The Red Carpet of Life

Magenta Plains, booth at Art Basel, Switzerland, June 2026. Photo: Alja Zoe Freier.

by Alja Zoe Freier

All sorts of people walk the red carpet of life.

Two barefoot men drift across it, their eyes everywhere and nowhere, Christ-like figures carrying flip-flops in their hands. Beside them, needle-thin heels pierce the carpet’s soft skin; they belong to a cat-woman in a blue dress. A man in his sixties appears to have stepped out of an advertisement: cashmere knee socks, polished shoes, red-and-white striped boxers, a tailored jacket—and no trousers. Children, drunk on laughter, scatter alarm. Adults graze like sheep, monuments to boredom that only art—or champagne—can briefly ignite.

Faces flow past like rivers. Pinkies intertwined. A hand resting on the back of a neck. Diamonds, watches, yawns, hurried hearts.

A gaze can repel and invite at once. Silence can speak; speech can say nothing. I never mind when a conversation leaves the highway of transaction and takes a detour into a middle-aged man’s ordinary life in Aachen. I get a kick out of this landscape and want to stop at every viewpoint. 

This year’s red carpet of life was laid by a pair of pale knees, only hours before the mechanical voice announced the opening of the art fair.

Fairs, fairs, and fairy tales.

At an art fair, fairies are the ones working the booths. They spend their days beneath artificial skies, industrious bees introducing strangers to works of art. They bring the light to windowless halls. They polish every reflective surface, from the artworks on the walls to the brightness of their own smiles, and if fortune favors them, they get to tell a good story or two. The currency here is as invisible as magic. Dollars, euros, francs, but stories are what truly change hands. A handshake seals them, and if they can be told in under three and a half minutes, so much the better for everyone’s facial muscles.

Coffee fuels the fairy’s performance: on their feet, mastering the choreography of hands and eye contact, offering not only an artwork but the emotional freedom it promises. A good story leaves the heart aching for something it didn’t know it lacked. Wrapped in exclusivity and ribbons of belonging, it transforms a stranger into a patron.

Every fairy has wondered, at least once, whether the hive might someday collapse. Especially now, as the architects of the largest fairs and galleries search for ways to bring the system they built back to a human scale, one rooted less in spectacle than in care, and in art itself. It is risky business, this golden hive, nourished equally by speculation and desire!

Yet it continues as though untouched, even when history detonates just outside its doors. On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel days before Frieze London and Art Basel Paris, setting in motion a devastating regional war and starvation. On June 13, 2025, Israel began the Twelve-Day War on Iran while visitors queued outside the doors of Art Basel in Switzerland.

No war has ever stopped storytelling. Nor the way people continue to open themselves before works of art.

One visitor saw themselves in a painting; another saw the Pope, though it was the artist’s self-portrait. Two sixteen-year-olds turned the mirrored back of a sculpture into a fashion shoot. Countless middle-aged men paused before that same mirror to see whether a quick shake of the head might rescue a receding hairline, unwittingly performing the artist’s work about consumerism and institutional critique. A group of women stood before the full lips and unwavering gaze of a figure painted from advertising. They surrendered completely to its erotic promise. “Fantasy is what distinguishes us from AI,” one of them told me. “So we’d better keep practicing it.”

In the fair’s quiet hours, fairies watch the people watching them. They make lists of arguments for and against their life choices. They doodle compulsively. They call their mothers.

Then someone walks in.

Whether in Qatar, Los Angeles, New York, Hong Kong, Basel, Seoul, London, Paris or Miami, every fairy rises to greet another passerby on the red carpet of life, hoping to offer a story that matters and perhaps take a detour into someone else’s eyes

About the author:

Magenta Plains, booth at Art Basel, Switzerland, June 2026. Photo: Alja Zoe Freier.
Artworks by Josephine Meckseper: Field of Dreams, 2026 (on the right) and Fall Figure, 2026 (on the left).