Museums in Literature
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# Museums in Literature

## Fictionalising Museums, World Exhibitions, and Private Collections

Edited by

CAROLINE MARIE & ANNE CHASSAGNOL

With contributions by

SUSANNE BAYERLIPP | EDWARD CAREY

ANNE CHASSAGNOL | CHRISTIANE CONNAN-PINTADO

NOLWENN CORRIOU | JESSICA DESCLAUX

SYLVAINE FAURE-GODBERT | MANUELE FIOR

EMMANUEL GUIBERT | HANNA HADJADJ

BÉNÉDICTE JARRASSE | ALEXANDER KORZER-ROBINSON

MORGAN LABAR | DAVID LABREURE

CAROLINE MARIE | LANCE OLSEN

MARIE-SYLVIE POLI | BEN SCREECH

JONAH SIEGEL | MAXIME THIRY

SOPHIE THOMAS | LAVINIA TORTI

ÉRIC TRIQUET | KIERA VACLAVIK

RACHEL WALSH | JAMES WELDON

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BREPOLS
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© BREPOLIS PUBLISHERS

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IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.
# Contents

Acknowledgments 7

Preface: Wall Texts / The Literature of the Museum 8

JONAH SIEGEL

## Introduction

Culture Shock: How Literature Matters in Museums and Elsewhere 15

ANNE CHASSAGNOL AND CAROLINE MARIE

## PART ONE *Museums Outside Museums* | *Le musée hors du musée* 23

1 In Conversation with Alexander Korzer-Robinson, Collage Artist, Author of the Cut Antiquarian Book on the Back Cover: Looking at these Books is like Revisiting a Museum 24

*An interview conducted by CAROLINE MARIE*

2 The Self-Contained Museum: Romanticism, Collecting, and the Space of Writing 28

SOPHIE THOMAS

3 The Dark Side of the Museum: Collecting, Hoarding, and Susannah Walker's

*The Life of Stuff: A Memoir about the Mess We Leave Behind* 45

SUSANNE BAYERLIPP

4 In Conversation with Lance Olsen, Writer: On the Ongoing Multimodal Collaborative Installation *There's No Place Like Time* 52

*An interview conducted by HANNA HADJADJ*

## PART TWO *Museums, Worlds, and Objects* | *Le musée, le monde et l'objet* 57

5 Féerie de verre et de fer : le spectacle de l'Exposition universelle de Londres sous l'œil d'un feuilletoniste parisien 58

BÉNÉDICTE JARRASSE

6 The Egyptological Museum at Night: From Science to Magic, from Order to Chaos 72

NOLWENN CORRIOU

7 Howard Phillips Lovecraft : l'horreur au musée 84

DAVID LABREURE

8 Écriture d'un musée janusien :

*Classé sans suite* de Claudio Magris, un roman muséologique 96

JAMES WELDON

9 In Conversation with Edward Carey, Writer and Visual Artist: Of Camels, Magpies, Mudlarking, Palaces of Toys, and Making a Museum in One's Home 106

*An interview conducted by CAROLINE MARIE*
PART THREE *Museums Poetics and Aesthetics* | *Poétiques et esthétiques du musée* 121

10 L'album-musée : un sous-genre thématique et formel de l'album pour la jeunesse 122
CHRISTIANE CONNAN-PINTADO

11 Le paradoxe du musée dans *Maîtres anciens* de Thomas Bernhard 133
SYLVAINE FAURE-GODBERT

12 Le musée comme atelier chez Daniele Del Giudice et Antonio Tabucchi, entre mémoire, imagination et cécité 140
LAVINIA TORTI

13 Conversation avec Emmanuel Guibert, dessinateur et scénariste :
La bande dessinée comme reliquaire ou l'art de collectionner les connivences 151
*Propos recueillis par* ANNE CHASSAGNOL

PART FOUR *Museum Material Culture and Writing* | *Culture matérielle et écriture au musée* 155

14 Contre la décadence latine :
Joséphin Péladan dans les salles chaldéo-assyriennes du Louvre 156
JESSICA DESCLAUX

15 « Qu'est-ce qu'il ne faut pas faire pour une exposition ! » :
ce que le livre doit au musée dans l'œuvre de Jean-Philippe Toussaint 168
MAXIME THIRY

16 The Oxford Museums and Storytelling for Young People 175
BEN SCREECH

17 Conversation avec Manuele Fior, auteur de bande dessinée.
Des Intransigeants à la naissance de la bande dessinée :
la force narrative du musée dans *Les Variations d'Orsay* (2015) 188
*Propos recueillis par* ANNE CHASSAGNOL

PART FIVE *Fictionalisation and Legitimisation* | *Fictionnalisation et légitimation* 193

18 La littérature, un dispositif de médiation puissant et sensible de l'expérience muséale :
le cas de la collection «Ma nuit au musée» des éditions Stock 194
ÉRIC TRIQUET ET MARIE-SYLVIE POLI

19 Sourcebook, Guidebook, VIP Pass:
The Role of the Museum in Writing for Young Readers 205
KIERA VACLAVIK

20 The New Discourses of the New Private Museums:
Dakis Joannou, Eli Broad, and François Pinault 213
MORGAN LABAR

List of Images 226

Notes on Contributors 231

Index of Museums 236

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Acknowledgments

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We would like to thank our publisher
for his trust and open-mindedness.

This book has been published with the
support of ComUE Université Paris Lumières,
the Direction générale des patrimoines –
département de la politique des publics, French
Ministry of Culture and Communication, the
association Publics & Musées, and the research
lab TransCrit (Université Paris 8). It is part of the
MuséaLitté Research Program.

Tous nos remerciements à notre éditeur
pour sa confiance et ses encouragements.

Cet ouvrage est publié grâce au
soutien de la ComUE Université Paris
Lumières, de la Direction générale des
patrimoines – département de la politique
des publics, Ministère de la Culture et de la
Communication, de l'association Publics &
Musées, et de l'UR TransCrit (Université Paris 8),
dans le cadre du projet MuséaLitté.
# The New Discourses of the New Private Museums

## Dakis Joannou, Eli Broad, and François Pinault

### MORGAN LABAR

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### Introduction (1):
establishing the regressive as legitimate art

This chapter addresses the ways in which three of the most influential contemporary art collectors in the world – Dakis Joannou, François Pinault, and Eli Broad – establish as legitimate and institutionalised art that might be called deliberately “dumb art” – or, we might say, art that is stupid for a reason<fnref n="1" />. The French concept of *bêtise* provides an arguably richer framework<fnref n="2" /> since, unlike its closest English equivalents such as “dumbness,” “stupidity,” or “silliness,” this term is etymologically associated with the animal, *la bête*. Certain types of *bêtise* partake of a beastly lowness; *bêtise* can be bodily, vulgar, regressive – or it can be simply silly or childish. As one spectator of the performance of *Parade* (1917)<fnref n="3" /> noted on exiting the theatre, “[h]ad I known it was that silly, I would have brought the kids”<fnref n="4" /> (“si j’avais su que c’était si bête, j’aurais emmené les enfants”)<fnref n="5" />. Since then, critics have likewise often found fault with modern or contemporary art, on the grounds that it is stupid, particularly when its forms challenge traditional techniques and its themes grate against received wisdom.

I use the expression *dumb art* to translate the French *art bête* firstly because it connotes both muteness—artworks that refuse to speak in articulate language and refuse the order of discourse—and stupidity, and secondly because it is sometimes closely associated with teenage culture, as exemplified by art critic John Coplans who talked about “the proverbial dumbness of most younger artists on the West Coast” in the very first issue of the art journal *Artforum* in 1962.<fnref n="6" />

Ranging from art star Jeff Koons to Paul McCarthy (see Fig. 1), or the “enfants terribles” of BritArt Jake and Dinos

Chapman (see Fig. 2)—all present in Dakis Joannou’s and François Pinault’s collections—grotesque and seemingly regressive art has played a key role in determining aesthetic styles and prompting debates about contemporary art from the late 1980s to the present. In the late 1980s, dumb art began to constitute an aesthetic *per se* mobilised by the art world’s biggest stars. What used to be marginal and critical tactics then took centre stage. Those artistic propositions shifted from underground galleries to blockbuster exhibitions in respected venues, aimed at the general public. Moreover, this art appealed to wealthy collectors prominently active on the art market. Silly jokes and dumb, flat-footed statements then started to be redefined and used as the material for and *raison d’être* of an artwork.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>⁺ FIG. 1 Paul McCarthy, *Untitled (Jack)*, 2002, reproduced in the exhibition catalogue *Monument to Now: The Dakis Joannou Collection* (2004).</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="1">¹ I would like to give my warmest thanks to Anne Chassagnol, Brigitte Friant-Kessler, and Caroline Marie for their feedback and careful reading and editing of the present chapter.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² See Morgan Labar, *La Gloire de la bêtise: régression et superficialité dans les arts depuis la fin des années 1980*, Dijon, Les Presses du réel, 2021, chapter 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Diaghilev’s *Ballets russes* ballet, Jean Cocteau (libretto), Erik Satie (music), Pablo Picasso</footnote>

<footnote>(scenography) and Léonide Massine (choreography).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Recounted by Jean Cocteau in a letter to Jacques Maritain (Jean Cocteau, *Poésie critique*, t. 2, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, 26).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Cocteau, *Poésie critique*, 26 (translation mine).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ John Coplans, “The New Painting of Common Objects,” *Pop Art: A Critical History*, edited by Steven Henry Madoff, Berkeley, U California P, 1997, 45.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>♦ FIG. 2 Jake and Dinos Chapman, *Like a Dog Returns to its Vomit Twice* (No. 6), reworked and improved etching from Francisco de Goya's "Los Caprichos," 2005, Pinault Collection.</figcaption></figure>

But dumb art does need legitimisation. Since dumb art, or *art bête*, requires legitimisation the most efficient way to legitimise it is via the art market, exhibitions, galleries, and critical acknowledgement. Regarding the role of the critic and the methods by which such art playing dumb has been integrated into the art world at a symbolic level,⁷ we can pinpoint a number of elements that act in favour of recognition. Specialised texts, such as contemporary art journals and exhibition catalogues, as well as more popular material accessible to a broad audience, be it mainstream press, exhibition booklets, or art-work labels and explanatory wall texts, have had a key influence on the legitimisation of what one might term an art in praise of regression. This may sound paradoxical but it is not: while those art-forms appeal either to the beast, the child, or the slacker teenage self in each of us, it still needs to be buttressed by a critical discourse to be perceived as legitimate and marketable. This is how symbolic legitimisation works. Even if a collector like Dakis Joannou enjoyed playing what I referred

to as “the Atlanticist barbarian” in *La Gloire de la bêtise*, by displaying Jeff Koons’s works in Athens among pottery from the Geometric Period—for the exhibition “Abstract Geometry” in 1989—, it must be remembered that he hired the professional art critic and advisor Jeffrey Deitch to curate art shows based on his personal collection and write catalogue essays. Again, one cannot *just* be dumb: artistic stupidity needs intellectual legitimisation.

*Introduction (II): establishing the new canon*

Over the last three decades, the collectors Dakis Joannou, François Pinault, and Eli Broad have gathered a substantial amount of these seemingly anti-intellectual artworks, which cover a vast range of styles, origins, forms, and humoristic aims: Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s piles of trash turned into shadow theatre (Joannou), Paul McCarthy’s defecating and fornicating figures (Joannou and Pinault), Maurizio Cattelan’s Pope John Paul II mashed by a meteorite and Takashi Murakami’s larger-than-life naked teenager masturbating and ejaculating a sperm lasso (Pinault), or Jeff Koons sleek *Balloon Dogs* (Joannou, Pinault, and Broad). The success of deliberately crude, rude, gross, and sophomoric art would not have been the same without the new public status of such collections. Not only did these collectors acquire these types of provocative art, but they also chose to make them public. And so one may wonder whether dumb and provocative art is not collected first and foremost in order to be made public, as opposed to being kept for private consumption and viewing. They advertised their collections through touring exhibitions, catalogues, and ultimately by building special settings for their displays. In other words, private museums have become the dominant regime of advertising and disseminating art in the making of taste. Through the display of their art collections, Joannou, Pinault, and Broad thus have had a major impact on the contemporary conception of art – and, through it, on our conception of society.

This chapter explores this grey zone: the (non)critical literature and discourses *on* and *by* these private collections turned into private museums, which ultimately legitimise the *art bête* that is so prominent today and shape the figure of the collector who is the owner/author of the museums, sometimes bearing a minimalist name like “The Broad” in Los Angeles—“the” one and only. Simple and effective.

Contemporary art museums occupy an ambiguous position in the very complex process of writing art history. Two types of museums should be distinguished: museums of Modern Art, which give the “modern canon” their seal of approval, and
museums involved in contemporary art, that is the art of the last decades: artworks that are not part of the history of art yet. For institutions or major private collectors, exhibiting contemporary art to the general audience implies taking part in the writing of the history of the art of the present time.

All the discourses of the new private museums are part and parcel of this writing, which might align with the production of the new canon. This is precisely the reason why it is essential for historians to tackle the writing of this history of the present, and to include those collectors and their museal approaches into the broader narrative of the history of art. This historians achieve through the analysis of various types of discourses of museums—different types of literature, or “para-literature,” generated by museums. Directly or indirectly, museum-produced texts fall into three categories: first, all texts belonging to the print media that review, advertise, and otherwise inform about these museums; second, the kind of grey literature they produce themselves, such as press releases, communicational materials of any kind, booklets, leaflets, wall texts, and labels; third, the critical literature published by the museums themselves, essentially exhibition catalogues. Catalogues are the main source of information on exhibitions that remains available once exhibitions are over. They are destined to become the archive of the exhibition and thus form part of the official history of the museum.

*The new private art museum phenomenon*

In 2009, art historian Anne Higonnet published a groundbreaking study of what she termed “collection museums,”<fnref n="8" /> defined as private collections laid out as museums by private collectors in their lifetime and designed to be opened to the public. These collection museums flourished between 1890 and the first decades of the twentieth century —paradigmatic examples are the Frick Collection in New York, The Huntington in Pasadena, and the Musée Condé in Chantilly. According to Higonnet, collection museums went out of fashion after World War II. It is not until the 2000s that the phenomenon resurfaced.

Following the boom of the art market in the early 1980s, the speculative market of the late 1990s was marked by the

investment of unprecedented sums of money in contemporary art by a handful of wealthy collectors. Some of them bought more artworks than they could house. These collectors, then, had two options: they could either rely on art storage—which is not satisfactory—or have exhibition spaces built for the sole purpose of displaying their collections, with the perk of being free to view and curate them themselves. A case in point is The Silo in France. Jean-Philippe and Françoise Billarant have turned a former grain silo into a private exhibition space where they have been organising and displaying their own collection of conceptual and minimal art since 2011. Wrapped in a very decorative Daniel Buren wallpaper, the bedroom on the last floor reminds visitors that this private collection has been set up by the collectors according to their own taste, though the Buren bedroom has long been considered an artwork in its own right and no longer has any domestic function.

Nowadays, collectors are less and less inclined to donate their collections to public institutions or museums. Most of the time, they distrust the management of museums and fear a major part of their collection will end up in museum storage spaces.

In the 2000s the opening of private museums initiated by art collectors grew exponentially, paralleling the expansion of a speculative market for contemporary art unprecedented in scale. “Private museums are currently springing up around the world like mushrooms. Their number is incalculable,”<fnref n="9" /> states art collector Cristina Bechtler in her book *The Private Museum of the Future* co-authored with art historian Dora Imhof in 2018. Scholars have addressed this issue as well, as testified by the symposium “The Global Power of Private Museums” held in Berlin at the Technische Universität in 2017.<fnref n="10" /> The very same year, the first “Private Museum Conference” was organised in Basel during the International Art Fair, two years after the emergence of the *Private Art Museum Report*, first published in 2015 by the Hong Kong start-up Larry’s List, which defines itself as an “art collector editorial and art market knowledge company providing insights, data, and access to contemporary art collectors.”<fnref n="11" />

In the face of this reconfiguration of the global art world, museum directors began to question their own role. Bartomeu Marí Ribas, who was the director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) from 2008 to 2015, declared: “A friend of mine used to say that art history is not written by museums but by private collectors. It sounds logical but a bit

<footnote n="7">⁷ This approach is inspired by Isabelle Graw's *High Price*.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Anne Higonnet, *A Museum of One's Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift*, Pittsburgh, PA, Periscope, 2009, 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Cristina Bechtler, in *idem* and Dora Imhof, *The Private Museum of the Future*, Zurich, Ringier-Les Presses du réel, 2018, 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ “The Global Power of Private Museums: Arts and Publics—States and Markets,” Center for Art Market Studies, Technische Universität Berlin, 16–18 November 2017.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ <www.larryslist.com>, accessed 22 May 2022.</footnote>
scary, too, especially when you see the new big private collections being amassed in the last few years.”¹² It is quite interesting to witness the former head of such an institution as the MACBA hiding behind “a friend of [his],” as if he could not fully acknowledge the current situation by himself. Indeed, Ribas is well aware of the fact that the main function of modern and contemporary art museums is to write the history of art. He also knows that this task has recently been profoundly challenged by private collectors. In her landmark 1992 study *L'Artiste, l'institution, le marché*, French art sociologist Raymonde Moulin defined the top collectors (“grands collectionneurs”) as the few owning several hundred works of art and acquiring

[d]ifferent positions within the market—discoverers, promoters, commissioners, buyers, sellers—and within the art world—enjoying the company of artists, managing museums, curating exhibitions, etc. Acting as both economic and cultural agents, they are able to interfere, as museums directors do—and often before they do—but with superior financial means, with all the dimensions of the artworks' value and of the artists' value.¹³

Moulin refers to these “lead collectors,” working closely with “lead galleries,” as “taste-maker collectors.” In 2009, she adopted a new mediatic terminology and added to the previous characteristics

of the now so-called “giga-collectors” the fact that they are very much aware of their image¹⁴. They are highly attentive to their public persona and visibility in the art world and beyond.

*Dakis Joannou: “We are promoters more than we are art historians.... Our purpose is not to stand back like an eminent museum”*¹⁵

Born in 1939 in Cyprus, Dakis Joannou, a key actor in the contemporary art world since the 1990s, was ranked number six on the *ArtReview Power 100 List* in 2004. In 1983, Joannou founded the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in Geneva – “deste” means “seeing” in modern Greek –, a non-profit organisation aimed at promoting contemporary art. In the mid-1980s, he became one of the first collectors of Jeff Koons, at a time when the artist was not the superstar of the art market he was soon to become. From 1983 to 1988, the DESTE Foundation had no permanent exhibition space and the exhibition it hosted at various museums had no relation to Joannou’s personal collection. Change occurred in 1988 when Joannou called upon Jeffrey Deitch, an art dealer, art critic, curator, and art advisor, to build a series of touring exhibitions based on his personal collection. *Cultural Geometry* gathered twenty-nine

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>♦ FIGS. 3–5 Dan Friedman and Jeffrey Deitch, *Artificial Nature*, Athens, Deste, 1990.</figcaption></figure>
works from Joannou's collection, acquired between 1985 and 1988, displayed alongside Greek and Cypriot ceramics from the ancient Greek Geometric Period. A few months later, the recently founded bimonthly journal *Galerie Magazine*, a bilingual French/English publication, devoted ten pages to Joannou's collection, describing it as “one of the most important in Europe”<fnref n="16" /> with a “high influence on the Greek and international artistic scene.”<fnref n="17" />

The review of the exhibition in *Galerie Magazine* was followed by an account of the relationships between the DESTE Foundation and Joannou's collection. This is where the text becomes unclear. In arcane prose, it discusses the general idea of circulation and movement:

> The Joannou collection is characterized by its flexibility and mobility. Inside as well as outside the house, the pieces in the collection frequently change places to create new visual encounters. The collection clearly reflects the cultural goals and options of the DESTE Foundation, and every year many of the works travel to major exhibitions around the world.<fnref n="18" />

The article insists upon the fact that the DESTE Foundation and Joannou's personal collection are two different entities. However, the former bases its exhibition agenda on the latter. In

other words, the foundation serves the image of the collection.

In the years that followed, Jeffrey Deitch curated a series of peculiar exhibitions: *Psychological Abstraction* (1989), *Artificial Nature* (1990), and *Post Human* (1992). As *Artificial Nature* took place only in Athens, Deitch and Joannou banked on an innovative catalogue designed by Dan Friedman (see Fig. 3). Inspired by the appropriationist aesthetics of the “Pictures Generation” and featuring the likes of Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince, the book is closer to a *livre d'artiste* than to an exhibition catalogue, freely associating photographic landscapes and portraits, photographs from magazines, and classical or contemporary artworks from Poussin to Koons. All of these images have been stamped by white lettering that starkly contrasts with the black tags and texts written in red, each having been taken directly from the catalogue essay (see Figs. 4–5). As an editorial and a museal object, the catalogue was undoubtedly instrumental in establishing Joannou as a major actor in the art world of the period. Two years later, *Post Human*, an exhibition that travelled from Athens to Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, turned out to be one of the defining moments of the decade: it was the first contemporary art exhibition to tackle delicate issues such as aesthetic surgery and trans-humanism.

In the late 1980s, Joannou's initiative could not be considered a “private museum”: the DESTE Foundation had never

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>

<footnote n="12">¹² Bechtler and Imhof, *The Private Museum*, 155.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Raymonde Moulin and Pascaline Costa, *L'Artiste, l'institution, le marché*, Paris, Flammarion, 1992, 51–52 (translation mine).</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Raymonde Moulin, “Le marché de l’art au XXIᵉ siècle,” *Vendu/Sold: regards sur la collection et le marché de l’art*, edited by Sylvette Babin, Montréal, Esse, 2009, 24.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ The section on Dakis Joannou is based on research that I carried out in 2015 at the archives of the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in Athens. I would like to thank archivist Elena Michaelidi who greatly facilitated my research there.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Sania Papa, “Dakis Joannou,” translated by Charles Lynn Clark, *Galerie Magazine*, October–November 1988, 158.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Papa, “Dakis Joannou,” 156.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Papa, “Dakis Joannou,” 160.</footnote>
aspired to be a museum; it wasn't one and still isn't, as a matter of fact. Commenting on the success of the exhibition *Artificial Nature* in a 1990 interview, Deitch underlines Joannou's non-museum-like ambition: "We are promoters more than we are art historians. We do not hide the fact that we are strong advocates for a certain kind of art. Our purpose is not to stand back like an eminent museum."<fnref n="19" /> At the same time, he unravels the following paradox: "this is a private collection that is not meant for private consumption."<fnref n="20" /> From the late 1980s onward, the Joannou collection has been designed to be public—and publicised. Even though Deitch insists that it should remain a non-museum structure and preserve a non-museum approach, he also stresses the challenge of building an ambitious exhibition such as *Artificial Nature* based almost exclusively on a private collection: "it is less expensive to buy a piece than to borrow it."<fnref n="21" /> Such a statement clearly shows that even though the DESTE was not strictly speaking a museum, and despite its owner's declarations of intent, the museal ambition of Joannou's personal collection was starting to become apparent.

1996 was a turning point regarding the status of the Joannou collection. Hosted in Athens' School of Fine Arts, the exhibition *Everything That's Interesting Is New* was the first extensive presentation of Joannou's personal collection which was labelled, branded, and advertised as such. The exhibition garnered attention and gathered contemporary artists newly occupying the art world frontstage, such as Jake and Dinos Chapman, Chris Ofili, Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, Robert Gober, and Kiki Smith, as well as Paul McCarthy, who belongs to an older generation but first began to gain international recognition in the mid-1990s. Well-known representatives of the art of the 1960s and 1970s were also included in the show, such as Donald Judd, Gilbert & George, Bruce Nauman, and Vito Acconci. Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp were the towering figures of the exhibition, inscribing the young generation emerging in the 1990s in a well-established narrative of provocative art. A luxurious and thick catalogue was published for the occasion. For the first time in the DESTE Foundation's history the title of the exhibition insisted on the private origin of the exhibited works: *The Dakis Joannou Collection*.

The 1990 catalogue *Artificial Nature* provided a means to posit the DESTE as an innovative actor of the international art world. The catalogue *Everything That's Interesting Is New. The Dakis Joannou Collection* (see Fig. 6) extended this logic and

played a key role in establishing both Joannou and the DESTE Foundation as actors in the production of contemporary art history. The latter volume comprises mostly images and unpublished texts or statements commissioned from the artists in the exhibition, thereby positing Joannou himself as an unavoidable figure of newness in the arts, a figure who prompts aesthetic discourses purporting to enlighten the art of his time.

That catalogue marks the beginning of a peculiar editorial policy. Editing original or reference publications on a regular basis is a core element in the understanding of the historical importance of and position held by the Joannou collection. In 2013, the DESTE began publishing 2000 words, a series of monographs dedicated to artists from the Joannou collection like Urs Fisher, Robert Gober, and Chris Ofili. The back cover reads "2000 words is a series of monographs conceived by Massimiliano Gioni, each of which combines a critical, forthright essay with a survey of an artist's works in the Dakis Joannou collection. From the vantage of a single unique collection, these small volumes give insight into the work of some of the most exciting contemporary artists." These books therefore make a significant contribution toward promoting Joannou's collection and foregrounding its intellectual nature.

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>+ FIG. 6 Catalogue of the exhibition *Everything That's Interesting Is New. The Dakis Joannou Collection*, 1996.</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Papa, "Dakis Joannou," 119.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Papa, "Dakis Joannou," 119.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Papa, "Dakis Joannou," 119.</footnote>
The DESTE also financially supports other types of art-related and collection-centred publications. In the aesthetic lineage of *Artificial Nature*, art star Maurizio Cattelan’s project *Charley*, with Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, consists in photographic time lapses of a series of art scenes—e.g., *Charley 2* offers a glimpse of the New York gallery scene in 2000–2001. Begun in 2010 by Cattelan, *Toilet Paper* is a succession of collages of now surrealistic, now deliberately distasteful images found on the internet.

In 1997, the DESTE Foundation settled in a permanent building in Athens, a former paper factory in the Neo Psychico neighbourhood rehabilitated by architect Christian Hubert. From then on, exhibitions have been exclusively based on Joannou’s personal collection. In other words, the DESTE is instrumental in promoting, circulating, and publicising the Joannou Collection—and, as a consequence, its own view on contemporary art history, especially since some of the exhibitions subsequently toured in international venues.

In 2002, the exhibition *Forever* presented seventy art-works from the Joannou Collection, including British duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Christopher Wool, Kara Walker, and Damien Hirst. The press release in English, available on the

DESTE website, insists upon content and politics: “These artists are less interested in the cool formalism and sharply polished corporate aesthetics of the eighties and more concerned with matters of personal or collective identity, the self, multi-cultural and gender politics, and the issue of inter-disciplinarity.” It sounds as if, in order to strengthen his aura, Joannou came to realise that a collector of international stature needs to engage with contemporary issues, to be up-to-date, and to go with the flow of ideas pervading the contemporary art world. “The collection expresses a preference for artists whose work engages in issues relating to daily life and the experience of the real world,” the press release adds.

This final element, “experience of the real world,” is a core and recurring argument for the legitimisation of the art presented by collectors such as Joannou, Pinault, and Broad. It may serve any collection of art since it is a highly transferable phrase, a topic vague enough to encompass any type of artwork.

Joannou’s exaltation of an “art of our time” culminated in the 2004 exhibition *Monument to Now: The Dakis Joannou Collection* set in a new facility of the foundation in the context of Athens’ Olympic Games (see Fig. 7). This “present time” argument, which reads “we are in tune with the contemporary world,” is used to legitimise an aesthetics characterised by regression and deliberate silliness. Favouring Jeff Koons—or, even more so, Paul McCarthy—over Cycladic Art or French Impressionism has been a way for Joannou to stand out from dynasties of Greek collectors: the Goulandris, the Niarchos, the Onassis, and even Stelios Joannou, Dakis Joannou’s own father, who never really supported an art that “engages in issues relating to daily life and the experience of the real world.” Rather than attaching his name to North American contemporary artists, Stelios Joannou funded the Stelios Joannou School for Research in Classical and Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford. By adopting an apparently philistine public *persona* Dakis Joannou has become one of the most influential forces of the contemporary art world, unquestionably contributing to shaping the artistic canon of the last three decades.

*François Pinault: standing between Paul McCarthy and “things assez mystique, big white paintings”*

Born in 1936, François Pinault is also one of the most powerful actors of the contemporary art world. Although he has been collecting art since the late 1970s, he only became a major figure in the field in the 1990s, when he bought a Mondrian for more than $2,000,000. This allowed him to access the very small circle of collectors able to spend more than a

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>+ FIG. 7 Catalogue of the exhibition *Monument to Now: The Dakis Joannou Collection*, 2004.</figcaption></figure>
million on a single artwork. At the same time, he acquired the auction house Christie's and gained an international aura. He notoriously paid $8,000,000 for Robert Rauschenberg's *Rebus* before selling it to MoMA for about $25,000,000 a decade later.

In exhibition catalogues as well as in the general press, François Pinault has been portrayed as a contemplative aesthetee. This has become a commonplace after the Pinault Foundation opened in 2006 in Venice, but it actually started long before. In 1998, when Pinault purchased Christie's, one could read in the French weekly magazine *L'Express* that the "richest man in France," as the title of one article suggested, "can spend hours contemplating his immense Miró."<fnref n="22" /> Journalist Jackie Wullschläger wrote in 2011 in *The Financial Times* that Pinault's purchase of Mondrian's *Tableau Losangique II* "announced the rigorous, cerebral nature of his taste."<fnref n="23" /> In the catalogue of the inaugural exhibition of the Pinault Foundation in 2006, the collector comments on this episode, noting that he had been seized by "the dire straits underlined by the intensity of the lines that delimitated [the painting's] plane."<fnref n="24" /> In the same catalogue, Pinault evokes Robert Ryman's "minimalist world where the spirit, free from the insignificance of details, enters in communion with the essence of the existence."<fnref n="25" /> Minimalist theoretician Donald Judd's Foundation in Marfa, Texas, is referred to as a "cathedral of light."<fnref n="26" /> This vocabulary does not express the theoretical views of the artist. What these expressions have in common is that they belong to the mystical rather than the aesthetic. In her 2008 coffee-table book on private collectors, journalist Judith Benhamou-Huet singles out a similar statement by Pinault: "My taste for the minimal pieces such as Carl Andre or Donald Judd certainly has to do, at un unconscious level, with a quest for spirituality. Rothko created a type of meditative painting, gravitating toward contemplation and quietness: only the bare essentials should be kept" ("Mon goût pour les pièces minimales comme celles de Carl Andre ou de Donald Judd est sans doute, inconsciemment, de l'ordre d'une quête de spiritualité. Rothko a créé une peinture du recueillement, de la méditation. Cela tend vers cette idée qu'il faudrait seulement garder l'essentiel").<fnref n="27" /> In 2011, in an interview with *The Financial Times*, Pinault again referred

to that mystical dimension, as the journalist recalls: "'My own taste', Pinault says suddenly, as our main courses appear, 'is minimalism—Donald Judd, Robert Ryman, things rather mystique, big white paintings.'"<fnref n="28" /> What appears in both the museum-produced literature and catalogues, and the museum- or exhibition-centred para-literature of the print media is mirrored and reinforced by the curatorial choices visible in the 2006 Venice inaugural exhibition.

In 2006, the Pinault Collection was shown to the public for the first time. It was displayed in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, an eighteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal recently acquired by Pinault and renovated by renowned architect Tadao Ando. Titled *Where Are We Going?*, this inaugural exhibition articulated two different types of aesthetics and in so doing inscribed the art of the decade within the history of modern art. The exhibition title refers equally (if not more) to Paul Gauguin's 1897 large oil on canvas *D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?*, owned by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as it does to Damien Hirst's skeletons in glass cabinets from 2000–2004 titled *Where Are We Going? Where Do We Come From? Is There A Reason?*, owned by Pinault and displayed in the exhibition. As an echo within an echo, an anecdote concerning the first acquisition—a *passage obligé*, a purple patch in the discourse on private collectors—is mentioned in the catalogue: a small oil on canvas by French Nabi painter and disciple of Gauguin, Paul Sérusier (*Cour de ferme en Bretagne*, 1891). The figure of the collector is thus constructed as both *modern* and *contemporary*. The *modern pieces* in the inaugural exhibition are those that are aesthetically sober and refined—abstract painting from the 1950s, minimalist sculpture from the 1960s, and Italian Arte Povera. They provide the symbolic legitimisation of the entirety of the collection.

In the discourses as well as in the curating of Pinault's private museum, a modern canon and an aesthetic norm are tacitly and mutually strengthened: silence and starkness, contemplation and mystique, refuge from the hustle and bustle of the world. The *autonomy* of the arts is the cornerstone of what is usually seen as artistic modernity. Two examples will illustrate my point about the conceptions and categorisations of the modern. In 1974, German literary theoretician Peter Bürger

<footnote n="22">²² Vincent Nouzille, Georges Dupuy, and Corinne Scemama, “François Pinault: enquête sur l’homme le plus riche de France,” *L’Express*, no. 2475, 10 December 1998, <www.lexpress.fr/informations/enquete-sur-l-homme-le-plus-riche-de-france_631479.html>.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Jackie Wullschläger, “Art Has Become My Religion,” *Financial Times* (weekend supplement—Life & Arts), 9 April 2011, 3, <www.ft.com/content/a11fe696-6165-11e0-a315-00144feab49a>.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Alison Gingeras, ed., *Where Are We Going? Un Choix d'œuvres de la collection Pinault*, exhibition catalogue, 30 April–1 October 2006, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Lausanne, Skira, 2006, 15 (translation mine).</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Gingeras, *Where Are We Going?*, 15.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Gingeras, *Where Are We Going?*, 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Judith Benhamou-Huet, *Global Collectors*, Paris, Cinq Sens-Phébus, 2008, 332, 334 (translation mine).</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Wullschläger, “Art Has Become My Religion,” 3.</footnote>
opposed both the avant-garde and modernism: modern art ide-
ology can be assimilated to the contemplation of an art separat-
ed from life, whereas the logic of the avant-garde is, according
to Bürger, to return to this separation and bridge it to reinstall
art within life. Bürger uses the oppositional pair contempla-
tion/action to apprehend art history. In the mid-1990s, French
sociologist Nathalie Heinich distinguished between what she
termed three “genres”<fnref n="29" /> of art: classical, modern, and contem-
porary. In her view, classical art would rely on *mimesis* and on
the imitation of the exterior world while modern art would
enhance the interior vision of the artist. Modern art also values
authenticity and sincerity whereas contemporary art would
welcome inauthenticity as a strategy and base itself on the sys-
tematic transgression of pre-established norms. From that per-
spective, the exhibition *Where Are We Going?* articulates *modern* and *contemporary* art or, rather, *modern* and *avant-garde* art of the
present day. More precisely, it uses the modern to legitimise
the contemporary, the meditative to legitimise the entertain-
ing or the edgy.

After presenting himself as an amateur shaped by a mod-
ernist aesthetics of starkness, Pinault declares in the catalogue
that “on the contrary, the joyful and lively world of Jeff Koons
fascinated [him].”<fnref n="30" /> In the wake of that exhibition, the press
would soon repeat and disseminate his words. In the French
newspaper *Le Figaro*, one could read in 2009 that Pinault’s
“taste for austerity, starkness, and the essential doesn’t keep
him from exploring pop art.”<fnref n="31" /> The austere and meditative im-
pulse underlined in the museum’s official discourse is asserted
from the outset of the inaugural 2006 exhibition. In the ma-
jestic atrium of Palazzo Grassi, the “prologue”—according to
the catalogue’s terminology—paired Jeff Koons’ monumental
*Hanging Heart* (1999) with the even more monumental 37th
*Piece of Work* (1969–1981) by Carl Andre, and with works by the
younger artists Urs Fisher and Piotr Uklański.

Andre's piece is made up of one thousand two hundred
and ninety-six square metal plates of aluminium, copper, steel,
magnesium, lead, and zinc arranged in a grid formation. The
total surface reaches one hundred and twenty square meters.
Pinault had acquired the piece in 2005 for $7,000,000. The
golden legend of Pinault has it that “after half an hour of silent

viewing, Pinault said, ‘I have no choice’ and paid $7m for it.”<fnref n="32" />
But Carl Andre’s display is not only about contemplation and
quietness. With its simplicity and its austerity, this artwork
endorses a function of symbolic legitimisation for more risky
artistic choices, such as those made by Koons, Fischer, and
Uklański. This legitimisation process occurred at two lev-
els throughout the exhibition. The emphatic interest in the
contemporary world in sections 1 (“Images of Modern Life”)
and 4 (“The Pop Today”) was legitimised firstly by the history
of contemporary art and its theoretical concerns in section 2
(“Material as Metaphor”) and secondly by the mystique of art
in section 3 (“The Minimalist Impulse”), a mystique exem-
plified by such figures as Mark Rothko, Brice Marden, Robert
Ryman, Agnes Martin, and Donald Judd.

The evolution of what has been shown to the public from
the Pinault Collection is eloquent in that regard. From 2006
to the mid-2010s, there was a noteworthy move from ab-
stract and minimal art to funny neo-pop art and grotesque,
abject, and regressive aesthetics,<fnref n="33" /> as if the legitimisation of
Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst had first to be made through
the modernist canon—abstraction, silence, minimalism. This
modernist canon was foregrounded, constituting up to half
of the artworks of the inaugural exhibition, and, as discussed
above, the literature accompanying the exhibition underlined
this specific aesthetics. Once Pinault had established himself
as a major and respectful collector through his engagement
with the modernist canon, he was able to advertise himself
as the first collector of his time to acquire the art produced
at the very moment of his collecting. With minimalism or ab-
stract painting from the 1950s, he would never have been
able to compete with historical museums of modern art such
as MoMA or Tate Modern. The staging of this meditative aes-
thetics, apart from testifying to the “intimate passions”<fnref n="34" /> of the
collector, therefore contributes to legitimising a radically dif-
ferent type of art, that is, as in Dakis Joannou’s case, the “art of
our time.” Moreover, creating an arena for very contemporary
artists like Koons or the YBA group opens avenues for anoth-
er narrative, that of the art of your own time period, while ab-
stract painting and minimal art simply pander to your taste and
embrace an already-written narrative of art history. A collector

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Nathalie Heinich, “Pour en finir avec la querelle de l’art contemporain,” *Le Débat*, no. 104, 1999, 108.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Gingeras, *Where Are We Going?*, 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Véronique Prat, “Coup double à Venise,” *Le Figaro*, no. 20164, 29 May 2009, <MAG60, nouveau.europresse.com/Link/PSLT_1/news%c2%b720090529%c2%b7LF%c2%b712016405601> (translation mine).</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Wüllschläger, “Art Has Become My Religion,” 3. The journalist recounts the anecdote as it was remembered by art consultant Philippe Segalot through whom Pinault bought the piece.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ See Labar, *La Gloire de la bêtise*.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Prat, “Coup double à Venise” (translation mine).</footnote>
of minimal or abstract art in the 2000s is no longer a pioneer,
nor is he a “tastemaker.”<fnref n="35" /> However, François Pinault, Dakis
Joannou, and Eli Broad are among the most influential taste-
maker-collectors of the last two decades.

The specific feature of such private collections shown in private museums is their aesthetic orientation: artworks are either neo-pop, smooth, glamorous, and child-appealing, as exemplified by Jeff Koons—for instance, each of the collectors under scrutiny in this chapter owns a version of Koons' *Balloon Dog*—, or else they are trashy, vulgar, grotesque, regressive, gratuitously provocative, and sometimes aggressively stupid. The latter would aptly qualify artists such as Paul McCarthy, Urs Fischer, Maurizio Cattelan, or Jake and Dinos Chapman.

From the discussion above we gather that any critical dis-
course on contemporary art at some point leads to engaging
with the discourses embedded in the curatorial display of the
collection and in its public image more than with the textu-
al production itself. Besides textual issues there is also the
broader and mostly visual *ordre du discours*—to borrow loosely
from Michel Foucault’s concept—which calls for reappraisal.

One way of exploring this implication is to look at the role of
the promotional iconography of the Pinault Collection exhibitions
touring outside of his own private museums in Venice. The poster
and catalogue cover of the exhibition *Qui a peur des artistes? Une*

* sélection d'œuvres de la François Pinault Foundation* held in Dinard, France, in 2009 featured Maurizio Cattelan's *La nona ora*, a life-size realistic sculpture of Pope John Paul II crushed by a meteorite (see Fig. 8). The poster and catalogue cover for the exhibition "L'art à l'épreuve du monde" held in Dunkerque, France, in 2013 showed Paul McCarthy's *Bear and Rabbit on a Rock*, a sculpture of a bear and a rabbit, both human-sized, joyfully copulating on a rock. Such artworks have become emblematic of the Pinault Collection and have shaped the image of the collector—as well as that of the art of the present day.

*Eli Broad: “Our audience is more diverse and younger than the typical museum-going audience”*

A similar reasoning can be applied to The Broad in Los
Angeles. Between 2005 and 2010, Eli Broad appeared each
year among the top ten of the *Art Review 100 Power List*, which
names the most influential people in the contemporary art
world. A figure of the Los Angeles art scene for decades, he
chaired the board of MOCA when it was founded in 1979,
then the first museum dedicated exclusively to contempo-
rary art. In 1984, he and his wife Edythe founded The Broad
Art Foundation, with the intention of both making their art
collection accessible to a general audience and developing a
strategy of important loans to numerous exhibitions. In 2003,
the foundation financed the renovation of the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art (LACMA) and in 2008, the creation of
a new building bearing the name of the collectors, alongside
an acquisition fund for contemporary art. Through the Broad
Art Foundation, Eli Broad finances several museums bear-
ing his name, such as the Broad Art Centre at the University
of California in Los Angeles and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art
Museum at Michigan State University. However, these are not
private museums: they do not belong to Eli and Edythe Broad.
They are first and foremost showcases of philanthropy. But the
ambition of the new museum simply named The Broad, inau-
gurated in Los Angeles in 2015, is beyond the intimate and the
philanthropic. Even though Eli Broad claims that “Edythe and
I built The Broad to live on long past our lifetimes,” he also de-
clares that they “are proud that The Broad is really reinventing
the American Museum.”<fnref n="36" /> As with Dakis Joannou and François

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>♦ FIG. 8 Catalogue of the exhibition *Qui a peur des artistes? Une sélection d'œuvres de la François Pinault Foundation* (Paris: Skira, 2009), featuring Maurizio Cattelan's *La nona ora*, 1999.</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Philippe Dagen, *L'Art dans le monde de 1960 à nos jours*, Paris, Hazan, 2012, 22.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Bechtler and Imhof, *The Private Museum*, 37.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Bechtler and Imhof, *The Private Museum*, 38.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>♦ FIG. 9 View of The Broad's inaugural exhibition in 2016, with Jeff Koons' *Tulips*.</figcaption></figure>

Pinault, it is all about aligning oneself with one's own time. Eli and Edythe Broad declare: “We are especially pleased that our audience is more diverse and younger than the typical museum-going audience.”³⁷ But as a businessman, the philanthropist Broad knows better than anyone that wagering on youth is always a successful commercial bet.

When it opened, The Broad's inaugural exhibition was a kind of digest of the art of the previous half-century, with historical pieces by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and John Baldessari. In adding German canonical figures such as Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer, The Broad endeavoured to position itself as comprising the hegemonic West-Coast, if not comprehensively North-American, narrative of contemporary art. But the rooms displaying these historical contemporary artists were mostly peripherical on the map of the museum: their overt function was to set the scene, establish filiations, and make clear the spirit of the Broad collection. What imposes itself to visitors, in the vast space on the third floor where they are taken by the escalator, is Jeff Koons's shiny bunch of

*Tulips*. Welcoming visitors with Jeff Koons is far from fortuitous; there is a staircase but visitors are expected to take the escalator that leads them directly to *Tulips* (see Fig. 9). Koons, a core artist in Joannou's and Pinault's collections, is also a key artist in The Broad. He even became an emblem of the Broad Art Foundation itself.

On the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation's website, three thumbnails allow visitors to discover different philanthropic projects funded by The Broad: “education” is graphically associated with a school bus, “science” with a microscope, and “the arts” with a rabbit. The latter is actually the silhouette of Jeff Koons' iconic work *Rabbit* (1986), a steel cast of an inflatable rabbit eating a carrot and evoking without ambiguity *Playboy* magazine's mascot. Since its appearance in MoMA's 1990 show “High and Low. Modern Art and Popular Culture,” *Rabbit* has become a flagship work of art, a status solidified by its reuse during Macy's Thanksgiving parade in New York in 2007, two years before Tate Modern installed that same inflatable giant rabbit in Covent Garden on the occasion of the exhibition *Pop Life! Art in a Material Culture*. By choosing *Rabbit* to guide the
visitor to the arts section on the website, Eli Broad makes that piece the first representative of international contemporary art. When it was sold for $91,000,000 at Christie's in 2019, the same *Rabbit*—the sculpture is an edition of three originals—turned Jeff Koons into the most expensive artist alive.

When we look closely at the funds used to publicise the collection, organise travelling exhibitions, set up collaborations with international curators, and ensure the scientific endorsement of well-known art historians contributing to catalogues, we are facing the production and the marketing of a new canon, as well as the construction of a narrative of contemporary art meant to become hegemonic. By leaving conceptual art, video art, and performance art from the 1960s onward aside, The Broad's inaugural exhibition generated a very peculiar narrative of contemporary art history, one whose ethical-aesthetic horizon might well be playfulness and entertainment. By presenting funny and sometimes vaguely critical neo-pop artworks, it diverts the audience's attention from more committed artistic practices that challenge the ideology of success and the economic model allowing for such private wealth and, as a result, such private collections.

The Broad, the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, and the Pinault Collection in Venice play on their ambiguous status: they are museums and they are not. Especially in Pinault's and Joannou's cases, the foundation is distinct from the art collection. But the foundation serves the collection and, eventually, it also serves the public image of the collector, who has become one of the authors of the main narrative of contemporary art history. Joannou, Pinault, and Broad are no longer simply tastemakers for collectors following their lead—other, less well-off collectors imitating these three trend makers—but are active contributors in establishing the aesthetic (if not ethical-aesthetic) norms of the time.

As I have written elsewhere:

> collectors promoting their own collections of the most recent art will no longer be mere discoverers or precursors, according to a dynamic close to the “temporal laws of the avant-garde,” historicity, and retroaction, as formulated by art historian Thierry de Duve. They will become—and are already in the

> process of becoming—the actors of the institutionalisation of a specific form of contemporary creation in the present time. The funding of their private museums allows these giga collectors to rewrite the history of contemporary art while producing the very criteria of the canon, thus avoiding the traditional step of rejection that historically used to precede the canonisation of the avant-garde.<fnref n="38" />

As I have argued in this chapter, the seemingly secondary literature, incidental literature, grey literature, when combined with the objects it refers to—that is, the artworks it mediates for other lesser collectors or the public at large—contributes to shaping a specific figure of the collector. The latter is supposedly in tune with his time and capable of derision; he contributes to the (re)writing of the art historical canon by substituting for public contemporary art museal collections. This chapter also endeavours to provide an insight into the power of these collectors in the art world as unchallenged and unchallenging. They can set trends; they can make or break artistic careers; they fund and allow for museum retrospectives. For instance, major works in the Centre Pompidou's retrospective of Jeff Koons in 2014 were loaned by Pinault. Even though the three trend-maker collectors discussed here present artworks that might be deemed critical both of the society of spectacle and of global capitalism, it all ends in a show, in a fancy building, in a grotesque and/or fun ambiance. Criticism is neutralised by the commodification of the artworks as well as by the apparatus surrounding them, mainly the system of their display and exhibition. If a billionaire can favour artworks that address the very dysfunctions of the system that makes these collectors what they are, then the efficiency of the critique has somehow been digested and returned to the sender.

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Morgan Labar, “L’Ambition des musées privés au XXIᵉ siècle: The Broad et la Collection Pinault,”</footnote>

<footnote>Histoire de l'art, nos. 84-85 “Musées/ Musée,” 2020, 49 (translation mine), 157-158.</footnote>
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Bürger, Peter, *Théorie de l'avant-garde*, 1974, translated by Jean-Pierre Cometti, Paris, Questions théoriques, 2013.

Cocteau, Jean, *Poésie critique*, t. 2, Paris, Gallimard, 1960.

Coplans, John, “The New Painting of Common Objects,” *Pop Art: A Critical History*, edited by Steven Henry Madoff, Berkeley, U California P, 1997, 43–46.

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*The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art Website*, deste.gr/, accessed 10 Dec. 2020.

Foucault, Michel, *L'Ordre du discours*, Paris, Gallimard, 1971.

Gingeras, Alison, ed., *Where Are We Going? Un Choix d'œuvres de la collection Pinault*, exhibition catalogue, 30 April–1 October 2006, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Lausanne, Skira, 2006.

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—, “L’Ambition des musées privés au XXIe siècle: The Broad et la Collection Pinault,” *Histoire de l’art*, nos. 84–85 “Musées/Musée,” 2020, 155–168.

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—, and Pascaline Costa, *L'Artiste, l'institution, le marché*, Paris, Flammarion, 1992.

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<figure><img src="image_15.png" /></figure>