Champagne is flowing, high fashion is on display. Crowds are filling into the Grand Palais on the Seine’s right bank. No, this is not Paris Fashion Week, it’s Art Basel Paris.
The venue – Grand Palais – the Great Palace cuts a familiar outline in the Paris skyline, can be described as a giant conservatory. Built for the 1900 World Fair, its size and grandeur are unparalleled. It’s an open space that can fit the entire Versailles palace. Covered in 15,000 panels of glass it allows for the natural light to pour over the gallery booths set up on the ground level and second floor alcoves. Across the street, stands the Petite Palace, also built for the 1900 World Fair, it’s smaller in scale but no less beautiful. The engineering feat and scale of this building, with the romantic views from the windows of the Pont Alexander III bridge and the Seine make this a truly unique and remarkable venue for an art show.
This drone video provides a great overview of the scale and the set up of the show, even though at night, you can not see the gorgeous glass ceiling of the Grand Palais.
Art Basel Paris has a special buzz to it. There’re 206 galleries from 41 countries. The biggest players in the art world – art advisors, collectors, blue-chip artists, along with emerging artists lucky enough to be selected. The first three days of the show was for the VIP clients, where the biggest sales were made. Richard Gerhart “Abstraktes Bild” paved the way with a $23 Million sale:
This large-scale canvas called “Charioteer” by Julie Mehretu was bought for $11 million. It reminds me of a Calder mobile, something of a suspended weightlessness and lightness combined with incredible speed and power:
Although Art Basel is dedicated to works created in the 20th Century to present day. But not everyone adhered to that rule. The big name galleries focused on sales and brought their most prestigious artists. Gagosian got an exception and displayed a 17th Century Peter Paul Rubens. In a $65 billion art market, the work sold is an investment, a financial instrument, and the most well-known and well-established artists are the ones who will appreciate in value. Especially sought after are the names already collected by large-scale museums. Artists that the general public would buy a museum ticket to see are sold here to the most well-placed collectors. Pablo Picasso, Amadeo Modigliani, Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Meret Oppenheimer, Yayoi Kusama, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Ruth Ozawa, and the list goes on and on. Bridget Riley’s painting sold for $2.2 million and she has a solo show at Musee D’Orsay across the Seine. Her paintings are constructed of patterns in shapes and colors that create optical illusions that seem to be moving and changing in front of us. Jean Dubuffet is a French artist collected by many museums, his sculpture graces the garden at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art in New York). To own their work is a mark of a true connoisseur and a status symbol. Yves Klein was on view, valued between $16 and $24 Million. Klein was a French artist known for Nouveau Realism – New Realism – art movement, his work was so influential, the blue color he used is now known by his name as International Klein Blue.
Art Basel was started in 1970 by gallerists based in Basel, Switzerland. Hence the name. The show is diverse and international, and it was a success from the very start that has only grown in scale over the years. It provides an incredible opportunity to visit the world’s most famous galleries, representing their most beloved artists. There’s creativity, daring, pushing of boundaries, questioning everything, taking a political stand, calling for a reaction, for us to be present, to pay attention. It’s proven by empirical studies that art influences human behavior and rewires our brains to think differently. It also makes us happy. This show certainly does that. It makes me hopeful for the future of humanity. If human beings are capable of creating visual art that is so engaging, we can put our phones down and be present, have our curiosity piqued in order to discuss it, to be enveloped in something utterly differently than the quotidian. George Bernard Shaw said: “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” Art Basel Paris is the antidote to the crudeness of reality with so many artworks that are transformational, reflecting on our society, asking of us to be better humans, connecting us to each other. Art is the common link, the one thing that connects all of us and Art Basel Paris celebrates that with known masters and emerging creators.
Art Basel Paris continues in the traditions of the world fair, for which this building was created. The World Fair in 1900 was utterly mind-blowing. People reported feeling like they’ve left planet earth and everything they knew. I felt that at times walking around Art Basel. There’re artists creating things that are so radically different, so revolutionary in their approaches, I’m still working on processing it and finding the right language to discuss it. There was a giant neon pink octopus, Takeshita Murakami’s playful take on Japonisme, which was the craze of artists and collectors for all things Japanese at the end of 19th-beginning of 20th Century. Influence of Japanese prints and textiles can be found in all impressionist and post-impressionist work, most notably Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Eduard Manet. Murakami is exploring the themes of artistic reappropriation. He’s experienced enormous success with solo shows across the world and now designing handbags for the Louis Vuitton x Murakami collaboration:
Mohamad Abdouni is a Lebanese Artist who imagines boyhood as a pair of tidy widies that he constructs out of aluminum with clear cum on it made from resin:
Mathilde Denize combines painting, sculpture, and dance in her work, with every piece becoming a performance art exercise, inviting the viewer to explore, to question and to discover:
Tschabalala Self is a fellow New Yorker who created the “Bayou Bather” with multi-layered paint, fabric and peices of her previous works. It’s exciting, compelling and utterly different from anything else I’ve seen:
Grayson Perry created a tapestry based on the famous image of Marie Antoinette and added the names of the world’s charities, such as Greenpeace, RSPCA, Save the Children, etc. Perhaps if the French Queen was more focused on charity and less on astronomical spending, like ordering 300 dresses a year, jewels with thousands of stones and the extravagance of the Versailles palace, she could’ve changed the course of history and French Revolution and even kept her head. She was imprisoned just around the corner from the Grand Palais and was beheaded here in Paris in 1793. Or perhaps this is a statement on the modern ways of conspicuous consumption and a reminder of what’s truly important.
Art Basel has the reach to transform our relationship with art by introducing new, innovative artworks, and celebrating creativity from artists across different countries represented in different ways. Whether hung on walls, put on pedestals or more unconventional installations, our lives are changing, our relationship with technology, with the natural world and with each other are rapidly changing and artworks should be a reflection of that, should push the boundaries of what’s familiar and what’s possible and guide us to the new ways of being. Hopefully, in harmony with ourselves, with our environment and with each other. Perhaps if our minds are challenged by art, it can lead us to be more open-minded, more accepting of ourselves and others, kinder and more connected to our natural environment. If art could serve a function, it would be to make our world a better, more inclusive, and more harmonious place.
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