Art Basel Paris

There is a particular kind of Paris morning when the art world takes over the city, and today is one of them. The fifth edition of Art Basel Paris opens its invite-only Avant-Première this morning at the Grand Palais, with preview days Wednesday and Thursday and the public days running Friday through Sunday. If you are anywhere near the 8th arrondissement this week, you will feel it.

The numbers are big and getting bigger. 211 galleries from 41 countries. 183 of them in the main Galeries sector, 16 solo presentations in Emergence, 12 projects in Premise — which moves this year into the 900-square-meter Salon Seine. Thirty-two galleries are first-timers. A record 12 joint booths bring 24 galleries together. And 64 exhibitors already operate spaces in France, which tells you something about how international this fair really is: more than a quarter of the participants already live here.

It is also the first edition under a new director. Karim Crippa, formerly the fair’s head of communications, takes over from Clément Delépine. A communications person running an art fair is a telling choice. Art fairs have become machines of attention — the art is the engine, but the noise is the fuel. Crippa knows the fuel.

The France–USA thread runs through the whole fair, as it always does in Paris. New American galleries in the Galeries sector include Pace Di Donna Schrader — a newly formed outfit, and you can feel the market’s consolidation in that name — plus Tina Kim, Reena Spaulings, the returning Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, and Luxembourg + Co, with spaces in London and New York. American art-fair culture is transactional and loud; Parisian art-fair culture is transactional and elegant. The fair is where the two learn each other’s language.

And nobody does that translation better than the luxury machine. Look at the partner list: Louis Vuitton, Miu Miu, Guerlain, Audemars Piguet, Zegna, Ray-Ban. This is the Paris nexus that American fairs cannot copy — art, fashion, and luxury woven into one long week where a gallery dinner and a fashion show are the same evening’s plans. In Miami, the art fair has parties. In Paris, the art fair has maisons.

The public program is where the fair earns its city. Nine venues across Paris: the Petit Palais, the Palais d’Iéna — where Alice Diop shows her Geste de Consolation — the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, the Parvis des Droits-de-l’Homme with Tracey Emin, the Beaux-Arts, the Avenue Winston-Churchill, the Square Jean Perrin, the Place Clemenceau with Robert Indiana’s LOVE wall, and the Jardin de la Nouvelle-France. Free, open, scattered through the city’s grandest rooms and squares. This is the part I love most as an expat: for one week, the contemporary art world and the Paris of the postcards are the same place.

Two programming notes worth your time. The Conversations program debuts in the Grand Palais Auditorium — talks, debates, the fair thinking out loud. And Oh La La! returns Thursday and Friday with Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu — yes, Sylvie from Emily in Paris, in her other life a serious art-world figure — art-directing the rehang around the theme “Myths and Legends.” Only in Paris does a television star curate a fair’s mythology theme and nobody blinks.

If you want a companion piece, the Fondation Louis Vuitton has its Gustave Fayet collector show running from early October through March 8. Fayet was one of those French collectors who bought what he loved before the market told him to. A good reminder, in a week of record booth counts, of what all this is supposed to be about.

The fair runs through Sunday. Go on a public day, walk the Grand Palais, then walk outside and find the LOVE wall at Place Clemenceau. Paris does this better than anyone: it makes the art world feel like it was always part of the street.