Louvre Closes as Students Block Pyramid Ahead of Art Basel Paris

By Daniel Okafor

The Louvre closed Monday after roughly 50 arts and culture students blocked its glass pyramid entrance, Le Figaro reported. The sit-in landed on the one-year anniversary of the museum's brazen jewelry heist. Timing, apparently, is everything.

The action follows a nationwide protest against social inequality on Saturday that spiraled into looting and riots, continuing at lower intensity into Sunday evening. The Louvre protesters, including students from the associated École du Louvre, said they were angry at the violent police response of recent weeks. They also wanted to back students demanding better conditions in public schools amid the rising cost of living.

No damage was done to the museum, and protesters never entered the pyramid, according to the AFP. The same can't be said for the surrounding art calendar.

What does the unrest mean for Art Basel Paris?

Plenty, potentially. The Louvre closure comes on the eve of Art Basel Paris, a fair anchored to a packed week of openings and events across the city. Art Basel issued a statement Sunday saying "the fair is proceeding as planned," while "additional security personnel have been deployed to patrol the perimeter of the fair 24 hours a day."

Casualties are already mounting at the margins. The Jeu de Paume canceled Sunday's opening of Stan Douglas's show Parallax "out of precaution," a museum spokesperson told ARTnews; the adjacent Tuileries gardens closed for the same reason. Hauser & Wirth shut its space in the 8th arrondissement on Saturday "as a precaution to protect the team, visitors and staff," a representative said by e-mail.

Why is Art Basel staying in Miami until 2031?

Because the rent halved. After months of heated negotiations, Art Basel struck a deal with city officials that cuts its annual rent from nearly $1 million to $500,000, plus additional city credits for police, fire and EMT services, the New York Times reported. The fair keeps its Miami Beach home through 2031.

To win the discount, Art Basel chief executive Noah Horowitz reportedly gave officials a bleak picture of the company's finances. He also threatened to decamp for Las Vegas or another city. Negotiation, like art, rewards a convincing fiction.

Horowitz said parent company MCH's recent profits followed years of "extraordinary losses in which MCH almost faced insolvency," which forced the group to take "in a large investment from James Murdoch's Lupa Systems family office to stabilize the business." All Art Basel fairs, he said, are "currently facing a cyclical downturn, the likes of which we haven't seen since the launch of Art Basel Miami Beach in the early 2000s."

The numbers back him up. Art Basel Miami Beach will host 250 galleries this December, down from 283 last year, as galleries limit fair participation or shutter outright in a slower market.

What else happened?

• A man died after being struck by dislodged roofing material during a walking tour of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. The site has temporarily closed.
• A study of 79 fingerprints on China's Terracotta Army suggests women and children helped make the sculptures alongside adult men, Heritage Daily reported.
• Landlords of Manhattan's Park Mansion are demanding socialite Libbie Mugrabi sell her Jean-Michel Basquiat painting to cover $2.3 million they say she owes in rent, the New York Post reported.
• A fine arts student strike at London's Goldsmiths University has reached 130 days, the longest at a UK higher education institution in history, per The Art Newspaper.
• National Museum of Korea director You Hong-june formally apologized Monday for exhibiting a calligraphy work wrongly attributed to activist Park Won-geun; it was in fact by a pro-Japanese collaborator.

The Kicker: Ibrahim Mahama at the Fondation Cartier

Ibrahim Mahama's major show "The Harvest Season" opens at the Fondation Cartier in Paris on Thursday. He calls it "the most ambitious exhibition I've done."

The Ghanaian artist, who works collectively within a community, tells ARTnews: "the artist is just a vessel, and I see myself as that vessel in order to put all these different things together to do the work that we do."

The show includes Parliament of Ghosts, an ongoing installation begun in 2019 from discarded train seats, railway sleepers, school furniture and government archives, now augmented with about 200 royal stools from the Asante Empire. Many of those stools were looted before ending up behind glass in Western museums, Mahama noted.

A new project, Things Fall Apart, reconstructs an abandoned glass bottle factory in Ghana — eventually destined for permanent display in Kumasi, where Mahama and his collaborators plan to build a new institution. Paris gets the preview; Kumasi gets the building.