The Pinault Collection’s ‘The world as it goes’ opens at the Bourse de Commerce

Almost certainly anyone reading this article will have acquired a luxury item produced in the Kering Group. A unique exhibition, ‘The world as it goes’, allows one to discover how its founder spent his profits. It turns out very wisely.

Le monde comme il va, or The world as it goes, which opens Wednesday at the Bourse de Commerce, is entirely culled from the Pinault Collection, gathered by billionaire François Pinault. It is an atypical ensemble of works by artists attempting to express their reaction to a sometimes violently changing world, and a testament to the unerring eye of this French businessman.
 
The world as it goes is also often a highly politicized commentary on a rapidly changing world, and humankind’s varying reaction to change. A quote from Voltaire is prominently displayed: “Unaccountable mortals! How can you unite so much baseness and so much grandeur, so many virtues and so many vices?”

François Pinault began buying art even before he bought his first luxury label. Today, Kering, the quoted company controlled by his family and managed by his son François-Henri, is an empire that includes such luminous brands as Gucci, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and Alexander McQueen.
 
And there are elements of luxury within this exhibition, including a supercar – Damaged Ferrari Dino – though smashed in an auto wreck, and positioned on a white plinth by artist Bertrand Lavier. A cataclysmic vision, in a section entitled Making ruins, where the idea of destruction becomes a way of opposing authority.

Many of the works on display are luxury because of their sheer price. Like a brilliant 10-foot-tall steel Balloon Dog in magenta by Jeff Koons, a similar work in orange sold for $58.4 million in Christie’s New York, a world record for a sculpture. Koons’ artistic hound prowled inside a section named Art, love and politics, where a wall displayed Damien Hirst’s noted cabinet of curiosities entitled The Fragile Truth. A stainless and glass cabinet of medicine and pharmaceuticals which Damien Hirst created after discovering what an immense quantity of prescription drugs his granny took on a daily basis. To Hirst, science is our new modern religion, designed to stave off death for as long as possible.
 
Politics plays its part too, notably in a stack of crisp white shirts worn by plantation workers through which a steel shaft is driven. Entitled Untitled by Doris Salcedo it is a reference to two massacres carried out on banana plantations in her native Colombia.
 
Even the most beautiful of artworks have a sense of menace. Like Peter Doig’s stunning oil painting of man in white shorts seemingly dancing on water in a paradisical Trinidadian tropical beach. A figure which the artist stumbled upon, but who turned out on closer inspection to be killing a pelican.
 
The human comedy that is life seen with dark humor in the largest room, where the Chinese duo of Sun Yuan & Peng Yu dreamed up a series of life-size sculptures of very old jaded men – from retired officers, wizened writers or pilgrims to Mecca – who wander around on automated wheelchairs. All before two magnificent monumental black and white tapestries of a collage of artists and intellectuals by Polish artist Goshka Macuga, seen before the Darul Aman Palace and the Orangerie Museum in Kassel.
 

Throughout, artists question the very meaning of a painting, like Anne Imhof, a German known for her performance art pieces, the earliest of which featured two boxers righting in a table dance bar. Her still life is in fact a punching bag, hanging before a window overlooking Les Halles, and the Pompidou Centre. A reminder that while the center of the art world may have moved to New York after WW2, the city with the greatest collection of museums and art institutes remains Paris.
 
One of the most recent of which was built inside the Bourse de Commerce thanks to a 50-year lease from the City of Paris. Paid for entirely by 87-year-old Pinault senior and skillfully restored by Japanese master architect Tadao Ando, who added a massive inner circular wall to the central round trading room, where Korean artist Kimsooja has installed a perfectly reflective floor named To Breathe – Constellation.
 
Who since retiring in 2003 and handing over the reins of Kering to his son, has by all accounts adopted a hands off approach to his stable of fashion brands. Little wonder, his collection – so strikingly displayed in this exhibition – must keep him pretty busy.