PARIS+ BY ART BASEL Review — Top Tier Euro-Centric Art

At Paris+, Art Basel’s inaugural show in the City of Lights, a few outliers wore couture more in keeping with the LOOK-AT-ME! LOOK-AT-ME! scene of Miami Art Week (and Art Basel Miami) where contemporary art is a stone’s throw from bikinis and beer on the Miami Beach sandscape.

Here at the Grand Palais Éphémère, close to iconic Parisian museums, the scene is very different. The zeitgeist seemed instead to be saying LOOK-AT-ART! LOOK-AT-ART!

And indeed, there was much art to savor, in this photographer/writer team’s view.

Politics and protest – sometimes the main headline in prior Art Basel fairs that Picture This Post has reported on – seemed, at least to this writer, to be relatively muted and comparatively cerebral conceptual presentations. Apart from a few notable exceptions, the lens was decidedly Euro-Centric.

One consistent highlight of Art Basel events is the skewering of colonialism and racism one sees in the works brought to these fairs by Mariane Ibrahim which has galleries in Chicago and Paris, and soon Mexico City too.

You too might feel this most when you compare the Sites outdoor art exhibits in each locale. In Miami, this writer often felt that many of the people interacting with the Sites installations were experiencing contemporary art for the first time. There, fresh takes abound and it’s somewhat of a thrill to encounter them. Contrast that to Paris, where most of the people frequenting the Tuileries faced the fountains as they read their tablets or phones, scarcely giving the Paris+ installations around them much of a glance. The majority of the interactors with the Sites installations in Paris seemed instead to be toddlers and young children curious about how the usual do-not-touch rules were nowhere to be found.