Paris Art Week Opens Amid Fires, Tear Gas and Closures

PARIS — Anyone who has attended Paris Art Week more than once tends to carry a story about something going wrong. This year’s came with the smell of burning plastic. That is how Hyperallergic’s correspondent greeted the city on the afternoon of Saturday, October 17, rolling a suitcase out of the Gare du Nord past black-clad protesters fleeing police squads while firefighters put out scattered fires.

The account, published by Hyperallergic, describes an art fair season colliding with a wave of unrest. A collector at Asia Now, the first of the fairs, which opened Monday, told the writer that people in the art world are courageous but that she would still like to be back at her hotel before 7 p.m. “just in case.” A friend of the writer’s who lives in the Marais had planned a quiet weekend of shows and fairs, even her outfits, but found herself running from police on Boulevard de Sébastopol, and did not get home until around 11 p.m.

The French-Moroccan artist El Mehdi Largo, who is skipping every fair this year, called them “rather grotesque” in this context before adding that they are “pretty grotesque in any context.” Speaking to the writer from a café on rue Poissonnière, with smashed glass and clusters of burned bikes in view, he argued that the modern art economy is about taxes and moving money around. For the elites, he said, it could just as easily be thoroughbred horses.

The writer describes damage that was selective rather than indiscriminate: most of the broken windows he saw belonged to Carrefour supermarkets, banks, real estate agencies, luxury brands and government buildings, though small shops were not spared, and there was looting. A Lebanese friend, whose daughter is among the marching students, found that shocking. Others were taking food and tampons for the homeless; some were simply smashing windows. Graffiti ranged from a handwritten cardboard quotation of Simone Weil to a blunt expletive aimed at the police.

The cultural calendar bent under the pressure. An Italian curator in the Marais hung her show with the shutters down while, as she put it, outside there was “basically a civil war,” with people banging on iron doors and tear gas seeping in. Her boyfriend shrugged that protests are always like this in France. At the Grand Palais, the police prefecture ordered a lockdown at 5 p.m. Saturday while galleries were installing Art Basel Paris; the building reopened the next day undamaged.

Elsewhere, closures piled up. On October 15 the Foreign Ministry postponed a design show by Thierry Lemaire and Harry Nuriev at the Quai d’Orsay, judging it ill-timed; its title, PASSAGES, plays on the French for “disobedient.” The Jeu de Paume called off the VIP opening of its Stan Douglas show on Sunday. On Monday, students from the École du Louvre blocked the museum’s entrance, and that evening students forced the École des Beaux-Arts to cancel its Gina Pane opening.

The interior minister acknowledged that police had “lost control” over the weekend, according to the report. The Chinese, German and U.S. embassies advised citizens to avoid protest areas, and an overnight curfew from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. was imposed on Place de la République and part of Les Halles. By Tuesday afternoon, when Art Basel’s invitation-only “Avant-Première” opened, the excerpt of the piece available to us ends before describing the scene inside.