After weeks of boiling protests all across France, the tension rose to a peak with demonstrations and looting stealing the spotlight of an otherwise set-to-be lavish Art Week in Paris. On Thursday 22nd, Art Basel announced that they would be closing early due to safety concerns; the decision to not let the fair run as normal during the weekend was a first in the history of Art Basel. Who was consulted? Art Basel says it spoke with galleries, its selection committee and the authorities; the French gallery association says the decision was made by Art Basel alone, and is now asking for compensation. Closing may well have been the right call; closing it the way it was done, with the smallest galleries left to absorb the cost, is what is hard to defend.

Whilst big names took the opportunity to go home early with a grin on their face (let it be known, around 147 million dollars were accounted for in artwork sales on the first two days of preview, according to figures compiled by the fair and reported by Artnet), mid- to small-sized galleries, which tend to depend highly on weekend visitors, took the bigger blow. David Zwirner himself estimated that around 80 percent of his sales happen in the first two days. Iwan Wirth, whose Hauser & Wirth sold two paintings for around 10 million dollars each, told Artnet that people buy art with another part of the brain, and that he has done well at fairs even during stock market crashes. Artist Rose Marcus, quoted in the same piece as rumours of an early closure spread, was blunter: “Destruction usually generates a profit.” From an audience perspective, the big money was not the one affected by the early close, but rather the ordinary art lovers, workers and everyone else who might take the opportunity to visit an art fair (and pay the rather expensive ticket price of it) for the chance to discover art in a uniquely easy and concentrated way. An art fair is, of course, made to sell; but anyone who spends their money and their time to go and see art should be just as welcome, because art holds, as has been established for some time now, a human and social value far beyond the economic one. Otherwise, let’s stop pretending to welcome the general public and keep it exclusive.

And as I sipped my coffee while reading the news in my 20sqm apartment, 9,000 km away from the main event, I realized the once again underlying joke of it all: the privilege of being able to choose detachment from reality. I was enjoying that privilege myself; Art Basel exercised it by closing its doors, safety concerns aside, while the small galleries, the visitors and the workers stayed in reality and absorbed the cost. Which is why Art Basel closing early is not so different, in its consequences, from vandals looting businesses in the midst of social exhaustion and popular uprising: legitimate events (protests and art fairs alike) can show their cracks and damage their own legitimacy, and the ones who pay the price are never those at the top.

Rising costs of living and decaying education conditions sit at the core of the demonstrations; peaceful demonstrations from a people long ignored by more than nine years of Macron’s presidency. What began in late September as student protests has since grown into a nationwide movement. In my view, protests in Paris are nothing other than the result of years of privatizations, polarizations and deliberate forgetfulness of the welfare state. Yet fairness does not make for a good opening title and the media has been filled by the - very loud but, nonetheless, minoritarian - displays of violence and looting. “See what these left-wing know-nothing kids are doing?” Yet if we stopped and thought for a second we’d soon realize the lying contradictions of those seemingly joint events. Who’s hurt in that looting? The big brands? The rich? If only.

A store that is broken into, robbed and trashed is a store that needs to make up for its losses. Who cleans the mess of a private space? Who makes up for the financial imbalance? It’s not always the owner; it’s often the employees and their salaries. Looting does not go hand in hand with basic rights: whatever little reason may lie behind it, it never serves them. Art Basel sits right at the core of the issue, because while big names of the art world pack up with their sales already made, the workers, the lovers, the artists and all the ecosystem that sustains this field far beyond the money and the private make-you-feel-like-you’re-somebody exclusive events are the ones deprived of their right to creativity and entertainment, sacrificed in the name of social improvement.

In the meantime, creators and other glamour-based art world people complained about events not being exclusive enough while trying to pretend like getting inebriated and being loud on Wednesday night c’est chic if you do it in a pair of Vivienne Westwood heels. One art-week diary describes drunk guests at a party a few steps from streets still strewn with burnt bikes and glass from the weekend before. These people are not millionaires, but they feel above it all, and that is exactly the privilege of detaching oneself from reality: a level of frivolity that has nothing to do with art and everything to do with money and appearances. I guess in all settings, the careless minority does not represent the majority, whose voices are drowned out by its squeaky yet deafening screams.