Venice Really Is Sinking, Isn’t It?
Francois Pinault is the billionaire who owns the Gucci fashion group, Yves St Laurent, the Chateau Latour vineyard and the auction house, Christie’s. He is the 74th richest man in the world, and it’s only fitting that a business oligarch be allowed to help shape the face of contemporary art, after all – culture is just another commodity in today’s monopolized/globalized market, no? Pinault is one of the elite art world’s gatekeepers, shaping and molding contemporary art through acquisition; he bestows fame and legitimacy to contemporary artists by adding their works to his enormous collection of postmodern art, and his new museum in Venice, Italy just opened to the public on April 30th, 2006.
The Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal, an 18th Century palace the magnate purchased from the city of Venice, will now house some of Pinault’s never before seen collection of 2,500 artworks. The billionaire transformed the building into a citadel for the conceptual – and indeed the palace has literally taken on those trappings. Its beautiful neo-classical waterfront façade has been wrapped in a skin of entwined luminous turquoise cords from the roof of the edifice to the waterline below. Created by Olafur Eliasson, the covering is meant to evoke “the motifs of the oriental carpets that once hung from the balconies of the noble palazzi lining Venice’s watery main thoroughfare.”
Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones reports that Hirst is now worth £100m (that’s around $180,288,800 Yankee dollars.) Jones poses the question, Do rich artists make bad art?, and he answers with the sad lament – “What would Van Gogh have done if you offered him Hirst’s money as he stood there in the cornfield, pistol cocked? I think he would have pulled the trigger that bit more firmly.”
Yes, Venice really is sinking isn’t it?
Having traveled the canals and narrow streets of Venice and poured over the city’s priceless art treasures encountered in its many glorious museums, I’m more than a little familiar with the well deserved reputation the place has as a center of the Renaissance arts. Call me a philistine, but I’m not ready to forsake the art of the Renaissance in favor of the money-spinning trend mongers and their stables of fashionable postmodern artists. I’d rather gaze upon a single painting by Andrea Mantegna then view the Grassi’s entire collection of minimalist chicken scratchings.
Like seeing the oil slicks deposited on the Grand Canal by the city’s heavily motorized boat traffic, I can’t help but feel Venice has been contaminated by the presence of Pinault’s collection. There are reports many Venetians have been baffled by what they’ve seen at the Grassi, but their consternation is dismissed by a chorus of media determined to sing the praises of the benevolent billionaire and art king maker, Francois Pinault.
I am here, merely to say – the Emperor has no clothes.