VIPs began arriving in Paris today for Art Basel, with no one quite sure how the weekend’s riots will affect the fair. Barriers now surround the Grand Palais, where it is held, and the organisers have said it is going ahead “as planned”. The word “additional” is doing some work in their statement, because security personnel have been added to patrol the perimeter around the clock.
Several anecdotal reports stated that some collectors, particularly Americans, have cancelled their trips and neither the organisers nor the galleries have said how many people have pulled out or whether it will affect sales. Le Monde has been blunter about the mood. The paper said the violence in the streets had dealt a sharp reality check to the bubble of opulence that usually surrounds a week like this.
Other events have been disrupted. An exhibition by the designers Thierry Lemaire and Harry Nuriev at the Quai d’Orsay has been postponed, and a VIP opening at the Jeu de Paume art centre was cancelled outright. Both are the sort of side events that fill out a fair week, the dinners and previews that collectors and dealers plan their days around, so their absence will be noticed even if the main fair runs smoothly.
The schedule at the Grand Palais itself has not changed. Tomorrow and Thursday are VIP days, when most of the serious buying tends to happen, and the public can enter from Friday to Sunday. If the fair has a problem this week, it will show up early, in the first two days, in who walks through the doors and how quickly the stands fill.
Art Basel Paris returns to the Grand Palais this week for its fifth edition, the first under a new director, Karim Crippa. Preview Days are on 21 and 22 October, and the fair opens to the public from 23 to 25 October. The organisers say the aim this year is to put Paris itself at the centre of the fair’s identity, rather than treating the city as a backdrop.
The numbers give a sense of the scale. There are 211 galleries in all, and 64 of them run spaces in France. The main Galeries sector holds 183; Emergence has 16 solo presentations; and Premise has 12 projects with a historical focus. Thirty-two galleries are taking part for the first time, and six have moved up from Emergence into Galeries. A record twelve joint booths put 24 galleries side by side, which should produce some unusual pairings of programmes and ideas.
Premise has been given more room, shifting to the larger Salon Seine. The section is for research-led presentations that revisit established accounts of art history and broaden them, and the extra space should help those stands breathe.
The fair also reaches well beyond the Grand Palais. An expanded Public Program places commissions and presentations at the Petit Palais, the Palais d’Iéna, the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, the Parvis des Droits de l’Homme and the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Others sit along Avenue Winston Churchill, in Square Jean Perrin, on Place Clemenceau and in the Jardin de la Nouvelle-France. Much of it is in public view, free of the fair’s doors.
Oh La La! The two-day rehang comes back on Friday and Saturday, when galleries change their booths and bring in new work. The actress Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu is art-directing it, with the theme “Myths and Legends”. Conversations, the talks programme with artists, museum directors, curators and collectors, moves into the Auditorium of the Grand Palais for the first time.
Last year’s edition drew more than 73,000 visitors and representatives from over 240 museums and foundations, and this one is meant to build on that. The commercial backdrop is solid. The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026 puts French sales at USD 4.5 billion in 2025, accounting for 8% of the global market and more than half of the EU total by value, making France the world’s fourth-largest art market.
The organisers describe a programme that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, performance, literature, dance, film and new media, and that seeks to look beyond the usual limits of an art fair to how art is made, shown, experienced and collected. That is a broad claim, and the week itself will test it.