From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Paris has been at the centre of the luxury trades for at least 300 years. ‘Fashion is to France what the gold mines of Peru are to Spain,’ Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the first minister of state to Louis XIV, declared in 1665. So it seemed appropriate that visitors to the first Art Basel Paris to take place in the newly renovated Grand Palais in October were greeted by a huge Louis Vuitton-branded sculpture by Frank Gehry placed high in the glass dome overlooking the galleries below.
Louis Vuitton was not the only luxury sponsor of the Swiss art fair. Miu Miu paid for the public art programme, including performances in the Palais d’Iena by Polish artist Goshka Macuga. Ruinart champagne stands were dotted around the fair and the Emergence section for young artists was sponsored by Galeries Lafayette. Guerlain, watchmaker Audemars Piguet and BMW were among the other sponsors. It was also the second iteration of Art Basel’s shop, selling pricey knick-knacks chosen by fashion influencer Sarah Andelman.
‘In Paris, fashion is betting on Art Basel’s big bang,’ trade publication The Business of Fashion reported, with a slew of dinners, artist talks and pop-up exhibitions organised by brands including Alaïa, Burberry and Dior timed to coincide with the fair. ‘In a period of waning interest in luxury, when maintaining relationships with the 1 per cent is paramount for brands, the art world represents an increasingly important window into the tastes of the world’s wealthiest culturati.’
The launch of Art Basel Paris also coincided with the opening of Sotheby’s new Paris headquarters at 83 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It is the former home of the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, which mounted the first retrospectives of Van Gogh, Matisse and Cézanne among others. A well-heeled queue developed outside the building to sample celebratory cocktails and towers of langoustines by celebrity food artist Laila Gohar.
Inside, they found a jewel-like art deco building that has been expensively restored. As well as an auction room and exhibition spaces, it features a ‘salon’ selling luxury goods and a wine-tasting cellar. At its inaugural ‘Surrealism and its Legacy’ sale, auctioneer Aurélie Vandevoorde hammered down a 1958 painting by Salvador Dalí, Rose Méditative, for €3.9m with fees – from a rostrum emblazoned with the name of fashion house Celine.
High-end fashion designers have long had a fascination with the art world, even before Yves St Laurent’s 1965 Mondrian dresses. But that has mushroomed in the past 20 years. At least 100 luxury businesses, not just fashion companies but also Rolls-Royce, Rolex and Porsche, now have arts programmes. These award prizes to artists, pay for mentorship schemes, commission projects and sponsor exhibitions. Some, including Prada, Cartier and Louis Vuitton, even have their own museums.
According to Federica Carlotto, a sociologist who heads a masters course in luxury business at Sotheby’s Institute, this happened as artisanal family businesses morphed into multinational giants. ‘From the 1990s onwards there was an extraordinary expansion of retail spaces, a massive release of products,’ she says. ‘Companies started investing in branding, capitalising to leverage their brands in order to sell more.’ Activities with the art world became a major way of burnishing a brand. Carlotto gives the example of Marc Jacobs, creative director of Louis Vuitton until 2013, who brought in artists to shake up its image – starting with Stephen Sprouse, who ‘defaced’ the bags with graffiti motifs.
‘Some of it was spontaneous. There is a natural synergy between designers and artists,’ Carlotto says. But some of it was also to do with the aspirations of wealthy company owners, of which Bernard Arnault – billionaire owner of LVMH and now an avid art collector – is one. ‘You have built an empire, you’re extremely wealthy, where do you go next?’ she says. ‘Cultural capital is valuable because it is difficult to accumulate. It takes effort and education and years to build up.’
The foyer of the new Sotheby’s space in Paris, which opened in October 2024. Photo: © Luc Castel
Not everyone saw the involvement of brands as a welcome development, and some projects were roundly derided. Few who saw it will forget Christian Jankowski’s full-sized speedboat and model of a 68m super-yacht, price €75m to order (€65m plus €10m for his artistic contribution) at Frieze in 2011 – despite the artist’s protestations that it was an extension of Duchamp’s readymades. In 2017, Jeff Koons’ Mona Lisa, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Starry Night handbags for Louis Vuitton, were seized on with appalled glee. But by then Koons’s groundbreaking work was two decades behind him. It was hard to know which was worse: the bags or the Gazing Ball paintings being marketed assiduously by his galleries.
Luxury brands’ involvement in the art world is not new. What is changing is the way art businesses are taking a much more strategic approach to ‘partnership’ arrangements.
Noah Horowitz became the chief executive of Art Basel in 2022. MCH, Art Basel’s Swiss parent company, was restructuring after losses caused by the pandemic and the demise of its once-market-leading watch fair Baselworld – MCH lost CHF72.2m (£60m) in 2020 and a further CHF17.3m (£14m) a year later. Horowitz says in the two years since, he has focused on ‘developing audiences, diversifying revenue streams and building a richer, deeper business and product offering’ – and working with brands is one way of doing that.
‘It’s a strategic priority for Art Basel to root in deeper with our partners at all levels,’ he says, but that now means ‘more than a logo on a wall and a certain number of VIP passes. If you look at fairs, auction houses, galleries and museums – the art business complex writ large is engaging with partners.’
Luxury is also high up on the auction houses’ agendas. Although Christie’s has been owned by luxury goods magnate François Pinault since 1998, it is Sotheby’s that is most enthusiastically embracing it. According to Josh Pullan, head of Sotheby’s global luxury division, the auction house has sponsorship deals with more than 30 brands including Porsche, Glenlivet and Omega as well as Celine. His division was set up in 2017, bringing together departments such as jewellery, wine and watches, to which new ventures – handbags, fashion, sneakers, game-worn baseball jerseys, dinosaurs and most recently trading cards – have been added.
Sotheby’s has also been expanding in other ways. In 2020 it introduced a ‘buy-now’ option for some luxury categories, allowing customers to buy immediately online. Real-world ‘boutiques’ followed next – ‘The Emporium’ in New York a year later; ‘Maison’ in Hong Kong; and ‘The Salon’ in the Bucherer store in Zurich and now Paris.
Buying stakes in classic car auctioneer RM Auctions and the upmarket Concierge property business has helped drive luxury revenues up to $2bn, a quarter of Sotheby’s turnover last year. This must be music to the ears of the Sotheby’s billionaire telecoms owner Patrick Drahi, who bought the auction house in June 2019 for $3.7bn, and has been looking to cut costs and increase revenue ever since.
The attraction of the luxury industry for art fairs and auction houses is obvious. It is much bigger and richer than the art market and spends vast sums on marketing. Bain, a management consultancy, estimates that the value of ‘personal luxury goods’ such as jewellery and watches was $362bn in 2023, more than five times bigger than the art market. The whole luxury industry, including cars, wine, jets, yachts and fine art, but not property, turned over $1.5trn. At nearly $20bn, Chanel’s revenues in 2023 were almost 50 per cent higher than Sotheby’s and Christie’s combined, and the number of people who are aware of the brand or buy its goods is certainly much larger. Art Basel’s 2.5m followers on Instagram – high by art world standards – is dwarfed by the fashion firm’s 60m.
Artists, too, are not as sniffy about brand collaborations as they used to be. Marcos Lutyens, a Los Angeles performance artist who has worked with Siemens and Samsung, says raising grant money for uncommercial projects like performances and films has become cumbersome. ‘Brands are sometimes quicker and bolder and give artists more freedom,’ he says. ‘The main issue is to avoid is any perception of selling out.’ This may explain why some less commercial artists such as Ryan Gander and Anthea Hamilton have been willing to work with firms such as Lavenham and Loewe.
Meanwhile, the benefits to brands are various: media coverage, access to high-net-worth individuals and association with innovation, according to Vadim Grigoryan. He is a Paris-based brand strategist and author of the forthcoming book Art Thinking. ‘High quality brands see themselves going beyond transactional value … [and] creating something that enriches our society,’ he says. Their motives are not altruistic, he adds. ‘They want to make sure that [their brand] isn’t degraded to a simple commodity.’
Cases of trainers on display for the ‘Ultimate Sneaker Collection’ online auction at Sotheby’s, which took place in July 2019. Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
Nevertheless, current developments are creating some unease. The art market has been here before, says art advisor Laura Paulson, former global chairman of fine art at Christie’s and later a director of Gagosian Art Advisory. More than a decade ago Heritage Auctions, a US-based auction house specialising in collectibles, created a niche for second-hand Hèrmes bags. ‘There was this idea among executives at Sotheby’s and Christie’s that if they ramped up luxury, they would lure new collectors in. These people would buy some earrings or a Birkin bag and next it would be a Picasso or a Rothko,’ Paulson says. ‘But it didn’t happen.’ She says interest in collecting is sparked where it always has been: at museums, galleries and, more recently, art fairs.
Art Basel’s latest collector report would appear to bear this out. It surveyed 3,660 serious art buyers who spent at least $10,000 a year on art and antiques in 2022 and 2023 and $5,000 in the first half of 2024 (although the average was much higher at more than $250,000). Only 15 per cent said they had bought luxury goods this year, falling to a low of two per cent for sports collectibles. ‘Luxury partnerships are aimed at consumers outside the art world – it’s all about companies gaining cultural capital and art-washing their brands,’ says the director of a major US-based artist foundation.
The irony is that art is the most luxurious of goods: functionally useless, expensive and often hard to understand, but freighted with intangible value. ‘No-one would mind about the commodification […] if art were not associated in Western culture with values such as beauty, morality, spirituality and authenticity,’ wrote Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, in a recent paper.
In 1884 the socialist designer William Morris denounced luxury as ‘the supplanter, the changeling of art’. But perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much. One hundred and forty years after his famous lecture, the lines between art and luxury may be blurring but the distinctions are still clear.
From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.