When the Californian art historian Elena Filipovic moved to Basel some nine years ago to take up a new role as director of Switzerland&rsquo;s oldest institution of contemporary art, Kunsthalle Basel, she was pleasantly surprised by the city. &ldquo;I am an urban person&mdash;I have lived in Los Angeles, Paris, Brussels, Berlin&mdash;and so I was terrified when my dream came true, and I got the job,&rdquo; she says, mentioning that Basel is the size of &ldquo;an American village.&rdquo;

But the small city, which is located at the border where Switzerland meets France and Germany, has much to show for itself. &ldquo;The richness of the cultural offering is so stupendous that it makes you feel like you&rsquo;re in a huge metropolitan city,&rdquo; she adds. &ldquo;If one is interested in culture, this is a place where every single day you have extraordinary artists in town, a really interesting local art scene and museums.&rdquo;

With almost 40 revered museums and countless galleries, Basel has become the go-to destination for art lovers worldwide. &ldquo;Every city has the thing that it&rsquo;s famous for,&rdquo; says Filipovic. &ldquo;In Basel&rsquo;s case, it&rsquo;s not watches or chocolate, but culture.&rdquo; Basel is particularly known for its long-standing art institutions, including The Kunstmuseum Basel, which, when established in 1661, became one of the first collections of art accessible to the public in the world. &ldquo;Even before the Louvre was opened to the public, there was the Kunstmuseum,&rdquo; she says. The Fondation Beyeler, which features modern and traditional art in Riehen near Basel, is also one of the most visited museums in the country. And Kunsthalle Basel celebrated its 150th anniversary last year; since its opening, Filipovic says, it &ldquo;has been the kind of place where the young, and the young at heart, gather.&rdquo;

People also attend the international art fair to see the burgeoning side of the art world, especially at Liste Art Fair Basel, which takes place every June at the same time as Art Basel and predominantly showcases the newcomers in the scene globally. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the place with the youngest galleries, and thus some of the youngest artists get shown,&rdquo; Filipovic says, noting that, while many of the galleries are still maturing, they are outstanding in uplifting the next generation. &ldquo;Liste is a really important platform for that and is the feeding ground for the galleries that will grow up to be the big players in Art Basel one day.&rdquo;

Since Art Basel began in the city in 1970, it has attracted a wide range of people that transform the city each year. &ldquo;[Basel] has taken over in a way that can never happen for Frieze New York, Frieze LA, or Paris+ par Art Basel,&rdquo; Filipovic says. &ldquo;Those cities are so big, and so many people are doing so many other things, whereas, in Basel, every single citizen is somehow swept into this beautiful vortex of art.&rdquo;&nbsp;

Last year saw the first edition of Basel Social Club, which took place at the Beverly Holz, a 1930s villa in Bruderholz, a suburb-like neighbourhood in the southeast of the city. The project created an environment where professionals could relax by the pool, eat and socialise with others while surrounded by the work of over fifty international and local artists exhibited over three floors and throughout the venue&rsquo;s garden. This year, the second edition will occur at Franck Factory, a former produce factory ten minutes from the fair showcasing more artists, musical acts, performances and food.

According to Filipovic, even seasoned professionals like herself are surprised by the Basel art scene&mdash;and they often find themselves astonished that some items for sale at Art Basel are not already in public collections. &ldquo;Whether you are an emerging collector, or a curator looking to prospect future artists, or you are simply curious about what the art world is, the very best place you could come to understand these things is Basel,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;It becomes a microcosm of the whole art system.&rdquo;

When people envision Art Basel, they tend to think of the ticketed show at the Swiss exhibition site Messe Basel, which features more than 280 leading galleries and 4,000 artists from around the world. But the international art fair offers even more to see in and around Basel. This includes public-focused projects such as Parcours, which transforms locations across Basel into site-specific sculptures, interventions, and performances, and Messeplatz, a public square used to exhibit art in front of Messe Basel.&nbsp;Samuel Leuenberger, curator for Parcours, particularly appreciates how Art Basel&rsquo;s public-focused art projects offer a taste of the fair to non-fair-goers. &ldquo;The beautiful thing about Parcours and Messeplatz is that it still has an overlap with a crowd that is not contemporary art-related, and you always have this potential to convince or surprise people with something that they would never have thought they would like, or they would even look at,&rdquo; he says.

Parcours specifically has been one of the highlights of Art Basel since its launch in 2010. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s much more complex than putting up a sculpture show,&rdquo; explains Leuenberger. While each of the site-specific artworks are made by artists represented by galleries showing in the main fair, the motivations of these works are different. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s outside. It&rsquo;s in the city. It&rsquo;s in the Kunsthalle Bar. It&rsquo;s in stores, private gardens and public institutions,&rdquo; Leuenberger says, explaining that many galleries at Art Basel are beginning to realise the worth of art exhibited without commercial intent. &ldquo;You can tell a great story, or you can make people read the works in a different context that you could never do in a gallery, white cube or exhibition space.&rdquo;This year, Leuenberger is also curating Art Basel&rsquo;s Messeplatz, where a musical installation titled Der Allplatz (2023) by the Moroccan, Swiss-based artist Latifa Echakhch will be on show. &ldquo;Messeplatz is very special because it&rsquo;s the only project within Art Basel that is commissioned by the fair rather than its participating galleries,&rdquo; Leuenberger says. Last year saw a participatory floor installation by the American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, who passed away in December 2021. This year, in collaboration with Luc Meier, director of Swiss Artist Residency La Becque, Echakhch will expand on her installation at the 59th Venice Biennale, which explored the relationship between music, memory and the body.&nbsp;

According to Leuenberger, Echakhch&rsquo;s piece for the upcoming Art Basel show will serve as a &ldquo;semi-deconstructed&rdquo; stage for daily concerts. &ldquo;It will be a messy, chaotic stage like if it was all broken or collapsed in the centre,&rdquo; adds Echakhch. Much like works for Parcours, the structure is open to the general public and located where most people will naturally come across it. &ldquo;She has created a landscape in three dimensions that will host a very lively music program,&rdquo; Leuenberger says.&nbsp;Echakhch has invited a number of well-known musicians to perform. While their tickets usually sell at a premium, in the case of Art Basel, they are free to all. The American composer Rhys Chatham is set to be one of the first performers, playing alongside artist and musician Robert Longo. There will be two to three concerts each day; at other points, the stage will remain empty for people to enjoy. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s all this time when nothing actively musical happens, where it&rsquo;s just a place you travel through,&rdquo; says Leuenberger. &ldquo;If you want to take a break when it&rsquo;s hot, you can sit on it, you can have a little corner of intimacy.&rdquo;

Art Basel will also host various public programmes and activities outside of its main ticketed exhibition space to make the fair more accessible to a wider range of people. It&rsquo;s an objective that Echakhch agrees with. &ldquo;I have many friends who do not usually go to Art Basel, who are going just to hear the concerts,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s one of the goals: to open [the fair and my work] not only to the art world but to a more general audience.&rdquo;

When 38-year-old gallerist Robbie Fitzpatrick and his then-business partner Alex Freedman were looking to expand their Los Angeles-based space, they knew their next one needed to be in Europe. After launching Freedman Fitzpatrick in 2013, the pair found they were primarily showcasing the work of artists from European countries and were regularly travelling to the continent for art fairs, biennials and institutional shows as a result. In 2018, they settled in Paris.“It was a sort of intuitive feeling that something was cooking within the French art scene,” says Fitzpatrick, who now runs an iteration of Freedman Fitzpatrick called Fitzpatrick Gallery, which he established on his own in 2020. “Our hunch was correct,” he says.In 2022, the world's leading art fair, Art Basel, launched a new annual show in the city, titled Paris+ par Art Basel. Taking place throughout the third week of October, it attracted a wave of excitement from the global art scene . The 2023 edition will include a free public program, taking place in six iconic venues around the city including three exhibitions in the Tuileries, the Beaux-Arts de Paris, and the Palais d'Iéna and two major public sculptures at Place Vendôme and Place de l'Institut. In the last year a number of new museums and galleries have been opening up all around the city, including an upcoming Hauser & Wirth space in a 19th-century neo-classical building set to open just off the River Seine this October.

But, Fitzpatrick is only one of many art enthusiasts who have settled in the city from elsewhere to take advantage of the thriving art scene. Although it has long been a prized art destination for culture tourists — millions of people visit Paris each year just to see the Mona Lisa, for example — those working in the art world have realised that the city has more to offer on both a long-term and short-term basis.

Art collector and critic William Zhao has lived between Paris and Hong Kong for over twenty years, having a home in both cities. “I grew up in China, but I moved to Paris to study,” Zhao says, noting that he received both his undergraduate degree and MBA in Paris and worked locally for just under a decade before he began living between his home city and the capital. “Paris is one of the most exciting cities in the world for art,” Zhao says. He also notes that he has seen an influx of visitors over the past year due to Paris+ par Art Basel and an increase in the quality of exhibitions around the time the fair is on. “Last year, during Art Basel, museums were showing exhibitions you would never usually expect to see at the same time in one city,” he says. “They were gorgeous exhibitions of a very high standard.” Similarly, this autumn's exhibition calendar is brimming with beguiling offerings, from Mark Rhotko at the Fondation Vuitton to Issy Wood at Lafayette Anticipations.

The 89-year-old American artist Sheila Hicks agrees with Zhao that Paris+ par Art Basel has brought extra excitement to the city, having moved to Paris from Mexico in 1964. An almost twenty-foot brightly coloured sculpture titled VERS DES HORIZONS NOUVEAUX (2023) by Hicks is set to be on show in front of the Institut de France, a non-profit organisation bringing together five of France's academies of arts and sciences, as part of the fair. “I look forward to walking down the block in my neighbourhood to the Seine and discovering my tall sculpture,” Hicks says. She also mentions that her initial impression of Paris was wrong. “I thought it was a good hiding place,” she says. “Inevitably, common enthusiasms connect one to communities. Museums and culture centres are strong in France, enriching daily life.”

Even for less established artists, Paris has become a go-to location. When Fitzpatrick lived in Berlin a decade and a half ago, he noticed many young French artists regularly relocated to the German capital. “They had graduated from French art schools but had decided not to remain in France, moving to Berlin or London or New York, but that has changed,” he says. “Many recent graduates have decided that Paris is actually a hospitable place to be a young artist, and that has expanded beyond just French artists. International artists have found that Paris can be a nurturing place.”

Paris is known for its rich history, exquisite food, and, of course, breathtaking architecture. From the Eiffel Tower to the Louvre, the city's buildings have long had cultural significance, especially after Emperor Napoleon III commissioned the French administrator Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the 1850s to renovate and modernise the city in a manner now called the Haussmann style, which has given the French capital the distinctive homogeneity it is recognised for.

But the reasons behind the beauty of Paris cannot be confined to one specific time period —it is instead a melting pot of different histories. “Paris' urban landscape is highly recognisable, due in great part to the substantial revamp of the city between 1853 and 1870,” says Clément Delépine, director of Paris+ par Art Basel, the French edition of the world's leading art fair Art Basel.“You can find Brutalist gems, contemporary experiments, and remnants from medieval Paris in the city's very centre,” he adds. Since its birth in 2022, Paris+ par Art Basel has used Parisian architecture as part of its public program, and consequently, the chosen venues “are an excellent example of this diversity,” Delépine says. The 2023 edition, which takes place in the third week of October, will use variedt locations ranging from the 17th-century Chapelle des Petits Augustins at the Beaux-Arts de Paris to the Centre Pompidou, which Delépine calls “one of the world's most striking museum buildings.”

Each building also carries with it its own cultural importance. “The chapel of the Beaux-Arts school is the last remnant of a convent founded by Marguerite de Navarre, one of France's most legendary queens and keen supporter of the arts,” Delépine explains. Works centred around themes of manmade culture and nature by the Welsh multidisciplinary artist Jessica Warboys, represented by the Parisian gallery Gaudel de Stampa, will be on view in this space for Paris+ par Art Basel. It will include THIS TAIL GROWS AMONG RUINS (2023), a multi-channel video and sound installation and SEA RIVER O (2023), a collage of large-scale paintings on an unstretched canvas.

Additionally, the Palais d'Iéna, built in 1939 by the French architect Auguste Perret, is “where France's Economic, Social, and Environmental Council meets to discuss societal issues,” Delépine adds. An exhibition curated by art historian Matthieu Poirier as part of the Paris+ par Art Basel public program will showcase the work of two renowned artists, the French Daniel Buren and Italian Michelangelo Pistoletto.That said, Paris also has influential outside spaces. The 2023 edition will again include an exhibition at The Jardin des Tuileries (or Tuileries Garden), which has been curated by Annabelle Ténèze, director of the Louvre-Lens Museum, an offshoot of the Mona Lisa's home in northern France. The garden gets its name from the tile-making factories that previously stood where another former Queen of France, Catherine de Medici, built the Palais des Tuileries in the mid-16th century. The 2023 show titled “La Cinquième Saison” (or The Fifth Season) brings together pieces by 26 contemporary artists from across the world dealing with the landscape genre and showing works that “dialogue with a space that has been a place of history and art history (with secular sculptures, as well as 20th-century sculptures by Jean Dubuffet, Germaine Richier and Giuseppe Pennone already present in the garden),” says Ténèze.

The Parvis de l’Institut de France, a square in front of the Institut de France (which hosts five French academies and is home to the oldest public library in France) will also show the work of the world-renowned artist Sheila Hicks. “A colourful column by Hicks on the Parvis de L'Institut de France creates a striking contrast with the muted tones of the 17th-century buildings surrounding the work,” says Delépine.It goes without saying that the beauty and varied history of Paris is undeniable, and using art to complement this takes it one step further.“This sort of density and richness is unique to Paris,” says Delépine.