{"id":26696,"date":"2026-03-06T15:38:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T15:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/26696\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T15:38:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T15:38:14","slug":"inside-the-global-art-fair-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/26696\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Global Art Fair Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\"A<\/a>Art Basel Hong Kong, 2025. Courtesy Art Basel<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s art fairs have become far more than cultural and commercial events; they operate as platforms of visibility, machines of global branding and instruments of geopolitical power. The rivalry between the mega fairs exemplifies the newest phase of art\u2019s globalization, but this system\u2014in which fairs shape where capital circulates, where legitimacy is produced and which cities become cultural nodes\u2014did not emerge naturally. It emerged from a broader transformation inseparable from the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s under Ronald Reagan<\/a> and Margaret Thatcher<\/a>, reaching its symbolic apex with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The globalization of capital, the liberalization of markets and the rapid expansion of cross-border financial flows reshaped not only economies but also the cultural sphere, accelerating the transnationalization of the art market. The art fair became the perfect platform for this new regime: a flexible, mobile, instantly deployable structure capable of producing visibility, attracting investment and activating cities as temporary cultural markets.<\/p>\n

The experiential art fair was born in Madrid<\/p>\n

When we look back at the evolution of the Global Art Fair, or GAF, in the 1990s, the real rupture did not occur in Basel or in Cologne, where the first European fairs emerged, but in Madrid. Under the direction of Rosina G\u00f3mez-Baeza<\/a>, ARCOmadrid<\/a> introduced a format that, at the time, seemed anomalous: part art fair, part biennial, part urban cultural festival.<\/p>\n

By the early 1990s, Art Basel<\/a> was entering what Lukas Gloor<\/a>, former director of the Swiss Emil B\u00fchrle<\/a> Foundation and one of the most knowledgeable analysts of Basel\u2019s institutional history, has described as a period of structural fatigue: declining revenues, an outdated selection system, inadequate exhibition formats and growing competition from new fairs in Paris, Chicago and, increasingly, Madrid. FIAC, Art Chicago and ARCOmadrid began to challenge Basel\u2019s long-standing dominance by offering fresher formats, stronger curatorial voices and a more dynamic engagement with artists and institutions.<\/p>\n

In 1989, Ernst Beyeler<\/a> and Trudl Bruckner<\/a>\u2014two of the founding gallerists who had shaped the early Basel ethos\u2014stepped back from the selection committee, marking not only a generational transition but the recognition that Basel could no longer rely solely on modernist authority in a rapidly globalizing art market. When Lorenzo Rudolf<\/a> took over in 1991, he inherited a fair that urgently needed reinvention\u2014while in Madrid, a new model was already taking shape. But why was Madrid able to invent a new format when Paris, Chicago or New York could not?<\/p>\n

\"A\"A<\/a>ARCOmadrid, 2026. Photo: Paco Barrag\u00e1n for Observer<\/p>\n

Spain, emerging in the early 1980s from four decades of dictatorship, was culturally starved and eager to reconnect with contemporary art. When Rosina G\u00f3mez-Baeza took over ARCOmadrid in 1986, she inherited a publicly funded fair supported by the City of Madrid, the Regional Government and the Chamber of Commerce, and championed unreservedly by the national press and the political establishment. At a time when Spain had almost no contemporary art museums\u2014the Museo Reina Sof\u00eda would not open until 1992\u2014ARCOmadrid became the country\u2019s principal gateway to international art.<\/p>\n

Within a few years, it was attracting more than 100,000 visitors, driven by an unusually young audience whose enthusiasm transformed the fair into a cultural event of national significance. Spain\u2019s determination to reinsert itself into the global cultural circuit allowed G\u00f3mez-Baeza to build what other fairs could not: high-level theoretical panels that brought figures such as Glenn D. Lowry, Hou Hanru<\/a>, Barry Schwabsky<\/a>, Ute Meta Bauer<\/a>, Okwui Enwezor<\/a> and Alanna Heiss<\/a> to Madrid; alongside curated sections and guest-country programs led by documenta and biennial curators such as Jan Hoet<\/a>, Nicolas Bourriaud<\/a>, Chus Mart\u00ednez<\/a> and Dan Cameron<\/a>. All of this was accompanied by parallel exhibitions across the city\u2019s institutions and an ecosystem of openings, receptions, parties and after-hours that turned the fair into a week-long urban experience.<\/p>\n

Yet ARCOmadrid could only operate at this scale because it devoted around one million euros every year to promotion, invited guests and international collectors\u2014a figure unmatched by any other fair, and something neither Art Basel nor Frieze<\/a> has ever had at its disposal. In a country with no established market, no gallery system of scale and hardly any museums of contemporary art, ARCOmadrid ended up catalyzing the very infrastructure it lacked\u2014precisely because nothing comparable existed. It endowed the emerging Global Art Fair with what I have termed the curator\u2013open\u2013space model. At ARCOmadrid, curators were not an accessory but a structural presence: curated sections, project rooms and guest-country pavilions broke with the classical dealer-booth-and-alley grid and replaced it with open formats that operated more like biennial zones than commercial corridors. The fair also began to expand physically beyond its own architecture\u2014into museums, public institutions and the city itself\u2014anticipating later developments such as Art Basel Unlimited or Frieze Projects, where the fair spills outward into large-scale commissions, performances and site-specific works. In Madrid, this spatial and conceptual opening was not an add-on but the core of a new model: the art fair as a curated, urban, experiential infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Lorenzo Rudolf\u2014supported closely by influential dealers such as Pierre Huber<\/a>, Gianfranco Verna<\/a> and Felix Buchmann<\/a>\u2014was radically restructuring Art Basel. Together they replaced the traditional dealer-driven logic with a project-based selection system that aligned with the new neoliberal ethos of the 1990s; what mattered was no longer a gallery\u2019s pedigree but the strength and ambition of its proposal. At the same time, Sam Keller<\/a>, then the fair\u2019s young and hyperactive director of communications, traveled to Spain and spent a full week embedded with the ARCOmadrid team. He observed not only the curated sections and the guest-country programs but also the entire ecosystem of theoretical panels, museum openings, receptions, parties and the unmistakable Madrid rhythm that culminated every night\u2014without fail, and I can attest to this\u2014with the art crowd ending up at the legendary after-hours Bar Cock at Calle de la Reina 16.<\/p>\n

The contrast with Basel\u2019s earlier experiments was stark. ARCOmadrid had made curatorial input the core of its identity. It introduced ARCO Videoarte as early as 1987, while Art Basel\u2019s Bankverein Video Kunstpreis would only follow in 1994; it launched Cutting Edge in 1996, with Art Basel\u2019s Statements section appearing later that same year; it created the Project Rooms in 1998, two years before Unlimited in 2000; and from 1994 onwards its Guest Country programs\u2014Germany, France, Korea and others\u2014installed national pavilions inside the fair as a central device.<\/p>\n

ARCOmadrid, in other words, had already embraced the curator as the central agent of the fair, creating what would become the first fully articulated curated art fair. Its yearly Guest Country structure reproduced with unexpected clarity the logic of the Venice Biennale. It was this conceptual leap\u2014turning the fair into a curatorial platform rather than a mere corridor of booths\u2014that Keller saw unfolding in Madrid, and that Basel was only just beginning to realize it needed to emulate.<\/p>\n

This transformation was evident to observers at the time. The Madrid model produced a cultural intensity that exceeded anything seen in Basel, Chicago or Paris. As cultural journalist Miguel Mora<\/a> wrote in the leading newspaper El Pa\u00eds on Sunday, February 16, 1997: \u201cThey are all well dressed; the gentlemen with expensive shoes and the ladies in high fashion clothes; but the shadows under their eyes give away the exhaustion caused by an overloaded program: performances, parties, museum, art fairs, conferences and after-hours, then they begin all over again.\u201d Few descriptions capture more vividly how ARCOmadrid had already evolved into a full-scale urban event\u2014a precursor to the experiential model that would later become standard across the Global Art Fair ecosystem.<\/p>\n

And although Sam Keller would subsequently argue that Art Basel itself had pioneered this fair-as-event structure, his own words reveal that Basel was adapting to a broader paradigm. As he told Cristina Ruiz<\/a> and Melanie Gerlis<\/a> in a 2007 interview for the Art Newspaper: \u201cArt Basel has developed as an event which combines commercial and cultural goals. We don\u2019t even use the term \u2018fair\u2019 anymore to describe Art Basel; we call it an art \u2018show\u2019, which is more appropriate.\u201d What he didn\u2019t mention was that the experiential framework he celebrated had already been fully articulated in Madrid a decade earlier.<\/p>\n

The GAF origin story, the Miami turn and the London response<\/p>\n

If ARCOmadrid invented the experiential art fair, it was in Miami in 2002\u2014when Art Basel exported its brand to the United States\u2014that the model finally became global. What emerged there was not an American imitation of Basel, but the first fully realized prototype of the Global Art Fair: the ARCOmadrid model pushed to its most festive and immersive extreme, amplified by a city with beaches, warm weather, a thriving club scene crowned by the nightly pop-up of Le Baron and a backdrop of kitsch Art Deco hotels such as The Betsy and the Leslie Hotel\u00a0that transformed the fair into a cultural and social spectacle unlike anything Europe had ever produced. At the same time, Miami\u2019s status as a tax haven and its year-round good weather drew wealthy collectors from Latin America and the United States to the fair each December, turning it into a magnet for capital, visibility and elite sociability.<\/p>\n

\"A\"A<\/a>Work by James Turrell in the Zero 10 section at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025. Photo: Martina Hoyos, courtesy Pace Gallery \/ Art Basel<\/p>\n

What took shape in Miami was the operational birth of the Global Art Fair, something I witnessed first-hand as the Basel team translated lessons absorbed in Madrid into a new continental scale. The fair ceased to be a self-contained commercial hall and re-emerged as a city-wide machine: more than 20 satellite fairs\u2014including Art Miami, Photo Miami, PULSE Miami, NADA Miami, SCOPE Miami, Aqua Art Miami, CONTEXT Art Miami and Untitled Art Miami Beach; the public opening of major private collections such as the Rubell Museum<\/a>, the de la Cruz Collection<\/a>, the Margulies Collection<\/a> at the Warehouse, the Craig Robins Collection and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO); and the creation or consolidation of new museums including the P\u00e9rez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami), together with the relaunch of The Bass, all of which collectively rewired Miami Beach into a temporary cultural metropolis.<\/p>\n

One of Miami\u2019s historical dealers, Bernice Steinbaum<\/a>, is of the opinion that \u201cMiami became very trendy because, unlike other U.S. cities, it attracted many affluent individuals or celebrities, spawning a series of other parallel art fairs.\u201d However, she also says that \u201cthe arrival of Art Basel Miami Beach<\/a> reshaped the ecosystem by creating a dynamic where the focus shifted increasingly toward global players and less toward the local gallery community.\u201d Additionally, the proliferation of parallel fairs raised another question\u2014one that has often come up in my conversations with Juli\u00e1n Navarro, director of CONTEXT Art Miami. Aware of the competition, Navarro suggested that \u201cBefore 2002, Miami had an active but relatively local ecosystem. The arrival of Art Basel Miami Beach forced fairs like Art Miami and CONTEXT to redefine their identity within the broader week. Rather than competing with Basel, our strategy has focused on complementing it\u2014offering a platform for mid-career galleries, strong regional programs and collectors interested in a different price segment. In that sense, Basel\u2019s arrival was a challenge but also an opportunity, showing that the city could sustain multiple fairs as long as each articulated a clear, differentiated vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A\"A<\/a>CONTEXT Art Miami, 2025. Courtesy Ken Hayden \/ CONTEXT Art Miami<\/p>\n

Art Basel Miami Beach did not simply expand the fair; it mutated it. It created the first true fair week, fused curatorial content with lifestyle spectacle and elevated the role of the fair director beyond the managerial expectations inherited from the traditional 1960s\/70s art-fair model. A new profile emerged, closer to an art critic, curator or institutional strategist\u2014think of figures such as Amanda Coulson<\/a>; Francesco Manacorda<\/a>; the Frieze co-founders Amanda Sharp<\/a> and Matthew Slotover<\/a>; or more recently Marc Spiegler<\/a>, Noah Horowitz<\/a> and Vincenzo de Bellis<\/a>. In Miami\u2014where I have been returning since my first visit in 2004\u2014the experiential model I had traced back to ARCOmadrid ceased to be an anomaly and became a global template.<\/p>\n

Within a year of Art Basel\u2019s breakthrough in the United States, Frieze London emerged not as a rupture from this new experiential logic but as its most metropolitan and editorially refined iteration. Founded by art publishers Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover\u2014the team behind Frieze magazine\u2014the fair arrived with a degree of critical authority and cultural legitimacy unprecedented for a new art fair. Under the curatorial direction of Neville Wakefield<\/a>, Frieze Projects embedded a strong curatorial identity at the core of the event, while the fair\u2019s proximity to London\u2019s fashion industry, publishing houses and creative-class networks gave it a tone of effortless sophistication: a mix of institutional credibility, cultural cool and metropolitan glamour. As the Guardian fashion writer Lauren Cochrane<\/a> has observed, \u201cthe relevance of fashion at Frieze has grown over the last decade,\u201d with brands such as Dunhill, Stone Island, Loewe and Nanushka appearing as official partners\u2014evidence that fashion\u2019s presence was structural rather than cosmetic.<\/p>\n

Art Basel thus arrived at the experiential logic of the new Global Art Fair through crisis, reinvention and progressive adaptation, whereas Frieze was born directly into that paradigm, unburdened by comparable legacy constraints. London provided conditions that Basel could never match: mega-galleries such as White Cube, Lisson and the legacy of Anthony d\u2019Offay; influential collectors including Charles Saatchi<\/a> and Anita Zabludowicz<\/a>; and a dense institutional matrix comprising Tate Modern, the ICA and the Serpentine. The fair also benefited from explicit political support. As then Culture Secretary James Purnell<\/a> stated in an interview quoted in\u00a0The Art Newspaper\/Frieze Art Fair Daily\u00a0in 2007, \u201cFrieze Art Fair raises public awareness of contemporary art, provides opportunities for artists, stimulates the U.K.\u2019s contemporary art market and makes a significant contribution to London\u2019s economy.\u201d In this environment, Frieze did not imitate Miami\u2019s exuberance; it translated the experiential-curatorial model into the idiom of London\u2019s editorial sophistication, cultural visibility and creative-industrial glamour.<\/p>\n

The four fronts of the art fair war<\/p>\n

The rivalry between Art Basel and Frieze does not unfold chronologically but territorially, across a set of differentiated battlefields where each region imposes its own conditions of victory. The fair war is not a linear march from Europe to the United States and on to Asia; it is a multi-front conflict in which saturation, acceleration, symbolism and geopolitics determine who can dominate visibility, institutional legitimacy and cultural capital. Rather than advancing in sequence, Art Basel and Frieze Art Fair confront a landscape of uneven terrains: the structurally oversaturated United States, the accelerated markets of Asia, the symbolic battleground of Europe where cultural history itself is contested, and the geopolitical velocity of the Gulf, where state-backed ambition has rewritten the tempo of global culture. Each front exposes a different vulnerability\u2014and a different limit\u2014in the aspirations of the GAF.<\/p>\n

\"An\"An<\/a>Work by Polish artist Rafal Zajko at Coulisse Gallery in the Focus section, Frieze London, 2025. Linda Nylind<\/p>\n

Frieze New York, launched in 2012, attempted to anchor itself in the post-1945 capital of contemporary art\u2014a city that, as French art historian Serge Guilbaut<\/a> argued in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, became the dominant locus of artistic authority after Abstract Expressionism<\/a> ended the \u201cParisian dealers\u2019 firm control of the American market.\u201d Nonetheless, New York already functions as a permanent art fair, with year-round auctions, gallery programs and a dense constellation of competing events\u2014Independent, NADA New York, TEFAF New York and 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, all taking place during Frieze Week and the city\u2019s extended spring art calendar\u2014dispersing attention and leaving Frieze New York a relatively small fair within a saturated ecosystem.<\/p>\n

Frieze Los Angeles, inaugurated in 2019 on the Paramount Studios lot and later acquired by Endeavor, pursued Hollywood visibility but encountered what Tim Schneider<\/a> identified in Artnet News as the city\u2019s structural limits: extreme spatial dispersion, a modest collector base and hype unsupported by a self-sustaining market. Los Angeles absorbs the fair without allowing it to reorganize its rhythm<\/a>. Against this backdrop, Art Basel Miami Beach remains the only fair capable of reprogramming a U.S. city, generating a dense ecosystem of satellite events, private collections and institutional activity. In the United States, Art Basel holds the strategic advantage, while Frieze\u2019s expansions in New York and Los Angeles reveal the limits of its platform logic within a terrain either too saturated\u2014or too dispersed\u2014to be territorialized.<\/p>\n

As Alain Servais<\/a>, the collector and financial broker whom I met again recently in Doha and now at ARCOmadrid, remarked: \u201cI am as happy to see a competition between Art Basel and Frieze as I am happy to see a competition in phones between Apple and Samsung. In art fairs and phones, the four are offering alternatives to each other, necessary competition and potential experimentation. They are not directly comparable as Art Basel has fairs which serve 200+ galleries, whereas Frieze can be considered more boutique art fairs with mostly around 100 participants except in London. Frieze has clearly attempted to appeal to a younger and more \u2018socializing\u2019 public, which forced Art Basel to think about its \u2018classic art blue chip\u2019 public. Frieze has a more U.S.A.-centered portfolio of fairs until the interesting and opportunistic Abu Dhabi initiative, when Art Basel is now solidly global.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A\"A<\/a>Work by Ebony G. Patterson at moniquemeloche, Frieze Los Angeles, 2026. Photo courtesy Casey Kelbaugh \/ CKA \/ Frieze<\/p>\n

Asia emerged as the most strategically consolidated front once Art Basel acquired Art HK in 2011 and relaunched it as Art Basel Hong Kong (ABHK) in 2013, establishing the city as the region\u2019s undisputed financial and institutional hub. The concentration of mega-galleries, auction houses and new cultural infrastructures such as Tai Kwun and M+ has given Hong Kong a degree of capital density and liquidity unmatched elsewhere in Asia. Last year, during Art Basel Hong Kong, I visited with Hong Kong architect and collector William Lim<\/a> the collection he donated to M+, and he offered a clear assessment of why the city remains the region\u2019s dominant fair hub: \u201cArt SG 26 had 105 participating galleries. Frieze Seoul 25 had 120 galleries. Art Basel Hong Kong 26 will have 240 international galleries, more than the other two combined. Art Basel Hong Kong creates a truly international art experience in Hong Kong, concurrently with Art Central, as well as major auction events and major international galleries having their flagship exhibitions opening in the same week, which turn Hong Kong into an amazing art city<\/a> for that week. You get the excitement of an international event, the excitement of being in Hong Kong, which is not easy for other places in Asia to even come close to.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Zwirner<\/a>\u2019s presence in Asia underscores this structural consolidation and highlights the importance of having robust institutional and market infrastructures already in place. As James Green<\/a>, senior director and head of London at David Zwirner, explains: \u201cArt fairs and galleries share a symbiotic relationship within the cities they share, mutually propelling positive momentum alongside institutions and regional and international collectors, which benefits all. A major fair can significantly elevate an art ecosystem, but strong foundations\u2013 established galleries, institutions, committed collectors and a dynamic network of market players\u2013must already be in place or strengthening for that impact to be sustained.\u201d At the same time, the infrastructural weight of Art Basel Hong Kong extends beyond scale alone. As Vincenzo De Bellis, global director of fairs and exhibition platforms at Art Basel, has noted, fairs operate with a temporal velocity that sharply contrasts with the slower institutional timelines that structure museum practice: \u201cFairs have the drive to put things into the world that others then pick up and reinterpret. We are faster than museums because we don\u2019t have the same timelines or layers of approval. Museums need years; we work in months or even weeks. That doesn\u2019t mean fairs replace institutions, but it does mean we often start conversations or bring visibility to artists and ideas that institutions later develop. We fill that gap naturally.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is precisely this speed, scale and infrastructural density that Frieze Seoul cannot replicate. Against this backdrop, Frieze Seoul, launched in 2022 alongside Frieze Masters in collaboration with KIAF, operates within a very different framework. As Patrick Lee<\/a>, director of Frieze Seoul, explained to Observer\u2019s Elisa Carollo<\/a> last year, \u201cFrieze has undeniably accelerated the internationalization of Seoul Art Week<\/a> and elevated the city\u2019s profile as a global art destination\u2014not just for regional collectors but also for those flying in from across the world. At the same time, it has helped coordinate and amplify the existing energy of a rich local scene already in motion.\u201d Seoul possesses a vibrant ecosystem of private museums, strong local galleries and an active collector base, and its convergence of art, fashion and celebrity culture\u2014further amplified by the synchronization of Seoul Fashion Week\u2014has made the fair a highly visible cultural moment.<\/p>\n

\"Two\"Two<\/a>Work by Seungwon Yang in the Focus Asia section at Gallery Planet, Frieze Seoul, 2025. Photo courtesy WeCap Studio \/ Frieze<\/p>\n

However, visibility is not dominance: unlike Hong Kong, Seoul lacks the infrastructural concentration, auction power and regional liquidity required to redirect the continent\u2019s flows of capital and legitimacy. In Asia, Art Basel Hong Kong remains the central node; Frieze Seoul functions as a powerful amplifier of attention rather than a competing locus of institutional or financial authority.<\/p>\n

The European front revolves around artistic authority and historical centrality. Art Basel Paris<\/a>, launched in 2022, reactivates the city\u2019s position as the pre-war capital of artistic modernity. As art historian Robert Jensen<\/a> has shown in his iconic Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Si\u00e8cle Europe, Paris was the place where modernist painting became the dominant interpretive model and where the institutional infrastructures of modern art first emerged. Art Basel\u2019s move embeds the fair within this lineage and aligns it with the city\u2019s exceptional institutional density, from the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay and the Centre Pompidou to the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne de Paris, reinforced by the cultural power of private foundations led by figures such as Bernard Arnault<\/a> and Fran\u00e7ois Pinault<\/a>. In the post-Brexit landscape, Frieze London, founded in 2003 to consolidate London\u2019s artistic legitimacy vis-\u00e0-vis New York, faces a renewed challenge from Paris, which can leverage historical depth, institutional mass and private\u2013public cultural capital to reassert itself as Europe\u2019s central art-market node. Although Frieze\u2019s press office was unable to provide a comment in time for this article, Eva Langret<\/a>, director of Frieze London, had already highlighted back in 2022 in an interview with Melanie Gerlis for the Financial Times that \u201cLondon\u2019s strength lies in the density of its museums, galleries and creative communities. That ecosystem creates a context where galleries can take risks and where audiences expect experimentation.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the strategic question now emerging across the European field is unavoidable: will Art Basel Paris ultimately cannibalize the original fair in Art Basel, given Paris\u2019s glamour, institutional gravitas and the preference many American collectors already show for the cit\u00e9 lumi\u00e8re over the comparatively discreet artistic offer of the Swiss city?<\/p>\n

In the Gulf, the rivalry between Art Basel Qatar<\/a> and Frieze Abu Dhabi pivots less on innovation than on state-aligned soft power. Following the logic identified by the late American political scientist Joseph Nye<\/a>, fairs here function as strategic infrastructure: instruments for projecting national narratives, attracting global audiences and consolidating geopolitical prestige. Iraqi artist Adel Abidin<\/a>, with whom I discussed this during the fair and whose work was on display at Gallery Tanit from Beirut, offers a clinical reading of this dynamic: \u201cMoving between Europe and the Gulf, I see less a cultural divide than two systems of validation. In Europe, art is often legitimized through institutions and theory. In the Gulf, work is more frequently read through the lens of immediacy and social change\u2026 Fairs like Art Basel or Frieze place both on the same stage, but real exchange depends on what continues beyond visibility and sales.\u201d During ARCOmadrid\u2019s opening hours, we caught up with prominent French-Algerian, Madrid-based gallerist Sabrina Amrani<\/a>, who focuses on artists from the Global South and the MENASA region and who also emphasized the structural complexity of the region\u2019s art ecosystem: \u201cFrom our experience working in the region for more than fifteen years, the main challenge is often a misunderstanding of the ecosystem. The MENASA region is not a new market that suddenly appeared; it has been developing for decades through artists, institutions and collectors. What is required from galleries is not quick access but continuity\u2014building trust, understanding the context, and committing to the region over time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Art Basel Qatar was conceived as a dispersed constellation of curated solo projects across Doha, an urban, curator-driven model that exceeds the traditional booth-based marketplace. As James Green of David Zwirner observed when reflecting on the fair\u2019s curatorial direction: \u201cArt Basel Qatar has recently made the concept of the \u2018curated\u2019 fair prominent\u2014an approach we embraced on our booth there with a solo presentation of Marlene Dumas. However, focused, single-artist presentations or single-artist sections within a larger booth have long been integral to the David Zwirner fair strategy. When planning for a fair, we carefully consider relevant local institutional connections, alongside the interests of its collector base.\u201d By contrast, Frieze Abu Dhabi adopts an absorptive strategy by taking over Abu Dhabi Art, itself descended from the earlier Art Paris Abu Dhabi, which withdrew after failing to gain traction; the first edition under the Frieze brand is scheduled for November 2026. Meanwhile, Art Dubai, founded in 2007, never fully stabilized as a regional hub and now faces pressure from these state-backed entrants. Amrani, whose gallery has participated in Art Dubai for years, offers a more measured interpretation of the shifting regional configuration: \u201cAs for the fair landscape, I don\u2019t see the arrival of Art Basel Qatar and Frieze Abu Dhabi as a threat. It simply reflects the growing importance of the region within the global art conversation. Ultimately, the strength of the region will not be defined by competition between fairs, but by the depth of its collectors, institutions, and artists. What we are witnessing is the consolidation of a cultural geography that has been developing for years and is now gaining wider visibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Critics such as Melanie Gerlis, who argued in her January 28, 2026,\u00a0Financial Times\u00a0article \u201cThe art market is betting on the Middle East\u2014but not everyone is on board,\u201d that the Gulf is building institutions before the market, repeat a historical misunderstanding: 19th-century France functioned in exactly this way, and the original paradigm\u2014established under Louis XIV, Richelieu and Mazarin\u2014placed culture at the center of statecraft long before dealers or collectors gained structural power. The Gulf is not inventing an anomaly; it is compressing this long-standing European model into a few decades. In this context, the Global Art Fair becomes an instrument of cultural diplomacy through which states compete for visibility, legitimacy and soft-power advantage.<\/p>\n

Across these four fronts, the geography of the art fair war becomes unmistakably clear: power concentrates in a handful of hyper-dense nodes, each defined by saturation, acceleration, symbolic authority or geopolitical ambition. Beyond these battlefields lies a vast portion of the global map that remains structurally peripheral to the GAF model.<\/p>\n

Latin America, Africa, Australia, Canada and the myth of global art<\/p>\n

The very notion of \u201cglobal art\u201d is a textbook product of Western academic imagination\u2014conceived far from the real hierarchies of the art system and grounded in a form of theoretical optimism that collapses under empirical scrutiny. Its most influential articulation comes from Hans Belting<\/a>\u2019s 2009 essay \u201cContemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,\u201d where he insists that global art is \u201copposed [to] modernity\u2019s ideals of progress and hegemony,\u201d that its expansion after 1989 \u201cchallenged the continuity of any Eurocentric view of \u2018art\u2019,\u201d and that it is \u201cwishful thinking to keep it under Western guidance and within the precincts of familiar institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, as Indian Professor Parul Dave Mukherji<\/a> has argued, this vision is \u201ccaught in an insidious ethnocentrism.\u201d The actual numbers are unforgiving. In his noted study \u201cThe Illusion of an International Contemporary Art Scene without Borders\u201d (2006), Professor of Sociology of Art Alain Quemin<\/a> demonstrated that between 2000 and 2005, nearly \u201c80 percent of the galleries\u201d at the flagship Art Basel came from just six Western nations he identified as structurally dominant.\u00a0We contacted Quemin again to hear his current assessment. As he notes, \u201cArt Basel tries to diversify the origin of its participating galleries; this is a general tendency, and they really strive to look more inclusive. But when it comes to proportions, the same countries are still highly represented, and much more than all other ones: Germany, the U.S., the U.K., France, Switzerland and Italy. And the share of all other countries remains very limited. So the main structure remains untouched in spite of the efforts to open the game a bit.\u201d\u00a0As a matter of fact, two decades later, nothing has shifted. At Art Basel, 80 percent of all participating galleries still come from those same six nations, and 95 percent originate from Europe and the United States, leaving the entire rest of the world with barely 5 percent. Only in the more experimental sections\u2014Statements and Premiere\u2014does the ratio become more balanced, with significantly higher representation from Asia, MENASA, Latin America and Africa. Even so, these sections remain structurally peripheral to the economic core of the fair, underscoring how the system\u2019s globality appears only at the margins rather than at its center. It is true that Art Basel in Hong Kong, Miami and the Gulf applies an approximate 50 percent ratio of galleries from the region, but access to the flagship fair remains virtually impossible for non-mainstream galleries. And although Hans Belting has spent decades publishing books and academic essays based on the notion of \u201cglobal art,\u201d any connection between that theoretical construct and the hard empirical reality of the art world remains pure fiction.<\/p>\n

What the GAF map reveals is therefore not a global system but a tightly concentrated Euro-American infrastructure with a handful of additional nodes\u2014Hong Kong, Seoul, and soon Doha and Abu Dhabi\u2014absorbing most of the visibility and circulation. The rhetoric of global art dissolves the moment the data appear. And it is precisely against this backdrop of structural concentration that we must turn to the regions the GAF system leaves behind.<\/p>\n

Latin America hosts some of the most dynamic artistic scenes globally, but none of its fairs has achieved the institutional, financial or infrastructural density required to anchor a GAF-level event. Key platforms such as arteBA (1991), ZONAMACO (2002), ARTBO (2005), SP-Arte (2005), Ch.ACO (2009) and Art Lima (2013) have strengthened regional circulation but cannot consolidate year-round global visibility. Historically, ARCOmadrid acted as the region\u2019s external gateway until the mid-2000s, when Art Basel Miami Beach, launched in 2002, decisively absorbed Latin America\u2019s collectors, galleries and institutional attention. The result is a paradox: Latin American art gains visibility abroad, but its global fair is structurally located outside the region.<\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, Pinta, founded in 2007 by Argentine gallerist, publisher and cultural entrepreneur Diego Costa Peuser<\/a>, represents a different model explicitly conceived as a continental network. As Costa Peuser explains: \u201cPinta\u2019s expansion follows a clear strategy: developing a multi-city network that strengthens and projects Latin American art internationally. Rather than concentrating its impact in a single venue, Pinta has built a distributed and specialized platform that creates opportunities for artists, galleries and curators across the region.\u201d The entrepreneur further elaborates on his strategy for the near future: \u201cEach city contributes a distinct identity and role: Miami as the global gateway; Lima and Buenos Aires as key cultural capitals through Pinta Lima and Pinta BAphoto; and Art Weeks in Asunci\u00f3n, Panama, and now Santo Domingo and Medell\u00edn, expanding the circuit\u2019s reach. Together, these cities form an interconnected ecosystem that generates year-round visibility and amplifies Latin America\u2019s cultural presence on the global stage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond Latin America, Africa illustrates even more starkly how entire continents remain structurally excluded from the Global Art Fair\u2019s infrastructure. The continent hosts strong artistic production but lacks the institutional density and market concentration required to anchor a GAF-level node. While South Africa sustains established galleries such as Goodman Gallery and Stevenson, their absence from the flagship Art Basel underscores how limited the global absorption of African galleries remains. Within this landscape, several fairs have attempted to create regional platforms: ART X Lagos, launched in 2016 by Nigerian entrepreneur Tokini Peterside-Schwebig<\/a>; FNB Art Joburg, originally founded in 2008 as Joburg Art Fair and relaunched in 2018; and Investec Cape Town Art Fair, inaugurated in 2013 and now widely regarded as Africa\u2019s leading fair. However, none of them has generated the infrastructural density required to reposition Africa within the global hierarchy. 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair\u2014founded by Franco-Moroccan cultural entrepreneur Touria El Glaoui<\/a> in London in 2013, expanded to New York in 2015 and to Marrakech in 2018\u2014functions not as an African node but as a transnational bridge connecting African artists and galleries to Euro-American markets. As El Glaoui herself has put it, \u201cmy aim with 1-54 has always been to provide a sustainable platform that gives artists from Africa and its diaspora the visibility they deserve, and to ensure that this visibility leads to real opportunities.\u201d This multi-city structure reflects a broader structural reality: for most African artists and galleries, meaningful visibility still depends on access to London and New York rather than on any continent-based consolidation.<\/p>\n

Africa thus remains engaged with the GAF system through interfaces rather than nodes, structurally outside the gravitational centers that organize global circulation. This structural imbalance is also reflected in recent scholarship on African art markets. A useful analytical framework comes from Dr. Jonathan Adeyemi<\/a>, a specialist in Arts Management and Cultural Policy and author of\u00a0Contemporary Art from Nigeria in the Global Markets: Trending in the Margins, whose research shows that the limited integration of African art ecosystems into the dominant fair circuit is less about artistic quality than about structural conditions: weak institutional infrastructures, uneven market governance and persistent postcolonial validation dynamics that keep most galleries operating outside the core nodes shaped by Art Basel and Frieze.<\/p>\n

Australia offers strong museums but structurally weak galleries and no credible fair infrastructure. Institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) and the National Gallery of Victoria provide cultural visibility, as do major periodic events such as the Biennale of Sydney (founded in 1973) and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art\u2013APT (held in Brisbane since 1993). Few Australian artists manage to enter the global mainstream\u2014apart from figures such as Tracey Moffatt<\/a>, Ron Mueck<\/a>, Patricia Piccinini<\/a> and Juan D\u00e1vila<\/a>\u2014which underscores how modest Australia\u2019s integration into the upper tiers of global circulation is. The commercial ecosystem, meanwhile, is thin, fragmented, and overwhelmingly domestic. Only a handful of galleries\u2014among them Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Anna Schwartz Gallery and Tolarno Galleries\u2014have participated in international art fairs, highlighting the limited projection of the country\u2019s gallery scene. The Melbourne Art Fair, founded in 1988 and despite periodic relaunches, has never developed the scale or ambition needed to attract sustained international interest. Geography compounds these structural weaknesses: Australia is far from all major collector routes, not \u201con the way\u201d to any global circuit, and its distance imposes prohibitive travel and logistical costs for galleries and collectors alike\u2014something I know first-hand, having travelled to the country nine times over the past two decades. Australian curator Russell Storer<\/a>, who worked in Brisbane from 2008-2014 at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) and is now senior curator and head of curatorial affairs at M+ in Hong Kong, noted: \u201cI think it is due to several interlinked factors. Distance is a significant challenge in a crowded art landscape, combined with the fact that Australia\u2019s art market is relatively small and doesn\u2019t benefit from being part of a larger regional bloc like East Asia or Western Europe. It is therefore hard to generate the sustained international interest that Australian art deserves.\u201d\u00a0The result is an ecosystem that is culturally rich but commercially peripheral, unable to generate the density, liquidity or mobility required by the Global Art Fair model.
Finally, the last case to consider is Canada, a country that presents a paradox: a well-developed institutional landscape but no capacity to generate a global node within the Global Art Fair model. Institutions such as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, and the ambitious Nuit Blanche Toronto give the country cultural visibility. Despite this, Canada has produced several globally recognized artists\u2014including Jeff Wall<\/a>, Rodney Graham<\/a> and Stan Douglas<\/a>\u2014yet their international visibility stems from agents and institutions outside the country rather than from any domestic mechanisms capable of projecting them globally.
Fairs such as the Toronto International Art Fair, founded in 2000 and renamed Art Toronto in 2008, have remained regional in scope and have been unable to attract sustained participation from global galleries or collectors. None of Canada\u2019s leading galleries\u2014from Corkin Gallery to Galerie de Bellefeuille or Cooper Cole\u2014has secured a regular presence at the major international fairs, a revealing indicator of the country\u2019s limited commercial projection within the Global Art Fair ecosystem. Structurally, Canada is absorbed by the United States art system: its galleries, artists, and collectors orient themselves toward New York and, increasingly, Miami, where visibility, liquidity and market hierarchy are produced. Geography reinforces this dependence. Canada sits adjacent to one of the most powerful cultural and economic nodes in the world, leaving neither the need nor the possibility for a Canadian fair to compete for international attention.<\/p>\n

A clear internal perspective comes from respected curator and former director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MoCCA), David Liss<\/a>, who underscores how structural limitations prevent Canada from establishing a globally relevant fair: \u201cThere is no significant market in Canada; an extensive contemporary art ecosystem exists, yes, but it flies under the radar and does not receive the investment or subsidies that other sectors rely upon. Most institutions cannot compete in the global market and are facing a crisis of storage capacity, aging facilities and diminishing government support. Collectors in Canada, meanwhile, tend to be followers of trends; they prefer to put their money on a winning horse, a proven investment, rather than take chances on something new or unknown. Artists follow their instincts, their ideas, and their imaginations. Markets follow the money.\u201d While it has some outstanding institutions, it lacks solid commercial frameworks, functioning as a receiver rather than a generator of global circulation within the Global Art Fair model.<\/p>\n

Why only some fairs become global nodes<\/p>\n

The final pattern that emerges is the distinction that Victoria Siddall<\/a>, the former global director of Frieze Fairs until 2021, articulated clearly at the Barcelona-based think tank TALKING GALLERIES in 2017: \u201cAn interesting development that I have noticed in the last couple of years is this global versus local when it comes to fairs. Some fairs are extremely global, and I would put Frieze in that category. They attract collectors from all over the world: from Asia, from Latin America and the Middle East, and of course from Europe and America. But then there is also a different model. Last week, I was in San Francisco for the FOG art fair<\/a>, which is very small\u2014only 40 galleries\u2014and there were no collectors or curators from overseas. The galleries that were doing it were there to meet the curators and the collectors from San Francisco.\u201d Her observation makes the divide explicit: a very small group of fairs operate globally, while most fall into what she calls the local model\u2014what is more accurately the regional tier\u2014serving their immediate ecosystems without generating broader circulation. An opposing view comes from Alain Servais, who notes: \u201cIn addition, those global fairs have only highlighted the specificity and attraction of well-planned local fairs, as in the larger society, \u2018global\u2019 is under pressure and more and more collectors are preferring that their galleries travel to them rather than having to travel to their galleries and their fairs. Many collectors and galleries are also appreciating the deeper contacts only possible in smaller fairs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across this regional tier, we find fairs such as Art Brussels, Artissima, Untitled Art, The Armory Show, Art Chicago, ART SG and Art Dubai: strong local platforms without the liquidity, infrastructural depth or collector mobility required to shift the geography of the art-fair system. The contrast is telling. While ART COLOGNE may have been the first contemporary art fair in 1967, it was Art Basel\u2014founded in 1970\u2014that became the global leader, showing that origin alone does not determine destiny but rather the capacity to scale and occupy strategic market nodes.<\/p>\n

A similar logic applies to ARCOmadrid. Although it invented the experiential fair in the 1990s, ARCOmadrid never succeeded in internationalizing its model, and a series of strategic miscalculations in the following decade would ultimately seal its long-term trajectory, making it a crucial case for understanding why some fairs consolidate as global nodes while others remain structurally regional. A decisive moment came when Rosina G\u00f3mez-Baeza explored opening an ARCOmadrid outpost in Miami in the late 1990s, supported by U.S. galleries already participating in the fair; the proposal was rejected by IFEMA, the public consortium that owns and manages ARCOmadrid. The fate of the fair would change forever. Art Basel, by contrast, launched successfully in Miami in 2002, as we saw earlier, capturing the most important Latin American collectors and art galleries. Instead of entering that strategic market, ARCOmadrid opened ARCOlisboa in 2016 under Carlos Urroz<\/a>, a move that reinforced its regional positioning rather than extending its reach. Ten years later, in 2026, under its current director, Maribel L\u00f3pez<\/a>, the Portuguese edition is neither financially sustainable nor capable of creating a solid gallery structure or expanding the brand\u2019s international prestige. Moreover, ARCOmadrid had always been, in practice, the main fair for leading Portuguese galleries such as Cristina Guerra<\/a> Contemporary Art, Galeria Filomena Soares<\/a> and Pedro Cera<\/a>, making the Lisbon expansion structurally redundant rather than strategically forward-looking.<\/p>\n

ARCOmadrid lost the Miami opportunity and, given its historical and market connections, should have opened a fair in Latin America rather than in Portugal. A Spanish museum director from one of the country\u2019s leading institutions, who spoke to me under the condition of anonymity, recalled that \u201cwhat first drew her into the art world were the ARCO talks of the late 1990s, when the Who\u2019s Who of the international scene converged at the fair\u2014from figures such as Gerardo Mosquera<\/a> and Dan Cameron to J\u00e9r\u00f4me Sans, Ute Meta Bauer, Alanna Heiss and Shirin Neshat. ARCO produced top-level theory on art fairs, biennials, collecting and museums\u2014at a level not even matched by documenta. That has totally disappeared. And since the 2000s, I\u2019ve also seen that top galleries such as Lisson Gallery, Gagosian, David Zwirner or even the historically influential\u2014but now-closed\u2014Leo Castelli Gallery haven\u2019t returned, let alone participated.\u201d A different perspective is offered by Lluci\u00e0 Homs<\/a>, art advisor and director of TALKING GALLERIES, who spoke to Observer just before the opening of the Madrid fair. In his view, \u201cARCOmadrid is one of the leading art fairs on the international circuit, positioned just behind the global mega-fairs such as Art Basel, Frieze and TEFAF. It has chosen not to enter the global franchise race that defines today\u2019s major fair platforms. Instead, it has opted to consolidate its position within its Iberian region, building an identity-driven model that distinguishes it from more expansion-oriented fairs.\u201d Homs acknowledges that \u201cARCO once missed the opportunity to lead the Latin American market\u2014a space later secured by Art Basel Miami Beach\u2014but argues that the fair\u2019s current strategy of reinforcing Southern Europe and deepening its natural ties with Latin America through Madrid and Lisbon provides a coherent framework for the internationalisation of Spanish galleries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where Art Basel has operated as a geopolitical architect\u2014selecting, occupying and consolidating the world\u2019s most decisive cultural nodes\u2014Frieze has expanded largely through replication, embedding itself in places where the ecosystem was already formed. The majority of fairs worldwide, from Europe to Asia and from Latin America to the Gulf, remain locked in regional circuits. They do not scale, they do not reorganize flows of capital or legitimacy, and they do not alter the global map. Only Art Basel does that; Frieze follows its contours rather than redrawing them.<\/p>\n

As of today, the truth about the global art-fair wars is simple: Art Basel changes cities; Frieze joins them. The rest observe from the regional margins.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Inside<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Basel Hong Kong, 2025. Courtesy Art Basel Today\u2019s art fairs have become far more than cultural and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1502,16250,1482,16211,16225,16227,16234,16232,16273,1377,1936,1476,1224,1475,16208,77,16243,16223,16268,16233,16214,11232,16270,16221,16215,16263,3919,16251,16241,16202,16203,16245,16218,16271,16226,16244,16274,16266,16217,16206,16248,16207,16239,16235,16212,16260,16267,16254,16246,16258,16224,16231,16265,16205,16201,1487,16199,16269,16228,16222,16220,16230,16213,5529,16210,16249,16257,16240,16272,16216,16242,16261,16256,16198,16200,16259,16247,16219,16236,16262,16237,16252,16253,16255,16204,16209,16264,16229,16238],"class_list":{"0":"post-26696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basel","8":"tag-adel-abidin","9":"tag-alain-quemin","10":"tag-alain-servais","11":"tag-alanna-heiss","12":"tag-amanda-coulson","13":"tag-amanda-sharp","14":"tag-anita-zabludowicz","15":"tag-anthony-doffay","16":"tag-arcomadrid","17":"tag-art-basel","18":"tag-art-basel-miami-beach","19":"tag-art-fairs","20":"tag-art-market","21":"tag-arts","22":"tag-barry-schwabsky","23":"tag-basel","24":"tag-bernard-arnault","25":"tag-bernice-steinbaum","26":"tag-carlos-urroz","27":"tag-charles-saatchi","28":"tag-chus-martu00ednez","29":"tag-contemporary-art","30":"tag-cristina-guerra","31":"tag-cristina-ruiz","32":"tag-dan-cameron","33":"tag-david-liss","34":"tag-david-zwirner","35":"tag-diego-costa-peuser","36":"tag-elisa-carollo","37":"tag-emil-bu00fchrle","38":"tag-ernst-beyeler","39":"tag-eva-langret","40":"tag-felix-buchmann","41":"tag-filomena-soares","42":"tag-francesco-manacorda","43":"tag-franu00e7ois-pinault","44":"tag-frieze","45":"tag-gerardo-mosquera","46":"tag-gianfranco-verna","47":"tag-glenn-d-lowry","48":"tag-hans-belting","49":"tag-hou-hanru","50":"tag-james-green","51":"tag-james-purnell","52":"tag-jan-hoet","53":"tag-jeff-wall","54":"tag-jerome-sans","55":"tag-jonathan-adeyemi","56":"tag-joseph-nye","57":"tag-juan-du00e1vila","58":"tag-julian-navarro","59":"tag-lauren-cochrane","60":"tag-lluciu00e0-homs","61":"tag-lorenzo-rudolf","62":"tag-lukas-gloor","63":"tag-marc-spiegler","64":"tag-margaret-thatcher","65":"tag-maribel-lu00f3pez","66":"tag-matthew-slotover","67":"tag-melanie-gerlis","68":"tag-miguel-mora","69":"tag-neville-wakefield","70":"tag-nicolas-bourriaud","71":"tag-noah-horowitz","72":"tag-okwui-enwezor","73":"tag-parul-dave-mukherji","74":"tag-patricia-piccinini","75":"tag-patrick-lee","76":"tag-pedro-cera","77":"tag-pierre-huber","78":"tag-robert-jensen","79":"tag-rodney-graham","80":"tag-ron-mueck","81":"tag-ronald-reagan","82":"tag-rosina-gu00f3mez-baeza","83":"tag-russell-storer","84":"tag-sabrina-amrani","85":"tag-sam-keller","86":"tag-serge-guilbaut","87":"tag-stan-douglas","88":"tag-tim-schneider","89":"tag-tokini-peterside-schwebig","90":"tag-touria-el-glaoui","91":"tag-tracey-moffatt","92":"tag-trudl-bruckner","93":"tag-ute-meta-bauer","94":"tag-victoria-siddall","95":"tag-vincenzo-de-bellis","96":"tag-william-lim"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}