One of Paris’s most iconic buildings, La Monnaie, serves as the setting for the eighth edition of Asia Now Paris, an ambitious art fair that has brought together more than 75 galleries from across Asia.

For its first fair since the start of the pandemic and its first in La Monnaie, Asia Now expanded in size. It’s also gotten buy-in from top galleries like Almine Rech, Perrotin, Richard Saltoun, Frank Elbaz, and P21. 

“This edition is special,” Asia Now director Alexandra Fain told ARTnews at a preview on Thursday.

In addition to well-presented booths, the fair has a program that includes numerous talks and performances, as well as various site-specific commissions. Among them are a durational live-painting session by Ayako Rokkaku and a special project of ceramics that incorporate hemp by artist Natsuko Uchino, who is collaborating with 91530 Le Marais, a farm about 40 minutes outside Paris founded by Victoire de Pourtalès and Benjamin Eymère.

But most importantly, it is showing truly cutting-edge work from artists active across Asia. (The fair uses the definition of the continent provided by the Asia Society in New York, which accounts not just for East Asia but also for the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.) Be prepared to learn about artists who have yet to come across your radar; it makes for a wonderful experience.

On the outskirts of Paris this week, in the suburb of Aubervilliers, 250 artists opened their studios to the public for a program called POUSH, which began in 2020. The brainchild of Hervé Digne, the cofounder of the art production consultancy Manifesto, POUSH offers emerging artists heavily subsidized studio space by making deals with real estate developers who are holding onto enormous, abandoned buildings. 

“At first, the landlords were skeptical,” said Digne, as we stood in the massive artistic compound. Its site was once a perfume factory, then a data center. “Artists in an abandoned building? They didn’t think it would go well.” 

But Digne, who had experience with government officials and developers from his Manifesto work, eventually convinced a developer in the suburb of Clichy to offer the office tower to artists. In return, POUSH was have to cover utility costs and some taxes, and thus, POUSH was able to offer studio spaces to artists at a heavily reduced rate of about 10 to 13 euros per square meter a month. After two years, the developer in Clichy wanted the space back.

“We gave it back on time and in the same condition,” Digne said. It was important to him to set a good example so that the program could hopefully spawn similar schemes.

Digne began POUSH as a way to address two key issues he thought were facing artists: a lack of affordable studio space and an epidemic of loneliness. He thought to himself: “These artists leave school, and they begin a very intense period, often very alone. But what if they weren’t?”

The original stone mosaic floors where St. Nicholas—the inspiration for Santa Claus—would have stood during mass and where his tomb is located within the building, have been uncovered by archaeologists excavating the Church of St. Nicholas in Demre, Turkey. Since 1982, the church has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

To access the remains of the third-century basilica below, an upper layer of Byzantine-era mosaic tiles were removed. After the older church was flooded due to rising sea levels, the current structure was erected over top its remains in the Middle Ages.

“We are talking about the floor on which St. Nicholas’s feet stepped. This is an extremely important discovery, the first find from that period,” Osman Eravşar, the head of the provincial cultural heritage preservation board in Antalya, told Demirören News Agency.

Excavations at the church have been ongoing since 2017, when experts identified the seventh- or eighth-century church as St. Nicholas’s final resting place. While electronically surveying the space, experts discovered empty spaces between the floor and the foundations.

The site was originally intended to be St. Nicholas’s final resting place, but Crusaders transported his bones to Bari, Italy in 1087. During the removal, they moved the empty burial chamber to a niche on the side of the chapel.

By Friday, several participants in Paris+, the first edition of Art Basel in the French capital, reported having sold artworks worth millions of dollars, potentially suggesting that the fair could have lasting power.

Galleries brought to the fair all kinds of work, from new pieces by rising stars to old ones by art-historical giants of years past. It was well-established international talents that seem to have performed best, however, and not artists associated with the French scene.

Still, French galleries said they felt a good deal of enthusiasm at the fair—perhaps more, even, than they’d found at FIAC, the long-reigning French art fair that was ousted from its venue and October slot by Art Basel this year.

“We were surprised by the number of first choice guests, the number of collectors is exceptional per square meter,” said Galerie Templon executive director Anne-Claudie Coric in a statement. “We had visitors from the United States, Latin America, China, we saw people from Turkey. We have never seen such eagerness, such excitement around the ex FIAC, that’s one thing.”

As always, it’s worth remembering that sales at art fairs are self-reported by galleries and difficult to verify. What galleries did report, however, is roughly on par with what gets announced when they participate in other top art fairs around the world.

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When I show up for New York Film Festival’s 9:30 P.M. opening-night screening of White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, the lobby is already swarming with television executives, publicists, and Lincoln Center benefactors. No one seems to have known how to dress for either the event or the weather. (Puffer coat and sheer tights? Sandals and spaghetti straps? Sensible backpack or Prada bag?) “They told me the vibe was black-tie,” a woman in a sequined gown says to her husband guiltily. He has very clearly been forced to wear a tuxedo. I watch some groups trying and failing to cut the line by flashing the branded wristband we have all been given. I find my seat and settle in for a Q&A with Noah Baumbach and members of the cast, including Greta Gerwig, Adam Driver, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Don Cheadle. They crack self-deprecating off-the-cuff jokes, as if there had not been two previous screenings earlier this evening. (At one point Baumbach says the “nine o’clock crowd” is his favorite yet. People cheer.) 

Finally the movie starts, and I take in Adam Driver as Jack Gladney, the chairman of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill, complete with gaudy button-down, receding hairline, and prosthetic paunch. The film is divided into three sections punctuated by the climactic “airborne toxic event,” which, as in the book, is also the most exciting and easiest bit to follow (a car crashes into a train carrying noxious chemicals; deadly smoke shrouds the sky). As the movie’s abrupt cuts and ecstatic colors make me mildly seasick, I notice some cast members appearing and disappearing into an opera box to glance at themselves on the screen. Perhaps taking their cue from the cast, several audience members trickle toward the exits around the time Babette, played by Gerwig, tells Jack she is afraid to die. (They miss the best part of the movie, which is the extended credits-and-dance sequence in the supermarket, set to LCD Soundsystem’s “new body rhumba,” written for the film.) The lights come back on and the actors again appear in the opera box, applauding and waving to the crowd.

A little after midnight, a group of white-haired men in newsboy caps wander down 66th Street toward Central Park, in the general direction of the after-party. “That Adam Driver,” one of them says. “Poorly cast. He just isn’t what you’d call an everyman.” A few women walk beside me, discussing the odds of getting in without a wristband. “What if Noah Baumbach tells us to leave?” A long line leaks out of Tavern on the Green: women in pearls and staticky shawls, men in sport coats over T-shirts and loafers without socks. Someone ushers me toward the front and soon enough I’m holding a miniature cheeseburger, a tiny tiramisu, and a free negroni. A famous DJ plays and red strobe lights flash across walls lined with rows of Campari bottles. I watch a group of women attempt to order spicy margaritas from the bartender, who throws his hands up in exasperation—he can’t serve anything except Campari-based cocktails. The liquor brand is proudly sponsoring the event. 

—Camille Jacobson, engagement editor

Q&A with Francisco echo Eraso, arts and access consultant.

How did you get involved in accessibility work?
I’m a disabled, trans, Colombian American artist, curator, arts administrator, and access consultant. I started my organizing work at the now disbanded Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn, where I learned how to approach accessibility in a grassroots context. I moved on to larger institutions such as the Ford Foundation, where I worked on a Disability Futures Fellowship. That experience, developing programs with 20 leaders of various disability arts and justice movements, is central to how I now understand contemporary access in the arts.

What are access services?
Institutions often approach access issues through the framework of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Many art spaces are working to meet a checklist of services now required by law, whether affecting exhibition design or programs for disabled workers. Recently, there has also been a lot of recommitment to diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI), but all these efforts can still leave out many types of access that disability justice organizers foreground.

My own communities of disabled people concentrate on making space for being together. That includes access services like tours designed to meet specific disability needs, access work, care work, event coordinating, public programs, and virtual spaces. Access work should be locally centered, but also very expansive, community engaged, and led by disabled people.

What does your role entail?
Access work in the arts incorporates services such as consulting with installation teams and graphic designers to develop a universal exhibition design, which often includes tours in ASL for those who are Deaf and hard of hearing, and visual descriptions for those who are blind or have low vision.

On a street not far from Paris’s Centre Pompidou, there once was a sculpture that moved. It had a muscular man formed from gold leaf and bronze who, at various points of the day, would appear to fight a dragon, a crab, and a rooster, clanging as his arms and body swayed around. A clock nearby him announced the time.

Since 2003, the year that funding to maintain the piece dried up, its clock has been stopped, and the man has remained static. A quiet hush has since fallen over this sculpture by Jacques Monestier, titled Le Défenseur du temps (The Defender of Time).

All that has changed, however, thanks to artist Cyprien Gaillard.

For the past few years, Gaillard has been working to breathe new life into Monestier’s sculpture, which he has transported to Lafayette Anticipations for a moving show that also extends to the Palais de Tokyo. Once his exhibition ends, Gaillard will return Le Défenseur du temps to its former home, where it will once again creak and clang for unsuspecting passersby.

The curator of both shows, Lafayette Anticipations director Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, said in an interview with ARTnews, “When I invited him, he said, ‘Okay, I will basically make my work be material that’s consistent with the revival of an artwork by someone else. And I will dedicate all my budget to an outsider to public art that’s not loved anymore.’”

Marcus, Luke, Pete and Andy pick through some post-Craven Cottage chaos, with Villa showing Stevie G the door after a turgid performance. At least they gave him a lift home! 

Also eyeing up the managerial buffet are Leeds and Southampton, while Cristiano Ronaldo’s insistent petulance threatens to overshadow his achievements. We also celebrate the return of two footballing icons: fans wearing goalie gloves in the crowd and Radja Nainggolan’s smoking habit.

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