THIS WEEK'S HOT TOPIC
In recent months, we’ve talked a lot about the viability of the gallery model and whether it is built to withstand the changing conditions of art-buying, travel, and real estate. Collaboration is a strategy that often comes up during discussions on this topic, and we’ve seen many examples over the years—dealers joining forces, galleries teaming up for fairs or even shared outposts like the Campus in upstate New York. Less common, though, is the kind of institutional partnership announced last Friday involving the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA in New York, and M+ in Hong Kong.
The museums have formed an alliance in which they’ll share their holdings, effectively creating a giant global collection of hundreds of thousands of objects accessible to curators—and audiences—across three continents. While we’ve seen museums co-purchase artworks or share collections in the past, the scope of the partnership between the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, and M+ is unprecedented.
You have to credit the museums for embracing collaboration on this scale, modeling a new approach at a time when cultural organizations of all kinds are being squeezed harder than ever. And while it’s fair to ask whether such a step toward globalism is good, culturally speaking, this won’t be the venture to put that question to the test, particularly since it rose from previously established partnerships. Sometimes, creating more opportunities to show more art to more people is all that matters.
What’s interesting, in this case, is a bigger museological question. “We can’t just keep collecting, so we are sharing instead,” M+ director Suhanya Raffel told ARTnews upon announcing the alliance. Raffel may have been referring to logistical limitations—there’s only so much space and money, even for the best-resourced institutions—but her comment also suggests a pivot away from collecting (that colonial concept) as an institutional precept. Maybe museums won’t move forward by finding new ways to pay for the art they own, but by abandoning the notion of ownership altogether.
Editor’s note: Last week’s newsletter mistakenly reported that Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) was sold to the “late” Ronald Lauder for $135 million. Lauder is alive. He purchased the painting for the Neue Galerie in New York.
3…THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT ARTISTS COLLABORATING WITH BRANDS
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On the occasion of the new Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at the Whitney, the museum and the artist's estate teamed up with Gap to drop a fresh pop-inspired fashion line. This may seem like a relatively new phenomenon, but there's a long history of artists making meaningful work with commercial brands or enterprises. Imagine walking down the street in Belle Époque Paris and seeing a beautiful Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec-designed poster, or your favorite cigarette papers advertised with a poster by Alphonse Mucha. These early commercial collaborations with artists set the tone for the next century, where we'd see Salvador Dalí fashioning a crustacean dress with Schiaparelli and Andy Warhol creating ads for Absolut Vodka. This tradition has since continued with Takashi Murakami making labels for Dom Pérignon, Jeff Koons teaming up with Evian, and, just this fall, the artsy fashion brand Eckhaus Latta developing a line for J. Crew.
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The inner workings of these collaborations vary greatly, and there's no one way to reach an agreement between brand and artist. Brands can commission an artist to make something exclusive and unique for use, or pay to license an existing work or image for reproduction. Other times, the two parties can form creative partnerships where they develop an idea together and share profits. In all instances, there should be oversight from the artist or their estate. Even in the case of licensing material to a brand, exclusions can be written into a contract stipulating that a given image can only be used for certain uses, and those uses should be clear before any creative work is put in.
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Though there is historical context for artist-brand collaborations being fruitful and even artistically meaningful, there can be negative implications. Reproducing artwork too prolifically can diminish and even cheapen an artist's legacy. Often, we see this happen when an artist has an overly zealous or perhaps greedy estate. When considering moving forward with a brand deal, posterity should be top of mind.
A NUMBER TO KNOW
22+ years
The time it's taken for the French state and potential private patrons to open a contemporary art institution on the Île Seguin—a delay that ended with the debut of Le Large on October 17. Built on what was once the site of the French automaker Renault’s main plant (demolished in 2004), the nearly 54,000 square-foot non-collecting institution is just the latest example of how tough it can be to bring a new cultural center into being.
Large, as it’s known colloquially, wasn’t the first candidate to fill this void. First came the luxury magnate, mega-collector, and philanthropist François Pinault, whose “plans for a museum were thwarted by red tape” in 2005, according to reporting from Dale Berning Sawa in The Art Newspaper. Then came the Swiss freeport tycoon and adviser-dealer Yves Bouvier, whose quest to build an “art city” called R4 foundered amid legal challenges and permitting issues more than a decade later.
But in 2016, Bouvier’s company sold its interest in the Île Seguin project to the Emerige Group real estate development company—and its chairman, the collector Laurent Dumas, has managed to do what his more well-known predecessors could not. Emerige not only manifested Large itself but also manifested a more than $500 million complex around it, featuring an IMAX theater, a riverside sculpture garden, plans for a chic hotel-restaurant, and more.
How did Emerige do it? By navigating state bureaucracy, private financing, and even fears that Île Seguin was cursed. Devorah Lauter reported for Artnet News that Dumas “invited a Native American spiritual leader, a shaman, and a voodoo priest to cleanse the land of evil spirits.” Snicker if you want, but his company just opened a gleaming museum with a Cecilia Alemani-curated inaugural show where no cultural entrepreneur could manage. Maybe more museum projects could use a little supernatural assistance.
—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market
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ASK: The Baer Faxt has produced its fair share of merch. Do you have a favorite example?
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