Viva La Revolution! The Guardian's loyal apparatchik, Amelie Gentleman demands that contemporary art collector, museum-builder, Frenchman, and "rapacious capitalist" Francois Pinault confess his artistic crimes.
Crimes number one, two, and three: pouring hundreds of millions of his own euros into to build a world-class collection--the likes of which doesn't exist anywhere else in France--and to turn a ruined factory--or, as she calls it, the "temple of France's workers"--into a Tadao Ando-designed museum.
She tries to scare France senseless by comparing Pinault to the mad king of London's art world, Charles Saatchi. But she's got almost all hyperbole, almost no data, and next to no quotes, except for a bitchy whispering "official," who's righter than he knows when he says most French contemporary artists aren't good enough to make the collection (Don't worry about them, though; their '68 buddies entrenched at the Pompidou will always buy their work.)
After living all these years in dread of Saatchi, Gentleman's article sounds like a case of the abused becoming the abuser.
Saatchi of the Seine [Guardian]
