector Selim Bouafsoun, in from Tunisia, had already bought pieces. "Manifestations are a right, and we respect their rights," he said. Outside, Alicja Kwade's "L'Élévation des Mondes" (2026), a 14-foot stone-sphere stack evoking Babel, came down Friday instead of Sunday. "Protest is good, but why everything has to be smashed and destroyed is beyond me," Kwade wrote on Instagram.

Is art the opposite of protest?

At Offscreen, held in the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, Iraqi-Finnish artist Adel Abidin offered a different verdict as armed officers took position outside. "While I condemn the vandalism and the violence, I think it's inspiring to see that people can protest and have a voice," he said. "I wish I'd had that when I was living in Baghdad." Art and protest, he argued, "are not really opposites."

Largo disagreed, calling socially engaged works at fairs mere decoration, and confessing he hoped "les casseurs" would walk into the Grand Palais — before catching himself: "This will become the aesthetic of smashing. Damn. There is no way out, isn't it?" The city's cleaning crews, meanwhile, are already painting over the graffiti.