Ulterior motif in Frank Gehry-designed LVMH museum in Paris

A REMARKABLE building is about to open on the outskirts of Paris, but what will LVMH put inside?

Detail from John Bartley’s Looking out (2014). From the exhibition the Five Decades of Watters Gallery exhibition at SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney.

IN two days, a remarkable new museum building will open in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris: the Fondation Louis Vuitton, designed by Frank Gehry. Though in a general way reminiscent of his museum at Bilbao, with its flexible metal skin, this building is conceived in sails of glass and, in one of the most striking photographs that have been published, appears to open out in space over a vast ornamental pool of water.

Gehry is apparently very sensitive to criticisms that extravagant architectural fantasies like this upstage the art they are meant to contain. Here he has taken care, we are told, to provide plain white exhibition spaces inside, so that work can be shown without distracting design elements intruding on the viewer’s attention; but it is hard to see how anything inside could match the impression made by the exterior.

In a general way, Gehry’s new museum is merely an especially prominent example of what has become an international phenomenon: the contemporary art museum as a kind of secular cathedral. And as contemporary art has been increasingly emptied of meaning and turned into a signifier of innovation or creativity, today’s art museums aim to embody analogous values.

The cult of novelty and creativity has arisen as a utopian alternative to the economic realities of routine and productivity; the art museum is similarly deliberately anti-functionalist, fanciful, illusory, as an escape from the regimentation represented by office architecture. Even Federation Square in Melbourne represents a kind of clumsy anti-functionalism, signalling its role as a playpen for the urban masses.

But the Fondation Louis Vuitton is a particularly interesting case. It is, ultimately, an enormously expensive promotional investment by the LVMH corporation, intended to associate the luxury products it sells not only with the name of one of the most famous architects in the world today but with the disembodied creativity mystique of contemporary art.

Such a hugely costly undertaking has been made possible, but also necessary, by the corporation’s commercial success. Louis Vuitton, a maker of trunks and suitcases from the mid-19th century, expanded into fashion products and in 1987 merged with Moet Hennessy, itself the product of a merger in 1971 between well-known brands of champagne and cognac respectively. Since 1988, the group has been controlled by Bernard Arnault through Christian Dior, a company he had taken over earlier.

Under Arnault’s leadership, the combined group has grown relentlessly, acquiring an extensive portfolio of luxury brands, including additional champagne labels (Veuve Clicquot and Krug), fashion and perfume (Fendi, Givenchy, Guerlain), jewellery and watches (Bulgari, TAG Heuer, De Beers); it has just withdrawn from an attempt to take over Hermes. In Australia, LVMH has even bought RM Williams.

The value of these brands to a conglomerate such as the one built by Arnault is that they all have the prestige that ultimately comes with high-quality, low-volume artisanal production in countries with long traditions of fine craftsmanship. Consumers feel purchasing such brands confers status, and in the case of the newly rich validates their social ascensions.

There is notably an immense amount of money to be made in selling these products to the new rich of the Middle East and Asia, whose materialism and appetite for ostentation know even fewer bounds of good taste than we see among their equivalents in the West. But there is a catch: when a luxury brand is overproduced and over-marketed it becomes commoditised, its elite aura evaporates, and it is reduced to a very expensive consumer product.

And when enough of the vulgar new rich in these developing markets have purchased such brands, their credibility is seriously compromised among their original customers. By a kind of osmosis, the unappealing qualities of this new class of consumers begin to leach across into the product. At worst, the formerly glamorous product can begin to feel crass.

One response to this, in Europe, has been to reaffirm the craft processes and artisanal skill that ultimately differentiates these products from mass-produced commodities. To this end, LVMH has held open workshop days, allowing the public to visit and, as it were, confirm for themselves that the products are indeed made by traditional craft processes and that the corporation is contributing to the conservation of a precious patrimony of artisanal skills.

The other response is to associate the corporation, or its various brands, with art and culture. In Rome, Fendi is sponsoring the restoration of the Trevi Fountain. In Australia, Moet et Chandon sponsored a contemporary art exhibition and award in the late 1980s and 90s, and more recently Bulgari has sponsored a painting prize at the Art Gallery of NSW.

The new museum in Paris, however, is the biggest, most ambitious promotional undertaking of all. The aim is nothing less than to establish a new cultural and tourist destination that will attract tens of thousands of visitors a year, all of whom will be impressed by the scale and splendour of the building and the economic power of the corporation, but above all associate it with the ineffably prestigious and quasi-spiritual aura of artistic creation.

Just as American plutocrats a century ago morally laundered their profits by investing them in cultural institutions, a corporation such as LVMH converts the huge profits gained from selling its products to an unglamorous market of undiscriminating brand fetishisers into a temple of beauty, a breathtaking structure and intended to house — but what exactly? Among the artists mentioned in advance publicity are the dismal Gilbert & ­George and Jeff Koons. This is the tawdry ­reality, and above all the irony — that the contemporary art for which the edifice is intended has entirely lost touch with the skilled artisanal tradition that used to underpin the quality of fine art as well as fine craftsmanship.

And contemporary art also has lost touch with the public of collectors that used to be its principal market. More recently the private market, ramped up by inflated prices, has been dominated by investors.

The public galleries meanwhile, while continuing to promote the now conventional line that contemporary art is controversial and challenging, have increasingly treated large-scale contemporary exhibitions as mass consumer experiences, attaching more importance to surprise and novelty, and audience numbers, than to depth of engagement and seriousness.

FAR from both these current faces of contemporary culture, the half-century survey of Watters Gallery at SH Ervin takes us back to a world in which art could be both difficult and engaging, in which relations between gallery, artist and audience were close and personal, and in which money played a relatively minor role, especially by today’s standards.

Since its earliest years, Watters has supported artists who have never made any money for it, out of conviction and loyalty. Only a handful made an appreciable profit for the gallery, and much of that went to keeping the doors open.

Frank Watters and his partners Geoffrey and Alex Legge are not only art dealers but true collectors in the sense that they love art and take pleasure in supporting artists. One of my favourite stories about Watters concerns a customer who, having just written the cheque for a fairly expensive work, asked whether it would at least prove a good investment. “Oh no,” Watters said, laughing, “of course not.”

Today it would be hard even to make a joke of this nature, especially when the investor-collector pays very high prices that can be justified only by faith in the market, not by the intrinsic quality of the work. Perversely, the high prices also mean that work below a certain cost is not even considered investment-grade, so many talented young artists, unless they can be hyped to a certain price point, are barely collectable.

What is perhaps most attractive about the Watters show is the sense that these pictures were not conceived as slick commercial products. Variable as they are in quality and in style, each of them arises from a sense of an authentic way of working rather than from a tactical attempt to create a commodity.

Some styles, and artists, have not aged as well as others. It is interesting to see that Tony Tuckson has stood up better than any of the other abstractionists. Overall, the most outstanding figure is Robert Klippel, but sculpture in general makes a good showing.

The hanging is not bad, given the disparate nature of the work, but it might have been a lot more interesting to present the exhibition chronologically, with supporting photographic material to give an idea of the gallery, the staff, the exhibitions, and perhaps especially of the performance events and installations that were important in the early decades.

Watters Gallery was a focus for much unconventional and experimental work in the later 1960s and the 70s, when there were not many other venues for such artists in Sydney, and the present exhibition gives a rather staid and limited view of the gallery’s character. Some photographic montages of these ephemeral events — concerts, performances, readings and meetings — would have reminded viewers of a role that has tended to be forgotten with the rise of alternative exhibition and performance spaces from the 80s onwards.

The pictures themselves could then have been presented in clusters according to decades, which would have conveyed a more vivid sense of evolving style and taste, for the greatest appeal of many of these works is as a stage in a process, rather than as a finished whole. In hindsight, in fact, the hard-edge abstractionists of the late 60s were the last who could imagine — however fallaciously — that their work represented an end point and a consummation.

These painters who came after lived in an age of the tentative and the provisional; and this is why their work is most attractive when seen grouped in the crowded display of a private collection, where one can appreciate above all the sense of energy and curiosity, even in works that remain essays rather than definitive statements.

Nowhere do they make a more convincing impression, in fact, than in Watters’s own flat, high above the gallery — which was itself reproduced in the 2011 exhibition Frank’s Flat at Maitland Regional Art Gallery.

Fondation Louis Vuitton

Opens Sunday, Paris.

Five Decades at Watters Gallery

SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney. Until November 2.