Almost as if to go deliberately against current international critical trends, the Ricard Prize, which gives strong critical backing to the young French scene, went to Katinka Bock; and this year's winners of the Duchamp Prize are the French-English duo Dewar and Gicquel — while an exhibition by last year's winner Mircea Cantor is on at the Beaubourg.
However, when all is said and done, everyone exploits this burst of international visibility to promote a product. It all began a few days in advance, with dinners and openings that revolved around the agoraphobic battle for the most cubic gallery-hangar metres in the Parisian balie. Two big guns on the contemporary market, Ropac and Gagosian, shared Anselm Kiefer's fame with two monumental projects: Morgentau Plan in the Le Bourget spaces renovated by Jean Nouvel; and a gentler re-staging of the 1969 Beuys work Titus Andronicus/Iphigenie, accompanied by another monumental exhibition by the Kiefer, Die Ungeborenen, to be seen at the Pantin.
All the galleries share a difficult parterre that is revamped after the VIP-preview rush, which sets the trend of blue-chip values and is then quickly re-arranged. We are left with fine, opted works: works by the highly political Paul McCarthy such as Static shown by Hauser & Wirth, Basquiat's stratospheric projects and Marisa Merz's delightful, fleeting apparitions, on display at Barbara Gladstone, and Alan Vega's unexpected post-Punk pieces, such as Suicide, at Laurent Godin. Not a sample collection but an attempted sampling.
The off-site and hors-les-murs events are ever richer, with routes in the Jardin des Plantes and Tuileries, and we all made one great rush through the Paris rain to flash exhibitions, some held in splendid private apartments