Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI) split its shares this month and now they are trading at one-tenth of what they were before the split. For investors, that means a lower share price, and perhaps the ability to own more full shares. Stock splits can sometimes have positive effects on the share price even though they don’t fundamentally change anything about a company’s prospects or improve its earnings numbers.

With shares of Super Micro Computer, also known as just Supermicro, down more than 50% in just the past six months, could the recent split provide the stock a boost, and potentially help stop its tailspin?

Why a stock split may not help Supermicro

A stock split doesn’t solve any problems for a business. Regardless of whether Supermicro stock is trading at $450 or $45, investors can buy fractional shares if they want to invest in it but don’t have the funds necessary to acquire entire shares of the company. And that’s why stock splits normally shouldn’t lead to a rally in the share price; they don’t change valuation multiples to make the stock a better buy.

Some investors may believe that because a stock is priced lower, it’s cheaper and a better buy, but that is a mistake. When talking about valuation, you should always look at per-share earnings and revenue multiples, which take into context the share price. And stock splits don’t change those multiples.

Stock splits can become positive catalysts if a stock rises significantly in value and then a company opts to do a split. In Supermicro’s case, however, the stock has been crashing of late, and its stock split comes at a time when there’s a lot of negativity and bearishness around the business, which is why a split may not have a positive effect on its share price.

Supermicro’s problems have nothing to do with its share price

For Supermicro, there are much larger concerns for investors than its share price being too high. The company’s margins have been under pressure and the Department of Justice (DOJ) is reportedly looking into the company after a short report in August alleged the company was involved in questionable accounting practices. Management has denied any wrongdoing and the DOJ investigation may not necessarily lead to anything substantive and consequential for the business and its investors.

The bigger issue, however, is that the company’s earnings may not grow at a high rate if Supermicro’s margins don’t improve. In its most recent earnings report, for the quarter ended June 30, the company’s gross margin was just 11%, down from an already fairly low rate of 17% a year ago. Low margins can negate much of the benefit the tech company will get from generating strong server sales and growing its operations, and that’s the biggest reason I’d be concerned about the stock right now.

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Is Supermicro stock a buy?

I don’t believe a stock split is going to save Supermicro stock nor do I think the DOJ probe is going to cripple it. Short reports are often biased and meritless and while they can temporarily send a stock lower, they rarely uncover disastrous findings auditors, analysts, and investors have all missed.

The company can put a lot of concerns to rest by simply posting strong earnings numbers and showing that it can grow both its top and bottom lines at high rates. But it still has to prove that it can do that.

Unless you’re comfortable with the risk that comes with owning Supermicro stock today, the safest option is to take a wait-and-see approach right now. The biggest question mark around the business remains its ability to grow its earnings, because if it can’t do that, it’s going to be hard to justify buying the AI stock.

Don’t miss this second chance at a potentially lucrative opportunity

Ever feel like you missed the boat in buying the most successful stocks? Then you’ll want to hear this.

On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a “Double Down” stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you’re worried you’ve already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it’s too late. And the numbers speak for themselves:

• Amazon: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2010, you’d have $21,266!*

• Apple: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2008, you’d have $43,047!*

• Netflix: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2004, you’d have $389,794!*

Right now, we’re issuing “Double Down” alerts for three incredible companies, and there may not be another chance like this anytime soon.

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David Jagielski has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Will Super Micro Computer’s Stock Split Help Rally Its Shares? was originally published by The Motley Fool

An HBO documentary says Peter Todd is the Bitcoin creator known as Satoshi Nakamoto. He denies it

Who created Bitcoin? Is it finally known? Perhaps not.

“Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” a new HBO (WBD) documentary that premiered on Tuesday, claims that former Bitcoin developer Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, who created Bitcoin. Hours before the documentary’s release, the 39-year-old Canadian software designer involved in the early years of developing Bitcoin denied the claim, saying that he was not the creator of Bitcoin.

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Tesla (TSLA) stock fell during morning trading on Friday, after its highly-anticipated robotaxi reveal failed to impress investors.

The electric vehicle maker’s shares were down around 7.5% on Friday morning after being down about 6% during pre-market trading. Its shares closed down almost 1% Thursday before the event. Read More

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Ryan Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, has been seeking a two-month delay for the start of his prison sentence due to alleged injuries from a dog. However, it appears he has come to terms with his situation. In a recent LinkedIn post, he announced his new role as an inmate at FCI Cumberland.

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Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has been one of the best-performing stocks on the market over the past two years, and the catalysts that drove it higher are still present. But after its strong run-up, is Nvidia stock still a smart buy at its current level, or would those who hold shares be advised to sell and take some profits?

There are valid arguments for both views.

The sell argument: How long will this demand wave last?

Nvidia’s rise has been directly tied to the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race. Its primary products are graphics processing units (GPUs) — parallel processors that excel at handling large and complex computing tasks that are easily broken down into many smaller ones that can be handled independently and simultaneously. Connect GPUs in clusters and you end up with a computing platform that can process certain types of incredibly complex workloads at blistering speeds — and these are just the sorts of workloads that AI systems create.

As AI companies and cloud computing providers rushed to get in front of the emerging demand for processing power, Nvidia’s sales went through the roof. In the past couple of years, quarterly revenues have often tripled on a year-over-year basis. However, its stellar growth is starting to slow slightly due to tougher annualized comparisons. This growth slowdown makes sense, but the bigger question is, can Nvidia maintain its overall sales at these levels?

Because companies are buying these GPUs to rapidly build their AI computing capacity, there is going to be a time when the demand will be satisfied. At that point, Nvidia’s sales may crater, as companies will only be buying replacement GPUs or making gradual capacity increases. This could be a huge problem for Nvidia, as its revenue levels in its latest quarters are far above where they have been in the past.

This also highlights the cyclical nature of the chip business. Nvidia has gone through multiple boom-and-bust cycles in its life as a company. If AI-related demand wanes, investors could be in a rough spot.

But has Nvidia built up enough of a sales base to compensate for that cyclicality?

The buy argument: New technology will spur further demand past 2025

GPUs don’t last forever. They generally need to be replaced after about three to five years, which means that if the companies that have been building out their computing infrastructure recently want to maintain that processing power over the long term, they will have to regularly fork out massive chunks of money on new hardware.

We’re two years into the AI build-out already, and many companies are still scaling up their AI computing power, so 2025 will be another year of strong demand. That gets investors to 2026, at which point the natural replacement cycle starts for the GPUs that were purchased at the start of the generative AI era. But there could also be more reasons for companies to upgrade.

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First, the semiconductor chips within these Nvidia GPUs are produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM). Taiwan Semi is always innovating on the process node front, allowing chip designers like Nvidia to create denser, higher-performance chips.

TSMC expects that its chips built using its next-generation N2 process node will be 25% to 30% more power efficient than prior-generation chips when configured at the same speeds. Energy costs are a huge operating expense for server farms, so some customers may choose to upgrade for that reason, regardless of whether they need more computing power or not. The N2 manufacturing lines aren’t expected to start production until 2025, which likely means Nvidia GPUs built on them won’t make their way to its customers in quantity until 2026.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is just launching its Blackwell architecture GPUs, which will replace the Hopper architecture upon which it has built its current top-of-the-line chips, and the improvements are astounding. Blackwell’s architecture is four times faster than Hopper’s, allowing AI companies to create more complex models faster.

The combination of all these factors points to demand remaining strong well past 2026. In other words, the market probably isn’t peaking any time soon. This is key, as Nvidia’s forward price-to-earnings ratio has already reached levels that are starting to look reasonable, at least relative to how fast it’s growing.

Trading at 45 times forward earnings, Nvidia stock is far from cheap, but it’s putting up strong growth, so this valuation is acceptable.

Investors’ decisions about whether to buy or sell Nvidia stock today should be based on how they expect the company’s business to be faring in 2026 and beyond. There are enough catalysts out there that Nvidia’s growth should last far beyond 2026, and with the upgrade cycle, it should be able to maintain its newfound revenue levels.

As a result, I think Nvidia’s buy case is greater than its sell case today.

Don’t miss this second chance at a potentially lucrative opportunity

Ever feel like you missed the boat in buying the most successful stocks? Then you’ll want to hear this.

On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a “Double Down” stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you’re worried you’ve already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it’s too late. And the numbers speak for themselves:

• Amazon: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2010, you’d have $21,266!*

• Apple: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2008, you’d have $43,047!*

• Netflix: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2004, you’d have $389,794!*

Right now, we’re issuing “Double Down” alerts for three incredible companies, and there may not be another chance like this anytime soon.

See 3 “Double Down” stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of October 7, 2024

Keithen Drury has positions in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Should You Buy or Sell Nvidia Stock? was originally published by The Motley Fool

There is a young boy, pale blue from head to toe, hanging upside down in the vast Berlin studio of Elmgreen & Dragset. At first it is surprising to see him, then comic, as you realise he is a sculpture, then unsettling — a range of emotions which the pair’s works, from swimming pools and club nights to a fake Prada store in the desert, have been evoking for the past 30 years.

The boy (later lacquered white) is part of the artists’ new show at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which opens next week, but he is not being turned right-way-up there. Indeed, most of the sculptures in the show will also be upside down, suspended from a temporary structure in the grand central sculpture gallery.

“We could have placed them around on the floor,” says Norway-born Ingar Dragset as we sit upstairs in the studio’s airy living space. But hanging them upside down “was us wanting to let the sculptures be in dialogue with existing sculptures, but still not just blend in and disappear”. There is no chance of that: the boy pensively sitting on a washing machine will grab attention, as will the boy peering off the end of a diving board (this one upright), a common motif for Elmgreen & Dragset. It represents “that very existential moment” when you have the choice to jump in or, which might be more courageous, bail out, says Denmark-born Michael Elmgreen.

The pair started working together after they met at a club in Copenhagen in 1994 and discovered they lived in the same building. (They were a couple until 2008.) At first their practice was ephemeral — they unravelled white knitted skirts they were wearing, for example — but once they moved to Berlin in 1997 it developed into something more solid, taking ordinary objects and spaces and making them unfamiliar or, as Dragset says, unheimlich, a German word close to “uncanny” yet more deep-seated. Their first major sculpture, at the Louisiana museum in Denmark, was a diving board, to all appearances a rather normal one, except half the board was sticking out through a window looking out over the sea. Familiar and practical but utterly functionless.

This unsettlement has a greater purpose. When Elmgreen & Dragset installed an empty swimming pool in London’s Whitechapel Gallery, or created an airport in a Seoul museum, or put a hospital hallway complete with patients in beds in Bergen, they were asking us to turn that out-of-place feeling into questions about bigger issues such as the structures of power in our society, who has that power — and how we can alter it.

“In the way we speak of power structures,” says Dragset, “there’s an inherent idea of something being able to change because any structure can morph or transform.” It is a critique which has shaped their sculptural ambitions, especially in an art world they found was “much more rigid, much more conventional and routine-based than we had expected”.

Artworks, especially when you place them outside, are like children — at some point they move from home and they take on their own life and you need to accept that

An early part of their work was challenging the generic modern gallery space, whose white walls suggest neutrality but in fact conceal questions of power, money and access. They buried a gallery in the ground so visitors could look in from a (literally and metaphorically) different perspective; they white-painted, hosed down and repainted a gallery’s walls for 12 hours. “We say we dress up the white cube in drag,” says Elmgreen in his slightly gravelly voice. “It temporarily gets another identity in order to perform a different role . . . We want visitors to dare to be a little less respectful, not disrespectful but a little less respectful — ”

“Unafraid — ” adds Dragset.

“Fearless. And explore and question when they are in our more immersive installations. At the Whitechapel it was amazing how people were reacting. There were people who claimed that they had been to the swimming pool when the Whitechapel was a swimming pool. It was beautiful. Then you really feel like you’ve done an OK job.” For an installation to be so convincing that people have false memories — the Whitechapel was never a swimming pool — is a new realm for art.

As Elmgreen gets up to close a large window before it rains, I turn to my right and am confronted by an unnerving sight: a lifelike sculpture of a vulture perched on a branch, looking directly at me. “That’s one of the models for this figure we developed called ‘The Critic’,” says Dragset.

The pair’s institutional critique may seem sombre but is leavened by wit and campness. Their best-known work is “Prada Marfa”, a luxury-goods store recreated in perfect detail, complete with shoes and handbags from the brand’s 2005 autumn/winter collection, which sits by itself on a lonely stretch of Route 90 in the Texan desert. (“There were like 30, 40 people at the opening, mostly local ranchers,” says Elmgreen.) Originally seen largely by those en route to the town of Marfa for minimalist sculptor Donald Judd’s foundation, it gained global renown thanks to appearances in TV series Gossip Girl and The Simpsons; Beyoncé was photographed doing a star-jump in front of it.

“Prada Marfa” has Instagram to thank for becoming a touchstone of contemporary art. Social media “[changed] the identity” of the work, says Elmgreen, but they don’t mind: “Artworks, especially when you place them outside, are like children — at some point they move from home and they take on their own life and you need to accept that.”

“We of course believe that the core idea is strong enough to survive whatever is happening to it,” says Dragset.

“But it is kind of satisfying,” resumes Elmgreen, “that artworks morph beyond your control.” He seems almost delighted that the work has become something beyond their envisaging.

He is slightly less delighted when I read out a quote from a 2002 review, which says — in an apparently supportive way — that Elmgreen & Dragset had staged “a ‘gay infiltration’ of minimalism’s famously macho high aesthetics”. “Minimalism has been infiltrated by queerness from the very start,” Elmgreen says. “I’m sorry, dear heterosexuals, but you can’t trademark minimalism as yours that will [then] be infiltrated by queers . . . You don’t need to accept being boxed in as a queer artist and having certain sets of aesthetics that are provided to you because you are not a heterosexual man.”

Queerness has certainly been a subject for the pair — they staged a gay club night at Victoria Miro gallery in London; a frisson of sex surrounds a sculpture of two pairs of jeans and two pairs of Calvin Klein boxer shorts lying on the floor. But queerness has also been a perspective, says Dragset, a way of looking at society from oblique or unexpected angles.

“Sometimes I have a feeling we haven’t been quite queer enough to be, for instance, included in the most important queer and gay shows in the last 20 years, because our aesthetics have morphed,” he says. “We’re trying out a lot of different things and are harder to pin down maybe than some other artists. But for us that’s also maybe a part of queerness, that you have this way that you’re adapting.”

Adaptation goes both ways: as much as Elmgreen & Dragset have changed within the art world, the art world, in its new growth of diverse voices and untold perspectives, has surely changed thanks to them.

October 15-February 2, musee-orsay.fr

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When Myriam Mihindou was in her 20s, she suffered from aphasia, an inability to speak or understand speech. The French-Gabonese artist’s process of rehabilitation helped her find her voice, both literally and artistically, and she has since developed a multidisciplinary practice in which collaboration plays a central role.

This autumn, a trio of major French exhibitions — at the Palais de Tokyo, the Musée du Quai Branly and the Biennale de Lyon — are set to solidify Mihindou’s reputation as a key figure in contemporary French and African diaspora art. But it was in 2000, when she created her first video installation, that she first struck upon her current mode of working. “I became conscious that I was a performance artist,” she says from her studio in Vitry-sur-Seine, a south-eastern suburb of Paris, dressed in a T-shirt and yoga trousers.

This early video, “Folle” (“Mad Woman”), is part of the artist’s new retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo, the French capital’s foremost contemporary art space. Projected on to the floor of the gallery, it shows Mihindou’s feet from a first-person perspective. The viewer hears laughing and jeering as her toes nervously explore the crack between two paving stones. After much hesitation, the feet leap from one stone to the next and the laughing stops. It’s a simple but potent visual metaphor for overcoming one’s fears.

Born in 1964 in Libreville, Gabon, to a French Catholic mother and a Gabonese animist, political activist father, Minhindou recalls her childhood as a rich source of inspiration, but also one of terror. “My father was often arrested,” she says. “He spent 14 years in prison for defending his political ideas.”

It was against the backdrop of her father’s opposition to the regime of President Omar Bongo Ondimba that Mihindou fled to France in the 1980s. In Bordeaux, she studied the architecture of the French colonial buildings that she had seen being razed. “When I was a child, the destruction of old colonial houses began,” she recalls. “In place of these houses, they built multistorey buildings, which drastically changed the atmosphere and the architectural memory of the neighbourhoods.” The destruction made her angry, she admits. “But I was able to separate the system from what that [same] system produced in terms of cultural heritage.”

Her studies did little to appease the pain of exile, however, and, to the dismay of her parents, Mihindou abandoned architecture to pursue a career in art. She enrolled in night courses at the University of Bordeaux, where a class on ruins provided the conceptual bridge between architecture and the internal conflicts that pressed her towards art-making. “I’m sort of obsessed with the idea of how to reconstitute the whole from a fragment,” she says. “Making things is, for me, a way of thinking through that.”

In 2004, Mihindou filmed “La Colonne Vide” (“The Empty Column”) in homage to her late sister. It shows a double image of the artist standing on a pedestal; as the figure on the right begins to move, walking backwards in a small circle, the one on the left follows with a few seconds of delay. Every so often, Mihindou stops to pose. She seems to represent herself and her sister as monuments of a very personal and individual kind. The subtle intertwining of personal story with political subtext is a recurring motif in her work.

It’s hard not to read these images against the context of ongoing debates regarding the presence of monuments to racist oppressors in public spaces. “I’m not an activist”, Mihindou insists at first, before conceding: “Alright. I am an activist when it comes to the question of pursuing certain goals. But I don’t like political structures. I don’t want to belong to a political movement or party.”

I’m sort of obsessed with the idea of how to reconstitute the whole from a fragment. Making things is, for me, a way of thinking through that

Themes of death and mourning are also present in her exhibition Ilimb, the Essence of Tears at Paris’s ethnographic Musée du Quai Branly. The show pays tribute to the Punu mourners of Gabon — an order of the ethnic group to which Mihindou belongs. In “Moñu” (2023), a long wickerwork braid snakes through the gallery; an embedded copper cord responds to the visitor’s touch, activating a sound recording of a Punu mourning ritual, guiding the souls of the deceased to the afterlife. Another work, “Nzumbili” (2023), presents what at first appear to be Gabonese wooden instruments, but which are actually trompe-l’oeil ceramic pieces. It both demonstrates Mihindou’s technical and conceptual sophistication and questions the museum’s conservation techniques and obsession with authenticity.

While these works dialogue closely with the concerns and contradictions of a colonial trophy museum, the installation “Lève le doigt quand tu parles” (“Raise your hand when you speak”, 2023-24), which was presented at the 2024 Biennale de Lyon, touches on broader social concerns. Impaled on a scaffolding of metal rods, cement casts of women’s arms point towards the sky in a gesture that speaks to the making invisible of women’s roles and highlights their demand to be heard.

When I ask Mihindou about this piece, she reorients the question, preferring to tell me about the collaborative process of making it. “At first, it was tough, laborious,” she recalls. “The poor crew, I think they were cursing me. After a while, each found their place. Then, each person started to deploy their intelligence, to push forward in their own capacities. We were constantly inventing. When you start inventing, it’s moments of laughter and joy. Depending on what’s invented, you really discover personalities, and that’s very beautiful.”

Palais de Tokyo, October 17-January 5, palaisdetokyo.com. Musée du Quai Branly, to November 10, quaibranly.fr; La Biennale de Lyon, to January 5, labiennaledelyon.com

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France’s flagship art and antiques fair has a chequered recent past. At one time the most glamorous fair in the world and an event of real cultural significance, the Biennale des Antiquaires has faced changing tastes, dipping attendance and a high-profile forgery scandal that rocked the French furniture trade. Reinvented as La Biennale, it merged with a younger initiative, Fine Arts Paris, in 2022, changing its name to FAB Paris the following year.

The event’s 100 or so exhibitors will convene this year under the great glass dome of the newly renovated Grand Palais (November 22-27). This return to the Biennale’s spectacular Art Nouveau home is, according to fair president Louis de Bayser, “the beginning of the rebirth”.

Unlike the extravaganzas staged in the 1980s and ’90s, the focus now, he maintains, is on the dealers and their objects rather than the mise en scène. At the same time, it is looking to the future and the next generation of dealers and, hopefully, also inspiring a new generation of collectors.

The two are not unrelated. “New dealers bring their own taste and a fresh perspective on handling works of art,” he explains. “Sometimes they bring collectors of their own generation.” In November, five emerging gallerists will contribute to a dedicated stand decorated by Victor Bonnivard, a young interior architect interested in combining the modern with the historical. Prices here will be under €25,000.

De Bayser describes the displays — and the fair itself — as an “invitation to become a collector”. Its two loan displays are aspirational as well as inspirational, and also dramatically contrasting. One represents — literally — the so-called “goût Rothschild” tradition of collecting the grandest of 17th- and 18th-century French furniture, boiserie, paintings, porcelain, tapestries and carpets.

It will feature 50 pieces from the vast and little-known collection amassed by the heiress Béatrice de Rothschild (1864-1934). Between 1907 and 1912, the Baroness created the magnificent Italianate mansion and gardens now known as the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera. She bequeathed the villa and some 5,000 works of art from her numerous residences to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, including one of the most important collections of porcelain in France.

“Béatrice was an important figure in the art market during the first decade of the 20th century,” explains Oriane Beaufils, director of collections at the villa, which opened to the public in 1937. “She acquired works from legendary sales and from dealers whose descendants are still working in Paris.”

Despite her interest in the ancien régime, the Baroness’s collecting was eclectic, embracing early Italian paintings, Coromandel lacquer screens, and contemporary art. “She represents the crazy branch of Rothschild taste,” Beaufils enthuses. Among the loans there will be a 14th-century Sienese panel by Bartolo di Fredi, a Vincennes porcelain vase made for Madame de Pompadour and a 1904 Renoir — all set in an evocation of the villa’s opulent interiors by the acclaimed designer and collector Jacques Garcia.

The diversity and depth of Béatrice de Rothschild’s eye is relevant to a fair that offers everything from antiquities — among them an ancient Egyptian burial mask that once belonged to Coco Chanel — to Old Masters and modern art and design, by way of Asian and tribal art. Her eclecticism will also be echoed in the second display: a monumental, almost whimsical, “cabinet of curiosities” greeting visitors at the fair entrance.

Here, the architect Sylvie Zerat has conceived an immersive installation featuring two 6.7-metre-long walls pierced by apertures of different scales and shapes. Inside will be 400 objects — from artists’ palettes and plaster casts to globes and reliquaries. Most are drawn from the collection of the illustrator, designer and owner of La Boutique, Marin Montagut. He describes them as “humble tokens of everyday life and folk art” found in flea markets and artisanal workshops. It is proof that collecting is not solely the preserve of Rockefellers or Rothschilds.

There is, however, ample opportunity to follow the Rothschilds’ lead. At Galerie Steinitz, a gilded bronze clock with painted glass panels by François Vion was reputedly a gift from Marie Antoinette and latterly in the collection of Baron Edouard de Rothschild (€650,000), while a set of three 18th-century, ormolu-mounted Chinese “clair de lune” celadon porcelain vases once belonged to Baron Guy de Rothschild (€1.2m). The Baron Alphonse is represented by a Japanese lacquer secretaire by Adam Weisweiler circa 1790-95, offered by Pascal Izarn.

De Bayser notes that the market for antique furniture remains a little subdued unless the pieces are of the very best quality or boast a sparkling provenance. Those looking for more contemporary inspiration, meanwhile, might find it at newcomers Maison Rapin, whose offering will include the likes of a coral and rock crystal chandelier made around 1980 by the late goldsmith and jeweller Robert Goossens.

“It takes time to build a new fair,” he concludes. Not every dealer invited to participate took up the invitation, and the proportion of foreign dealers is well below the 45 per cent of the Biennale’s heyday. Selection and vetting are key, he believes, as is the element of surprise. “We hope visitors will return year after year because they will never know what to expect.”

November 22-27, fabparis.com