The Marquis de Custine, in his great book Russia in 1839, remarks, in connection with the military parades of which Tsar Nicholas I was inordinately fond, that tyrannies command immense efforts to bring forth trifles. I confess that this remark was often uppermost in my mind as I toured the Pinault Collection in the restored Bourse de Commerce in Paris: not, of course, that billionaires such as M. Pinault can properly be called tyrants.
François Pinault is one of the richest men in France, even the world, with a fortune estimated at about $50 billion. No doubt it is difficult to know how to use such a fortune constructively (a problem that I have never had to face), but to the extent that M. Pinault has used it to collect contemporary art, I cannot say that he has used it constructively, except that by concentrating on it he has avoided driving up further the price of old masters and other work of genuine merit, which I suppose is service of a kind. The other side of this is that his collection bids up the price of productions of very little merit and thereby distorts judgment.
M. Pinault’s misfortune is to have wanted to be a Maecenas in an epoch that can hardly be described as a golden, or even a silver or bronze, age of art, to put it at
