The forthcoming edition of Art Basel Paris (24-26 October) will allow participating galleries to invite up to six guests to tour the fair the day before its First Choice VIP opening on Wednesday 22 October.
The new time slot, titled Avant Première, is on Tuesday 21 October between 3pm to 7pm. It aligns the schedule of the Paris fair closer to that of Art Basel's flagship event in Switzerland, which opens to First Choice VIPs on the Tuesday of the fair week.
“Following discussions with its stakeholders, Art Basel decided to introduce Avant-Première to the Paris show to enable participating galleries to welcome their closest clients for an intimate moment of discovery, dialogue, and focused business engagement ahead of the fair's First Choice VIP Opening the following day," said an Art Basel spokesperson.
“As the primary inviting authority, galleries have been asked to nominate clients for this occasion irrespective of their VIP status or whether they have already been invited to the fair. Galleries will have received number of invitations to share at their own discretion. The event’s aim is to offer a particularly intimate and privileged experience of this year’s edition.”
The move appears to address a dilemma facing many fairs: lower attendance by core clients, i.e. established collectors that will reliably spend large sums on art, but greater attendance by more casual fair-goers. Last year’s Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting included a study sampling 1,400 Art Basel VIPs, which found that this group attended an average of five fairs a year, down from eight in 2019. Meanwhile, respondents to the wider survey attended more fairs on average than before the pandemic.
Respondents to the VIP survey cited “overcrowding” as a reason for reducing their fair attendance. One complained that “too many interesting works are already sold when the show opens, so it becomes meaningless to travel to a fair in which you cannot buy the works you like”.