Artists and Patrons

One hundred years after the first ready-made by Marcel Duchamp (1913), where is contemporary art today?

To understand the links between contemporary aesthetics and financial strategy at work in the art market, Martine Renaud-Boulart has investigated the relationships between artists and patrons from Laurent de Medici to François Pinault and from Michelangelo to Annette Messager.

Taking a psychological perspective, the author met with today’s patrons - foundation or museum directors, collectors, etc. - who have been involved in the art world for many years. - He asked them about what art brings them: an enhancement of their image, tax exemption, internal completeness. Then she asked today’s artists what corporate patronage brings them: a rejection of the system, recognition, an ability to dare to go further.

These exchanges highlight an abundance of creativity, too often overshadowed by the Non Art tendencies of hyper-intellectualisation and Arty of hyper-decoration. Faced with the excesses of finance, technology and the absence of culture, the author has endeavoured to translate his personal experience of creating a collection and a foundation for the diffusion of contemporary art, in order to find openings to post-Duchamp theories and rediscover the values of art made of the quest for beauty and spirituality beyond the stakes of the market.