inault’s IPO for the Palazzo Grassi marks without contest the apothe-osis of relations between the luxury industry and contemporary art. As is often the case with apotheosis, this moment may also signal the beginning of the end of this relation. After ten years of happiness, the honeymoon between art works and fashion money is already over. Certainly, art and fashion are an old couple. “Things have been worse,” you’ll say. Around Cocteau, the emblematic figure of their union, Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel found themselves at home with Anna de Noailles or Louise de Vilmorin. That’s a fact. But it’s also a fact that art and fashion are an old couple who have already separated and have no reason to do so again. The first divorce between art and fashion was in the 60s. Until the 50s, about, fashion designers and artists were taking orders from the same people and had the same interests. Rich patrons, enlightened aesthetics, and protectors of art enjoyed dreaming that their good taste could incarnate indifferently in paintings or sculpture, dresses, furniture or houses. There were theater costumes designed for avant-garde plays the way avant-garde motifs fi gured on fabrics, without contradiction. But starting in the 60s, these rich patrons, if they continued to be the principal support of art, which they continue to be today, then they also stopped being the essential suppliers of funds for fashion. In fact it was at this time that high fashion realized it had industrial potential. Pierre Cardin, using new fabrication techniques and a vast system of franchises that remain unsurpassed today, was one of the essential initia- tors of this revolution. The consumer’s money mine, yours was progressively substituted for that of the patron, and fashion, becoming the bridge head of prêt-à-porter, could for the first time free itself from the guardianship of art. The modern union of art and fashion that we are supposed to celebrate as if it had always existed is in reality a recent phenomenon, which even follows in fact other, circumstantial unions, each of which lasted about a dozen years. The fi rst of these unions was that of fashion and the high and mighty. Because the young fashion industry was called upon to seduce a public demanding that from then on it be a rare and inexpensive prod-uct, an auratic product and at the same time a product for large-scale consummation, it had no other choice than to in turn call upon it’s former financial supporters to become the models who would seduce the new public at large. Thus the public at large found itself in ecstasy before the outfits of Jackie Kennedy in the still young Jour de France.The second of these unions was that of fashion and cinema. May 68 cruelly obliged the former crowned heads to get down off their pedestals. At a time when Giscard played the accordion and had breakfast with street sweepers, the stars of cinema came along to occupy the empty place of dreams. Grace Kelly, at the juncture of two worlds, incarnates the ideal icon of these years. But in the 80s, probably the fault of the massive arrival of television, cinema stars gave way in their turn to the mermaids of normality. Catherine Deneuve doing commercials for Woolite is no divinity. Now seduced by the cult of the body, fashion got married to the top models. Here it is probably Jane Fonda who takes the place of Grace Kelly, again at the frontier of two universes. But the extraterrestrials at the podiums were used up as were the “normal” people or the cinema stars. In the 90s, most of them had children and confi ded their years of anorexia to Cosmo. Fashion needed fresh fl esh. At this point contemporary art makes its big comeback in the world of glamour. The 90s are also the years of the crisis in contemporary art. Every cloud has a silver lining, as the saying goes, this crisis permitted the reinstallation of a “distinction”, in the Bourdieusian sense, in the heart of a postmodern society that was cruelly lacking distinction of any kind. After the jet-set gold, after the disincarnated fl esh of the stars, after the glacial perfection of models, contemporary art, mysterious practice partaking of all of them, comprised of a small elect who understand each other, on the margins of the majority of reactionary and unimaginative people, became the new auratic practice to which the luxury industry had the intelligence to unite its destiny in the 90s, with the success we know about. Jeff Koonsmarrying and then divorcing Cicciolina fi gures the gesture by which the world of contemporary art raised itself up to an auratic industry as it extracted itself from the world of fl esh. Vanessa Beecroft, making her work from the exhaustion of models, repeats it.
But ten years has already passed since this gesture and clear signs indicate that it will soon betime to change partners once again. Contemporary art has not succeeded in maintaining its allure any better than the others, in fact. It’s become popular, alas. And it’s fi rst of all by fi guring in the feminine press that women have finally come to take it for granted, so much so that today a magazine like ELLE can serenely envision confi ding it’s 50th anniversary issue to 50 contemporary artists. But it’s still a generation of young curators, probably traumatized by the contemporary art crisis, who have not ceased
demonstrating to the public that contemporary art will please them at the price of scenographies more or less narrative and “cool”. Contemporary art is not only à la mode. Art has become an article of fashion in itself, like the art magazines in which we fi nd this now demonstrated, magazines, such as Frog, that borrow their formats, their codes and their photographs “hype” from fashion magazines. The “distinction” by which the fashion industry lives is no longer operative. The marriage of fashion and art stops making sense too. This is bad news for the art market, but maybe it’s good news for art. To be continued. Today’s new hero is called Johnny Knoxville in any case, not Maurizio Cattelan. He amuses himself by putting his life in danger for laughs, for nothing, much the same way, fi nally, as performers in the 70s. But he has nothing to do, for all that, with the world of contemporary art. In fact, death is the last luxury that white- collar workers can not offer themselves. But the luxury industry knows that they would like to offer themselves the clothes that the gladiator is wearing, he who is about to die and who salutes you.
MARK ALIZART, Paris

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