Art fair time again, October 2023: 1 - Paris Internationale

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This year, unlike last, I was well-organised enough to be back from Greece in time for Paris's annual contemporary art week.

Two years ago, I wrote a series of posts grouped together by the notion of 'art-fair fatigue' (Art-Fair Fatigue 1: Basel, Art-Fair Fatigue 2: Athens Biennale, Art-Fair Fatigue 3: FIAC, the FIAC not yet having been replaced by Paris+ by Art Basel, and finally, Art-fair fatigue 4: Paris Internationale and Asia Now). I'm not alone, I know, in finding the profusion of events, many of them major, going on simultaneously in Paris in a single week a bit too much to take in: art-fair fatigue again.

I started with Paris Internationale. This is a peripatetic event that usually takes place somewhere unusual and disused or undergoing refurbishment. This year it was housed in one of a number of striking telephone exchanges, quite avant garde for their date, that went up in Paris circa 1920. The building, while intact outside, was gutted, leading to complaints about the dust - the same as the year the fair was held in a disused car park off République. I remember I had to ask my framer to clean, as well as frame, a painting I bought there.

What struck me most, apart from the setting, was how tame the work all seemed, when the world outside is in murderous, bloody turmoil. It felt as if art and artists were tired with it all and groping for something to say. Not an exciting vintage, but there were exceptions, of course.

















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