Pinault for Dummies; A Diatribe About the Art Market; Marcel Breuer's B9 Table
PINAULT FOR DUMMIES
Ever wonder about François Pinault's world? Le Monde reduces the life of France's number one collector to a one-page diagram—complete with handy arrows—that nevertheless retains the number of tensions and characters found in a Balzac novel. The sixty-nine-year-old billionaire, a self-made man who built his fortune in lumber before moving into luxury goods, began collecting art in 1972. In 1998, Pinault became the first private collector to own an auction house, namely Christie's, where "his experts provide him with first-hand information and he resells works that no longer please him." Apart from his "passion" for contemporary art, what "frictions" animate our protagonist's life? According to Le Monde, they lie chiefly with Art Basel head Samuel Keller, who doesn't like Pinault's penchant for visiting the fairs before official opening time to get first choice of the goods.
In Le Monde's diagram, the collector's closest circle includes not artists but rather a group of "independent and multi-talented" individuals, "who each have their role." New York advisor Philippe Ségalot plays the "trader" while the Geneva-based Marc Blondeau is Pinault's "specialist." Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the former French Minister of Culture and now head of TV5, "discovered" Venice's Palazzo Grassi as an alternative site to show Pinault's private collection when the collector grew weary of French bureaucracy's sluggish response to his proposal to build a museum on Paris's Ile Séguin. At the Palazzo Grassi, which is being currently being renovated and expanded, the role of head curator will be taken on by Alison Gingeras, now at New York's Guggenheim Museum. Keeping an eye out for new acquisitions are Elena Geuna, the former director of Sotheby's Europe, and Caroline Bourgeois, the head of Paris's Le Plateau and a specialist in video art.
The next circle of players in Pinault's world are artists in his collection, including Richard Serra, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Fabrice Hybert, and Abdel Abdessemed, the latest discovery. Last but not least, there is the circle of gallerists with whom, according to Le Monde, Pinault maintains "a privileged relationship": Larry Gagosian, Jay Jopling, Pierre Huber, Emmanuel Perrotin, Jérôme de Noirmont, and Didier Krzentowski. Of course, the next chapter in this epic will be written in spring 2006, when the Palazzo Grassi opens its doors and the public will finally get a chance to see Pinault's treasures.
ART'S SHIFTING VALUE
Die Zeit's Hanno Rauterberg offers a timely diatribe against the booming art market. "The present has never been as expensive as today," writes Rauterberg, who notes that artworks by living artists like Damien Hirst and Maurizio Cattelan are breaking auction price records once firmly held by Old Masters. For Rauterberg, the spectacular prices being paid for contemporary art at auction houses and art fairs are eroding the incalculable aesthetic values traditionally promoted by the museum. "The wealth of aesthetics is becoming economic in a more unbridled fashion than ever before," he writes. "Money is becoming the driving, omnipotent force. Whether we like it or not, that changes our image of art. It changes art itself."
For Rauterberg, the tendency to value artworks according to their sales price began in 1998, when Christie's put contemporary art—that is, works less than ten years old—under the hammer. Offering fresher wares was a wise decision; in 2005, Christie's almost doubled its returns in contemporary art sales. Rauterberg links Christie's change in policy not with François Pinault, who acquired the auction house in the same year, but rather with the then-newly appointed contemporary art sales director Gérard Goodrow. "We made a monster," recalls Goodrow, who now heads the Art Cologne fair. "Before, museums and art history influenced the market. Now, it's the other way around."
Rauterberg believes the art fair also takes its cue from museums while promoting "art shopping." The Frieze art fair—where the "atmosphere" of "being in the right place at the right time" rivals the art—is a case in point. Like other newer fairs, the Frieze art fair "wants to appear as universally useful as possible, like a museum or a center for contemporary art," he writes. "For example, the 'Frieze museum' showed a large sculpture exhibition beside the fair tent, [the fair] gives scholarships to artists and gets sponsors to make an acquisitions budget of 150,000 pounds available to Tate Modern. There were tours for school children, concerts by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and a lecture from Jacques Rancière. And then the fair makes itself a topic through panel discussions with prominent speakers."
The educational program—however self-referential—is not the only similarity with the public museum. Despite the fact that the Frieze art fair is a market, it not only obtained public funds from European taxpayers but also managed to mix public and corporate funding. "It is probably not a coincidence that there is a lot of money for all this from European Union's arts funding program Culture 2000," writes Rauterberg. "And powerful sponsors also attach themselves to Frieze, which seems to happen completely naturally but is nevertheless strange. In the end, Deutsche Bank wouldn’t sponsor a department store like Kaufhof or a media store like Saturn."
BREUER'S B9
Can a mass-produced object become like an artwork? Die Welt's Uta Baier considers the question by looking at the recent legal battle over Marcel Breuer's B9 table, first made in 1925-26. As Baier reports, two German firms—Tecta and Knoll International—asked a Dusseldorf court to decide which company has the right to reproduce the table for the contemporary market. B9 has become a cult object because it is the first piece of furniture that Breuer made with steel tubes. (After experimenting with Duralumin pipes, a material used in the ‘20s in Dessau for aircraft construction, the Bauhaus architect decided upon steel tubing because it was cheaper.)
"The table's cult status means that a mass product became an expensive piece of design, a work of art that has stories to tell, justifying its high price," writes Baier. For the courts, the only story that counts is the contract that gives a firm the right to reproduce a design. While Breuer himself signed the contract with Knoll International in 1968, Tecta earned the right to reproduce B9 from Berlin's Bauhaus archive, which cooperated with Breuer's widow. As Baier notes, a lower court has decided in favor of Knoll because the company's contract is older. A higher court will decide the case on January 24.