8
Collection and Enrichment

The usefulness of useless things

It would clearly be quite a stretch to suppose that the development of an enrichment economy depended on the increase in the number, activity, and wealth of collectors, in the proper sense of the term. And this is why the relation we have posited between the formal arrangement of collecting, on the one hand, and what we have called the collection form as a modality of valorization, on the other, shifts according to the particular case along an axis that goes from literal application to synecdoche. Still, the shift of capitalism toward new domains of activity, as the opportunities for profit offered by mass production were tending toward exhaustion (at least in Western Europe – that is, in the countries where capitalism was born), would have been difficult without the recourse to new forms of valorization, forms with dual roles.

These forms had to supply a structural base favoring large-scale commercialization of things characterized by their “singularity” and by their “scarcity,” two qualifications that stemmed from the fact that they had been identified through opposition to standard objects. Things said to be “exceptional,” whose “scarcity” was considered “natural” and “absolute” (by David Ricardo,1 for example) because they were not reproducible, were once viewed not only as being relatively marginal but especially as constituting exceptions to the “economic laws” that had been established through reference to industrial production. These things, as they were transformed into layers whose exploitation could create wealth, had to find a language in which they could be appreciated: that is, they had to be associated with arrangements that could establish their prices and, especially, make those prices justifiable on the basis of arguments that would reveal their value.

But at the same time these specific forms of valuation were also charged with making the prices of objects that were being extracted from such buried layers intelligible in relation to the prices of things stemming from other forms: standard objects first of all, but also fashionable objects – those appreciated in the trend form – and objects appreciated as assets.

Thus while, as we have seen, an enrichment economy is by no means addressed solely to “collectors,” the collection form is a cognitive operator that makes it possible to appreciate the value of things judged “exceptional” by envisaging them from a point of view comparable to the one from which a “collector” would consider them, a collector being a fervent accumulator of things that are no longer useful but are appreciated both because they have been bequeathed by the past and because they lend themselves to being organized in a serial mode that articulates their similarities and differences.

The practice of collection has generally been considered a pastime or hobby and, consequently, as a marginal or even parasitic activity grafted onto other modalities of access to wealth, whether these modalities come from inheritance, from work, or from financial operations. It is moreover precisely because the activities involved in collecting are presented as hobbies – that is, as superfluous – that they have been able to maintain the unique position they have always occupied in the economic order. The practice of collecting, no matter how much or how little time and money may be devoted to it, is in fact inscribed in a cognitive structure that has accompanied the development of capitalism and that rests on a series of homologous oppositions. These include the relation between work and leisure (or non-work); between what is necessary and what is superfluous; and between action oriented toward business and action oriented toward disinterestedness – that is, in this case, toward leisure, passion, spending, all of which, in this context, have an orientation that is at once aesthetic and sexual (ever since the first half of the nineteenth century, the “mania” of systematic collectors has been considered a substitute for sexual activity).2

These oppositions have been grafted onto a distinction that played a central role among the bourgeoisie in France and elsewhere throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the distinction that contrasts practices and ways of being as functions of gender. On the masculine side, we find business, money, work, science, sports, and outdoor activities; on the feminine side, we find taste, fiction, indoor activities, and religion. Activities stemming from the vast domain of “culture” or “the arts” can be associated with one pole or the other according to the modalities of the practice (professional, institutional, and lucrative on the masculine side, gratuitous or associated with pure expenditure or taste on the feminine side).3 Steven Gelber has shown how stamp collecting, when it first began in the 1850s and 1860s, was viewed as a feminine practice, in which the decorative aspect of the vignettes was emphasized; this lasted until the formation of an organized market gave stamp collecting a new character that it would retain until the mid-twentieth century, that of an educational practice intended in particular to stimulate, in boys, a tendency to accumulate possessions and engage in commerce.4

One feature in particular conferred a certain salience on the systematic collection form as it developed during the nineteenth century and, indeed, was largely responsible for the attractiveness of the form in the bourgeois universe: it served as a support structure for practices that escaped the distinctions we have just evoked. In this zone of marginal importance, the tension between what was associated with beauty and gratuitousness, on the one hand, and with usefulness and interest, on the other, could be suspended (often by invoking the ancient notion of otium, leisure time).5 Stories featuring collectors appeared with some frequency in the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, well before major collectors became objects of biographies or published their own autobiographies. These fictional accounts incorporated anecdotes that blended the register of passion inseparably with that of commerce. They staged narratives that were at once stories about love for things, impelled by a desire that had nothing to do with calculation, and stories about money, often presented (especially by Balzac) in a way that highlighted their most sordid aspects and invoked attitudes and behaviors associated with critical representations of finance, such as harshness, greed, and especially deceit. Thus Balzac’s Cousin Pons – to go back to one of the earliest and best-known illustrations of the personal character of a collector – is truly satisfied only when he has managed to acquire the “beautiful” things that he covets at a price below what he thinks of as their “real” price – that is, either below the price that others less shrewd than he would be inclined to pay or below the price at which the object might be negotiated in the future. This satisfaction can be described by Balzac as both aesthetic and commercial, because it is based, in both regimes, on the buyer’s capacity to recognize the value of small differences that escape the eyes of others, and particularly, during the transaction, the eyes of the seller – a situation of what we have called asymmetrical information. Asymmetries of this sort stimulate a desire whose fulfillment depends on differential gaps. The satisfaction of having bought a thing for less than its asking price boosts and objectivizes the pride of a connoisseur who knows how to identify small differences and also the social distinction of the person who is proving himself or herself superior to neophytes. For connoisseurs like Pons, it is thus as though the items were no longer purchased – unlike the case of any standard object acquired from a catalog – but instead were in some sense giving themselves to the connoisseur and to no one else.

The articulation between the collection arrangement and the development of modes of consumption dependent on an enrichment economy is pertinent from yet another standpoint, that of the relation to what is useless. As Russell Belk has remarked, the development of collections becomes a salient phenomenon only in societies characterized by an excess of wealth.6 As it happens, the increase in wealth has been one of the obstacles confronting the expansion of capitalism, whose justification has relied on the thematics of need and has aligned itself simultaneously with necessity, utility, and the scarcity of things required for the pursuit of life, and also (especially in Marxist terms) by the maintenance of a workforce. But that form of capitalism, characteristic of the decades following the Second World War in Europe in countries where the war had produced penury, was rapidly limited by the unequal distribution of the monetary resources needed to acquire mass-produced consumer goods; in other words, it was limited by the difficulty of expanding solvent demand, a difficulty that gave rise to ever-increasing recourse to credit.7

A large proportion of potential consumers had difficulty acquiring the goods offered for sale, while those who had the means to purchase factory-made goods had already done so. This situation, which tended to perpetuate itself and to become even more acute in the process, led to an overcapacity to produce. Why buy a second car – a more recent model, when the one already at hand sufficed to meet transportation needs – a new refrigerator, or a new television? Or a new watch, a particularly interesting example if we recall that the invention of quartz watches in the 1970s made that instrument very reliable and very inexpensive, even before electronic developments put watches inside mobile phones; the rapid and widespread diffusion of these instruments thus made wearing a watch less useful. As it happened, after an intense but brief crisis that affected Switzerland in particular (for Switzerland held a quasi-monopoly on watchmaking), it was precisely owing to a resurgence of the watchmaking industry that a particularly active and profitable luxury economy was re-established in that country.

Compared to the thorny problems posed by the exhaustion of the form of capitalism that was justified by recourse to the problematics of need and consequently of necessity and utility, the generalization of the collection arrangement offered a resource capable of relaunching consumerist accumulation by basing it on a different thematics, one that, far from referring to usefulness, emphasized on the contrary the value of accumulating useless things – in other words, accumulation for its own sake.

Here we can evoke the intuitions of Georges Bataille when, in The Accursed Share, he reversed the problematics of scarcity, which had been at the heart of economic thought at least since Malthus.8 Bataille saw excess as one of the principal challenges societies have to confront.9 If the formulations that associate excess with transgression could be left behind, it might be possible to revisit the problematics of scarcity in order to identify one of the paths followed by the agents of capitalism to get out of the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s and stimulate the generation of profit. That endeavor consisted primarily in relaunching the process of accumulation by displacing it toward spheres of economic activity that were largely exempt from a requirement of justification based on utility, as is characteristic of the enrichment economy. We must nonetheless note – following Bataille – that each social formation develops a specific way of stimulating and consuming excess, for example by war, competitive destruction, or ostentatious magnificence, as was the case in fifteenth-century Italy. In this last instance, as Malcolm Bull has shown, artistic representations, featuring reinterpretations of mythological themes and magnified human bodies that were at once denuded to reveal their splendor and surrounded by sumptuous adornments, had become symbolic expressions of a worldly power that was inextricably political, military, and pecuniary – and difficult to depict through the bleak iconography of Christian inspiration.10

But in post-Cold War Europe – democratic, meritocratic, fond of ethnic considerations – none of these forms of consumption was legitimately available to counter the threat of insufficient consumerism. In this context, the collection form was of interest because it supplied a model of accumulation for its own sake that could reconcile the extravagance of completely gratuitous expenditures with the principal features associated with the capitalist ethos as thematized by Max Weber:11 meticulousness, a sort of restraint bordering on the most sordid avarice, an aptitude for calculation, and the deployment of frenetic activity that was at once disinterested and inclined to tilt toward a quest for profit. This was particularly the case when the things accumulated were detached from the collection arrangement and transferred to the asset form. The collection arrangement makes it possible, in fact, on the same basis as financial operations when they are removed from investment in the strict sense, to generate scarcity from the starting point of everything or nothing (and these come down to the same thing), including trash, since, by relying on the construction of serial forms of totalization, the practice of collecting creates lacks that demand imperiously to be filled. Viewed in this light, the collection form thus possesses a specific property that represents an undeniable advantage with respect to the capitalist universe, which is simply its capacity to generate wealth without massive recourse to human work and, consequently, without having to worry either about handling masses of potentially rebellious workers or about managing technological arrangements subject to frequent breakdowns and costly maintenance – and without even having to rely on justifications involving the thematics of need.

Thus the collection form, without jostling egalitarian sensibilities too forcefully, has been able to frame sumptuary expenses attributed to a pastime sublimated by the attraction of beauty, or even seen as a sort of beneficent activity undertaken to the advantage of all – as though the very possibility of accumulation for its own sake were completely unrelated to the destitution of the multitude of those who are excluded from it and in which globalized capitalism could nevertheless simultaneously discover the most reliable source of future profits based on the “democratization of commerce” – that is, on its extension down to “the bottom of the pyramid” in countries and classes that had been largely kept out of the consumerist sphere.12 Or as if scarcity itself could be “produced,” just as industrial capitalism produces the experience of necessity in which Sartre thought he recognized the “original structure” underlying the human adventure.13

Collecting in thrall to marketing

The collection arrangement does not apply directly to all the objects whose exchange and circulation create wealth in the context of an enrichment economy. This arrangement, which becomes particularly apparent if we look, for example, at commerce in artworks and antiquities, may appear less appropriate, at first glance, for domains such as luxury and tourism, the processes of heritage creation that involve rooted, non-transportable things, or even the broad and vague cluster that is called “culture,” a domain that, partly deposited in things endowed with bodies, also manifests itself in the form of texts, words, schemas, and “ideas.” It is nevertheless permissible to think that, in the regions or countries where capitalism has shifted in part from a production economy toward an enrichment economy, the collection arrangement has supplied a repertory of schemas available to be reworked so as to trace the contours of an extended form of valorization of things.

How are these apparently unconnected activities – the pursuit of luxury, tourism, heritage creation, and culture – related to one another, and why is the collection form central? The starting point must be tourists, especially the wealthiest tourists, whose increasing importance in the economies of Western countries (and especially in France) we have already noted. Heritage creation is one way to get affluent tourists to move about and to attract them to one particular locale rather than another; the attention of prospective tourists can be secured by recourse to culture, and especially to narratives. But, once they have been drawn in, once they have been told a story, tourists must still be enticed to buy things. Yet these things cannot be standard objects that they could just as well have bought at home. The objects thus have to rely on the collection form and enter into the category of luxury items, or at least tend in that direction. Since the collection form is not oriented toward use, it can be a way of justifying the accumulation of things that, in terms of their utilization, would be seen as more or less similar and thus substitutable. This form, when it is extended, thus constitutes a powerful engine for buying and consequently for generating profit. Those who draw the greatest benefit from this linkage, those who are already the wealthiest, can also be tourists in countries other than their own.

We shall thus try to sort out, in an extended approach, what the collection form owes to the features that characterize the collection arrangement, but we shall also try to show how, as its repertory was gradually developing, these features were selected and redeployed: some of them occupied central positions, while others were marginalized and associated with properties borrowed from other formations so as to cover a much broader set of situations. We shall start with the hypothesis that this form plays a role of the first order in the valorization of exceptional items destined for a wealthy public. According to this hypothesis, the collection form would take on ever-greater salience and would now be extending its sphere of influence to the detriment of the standard form.

The juxtaposition of processes associated with an enrichment economy and the collection arrangement seems fairly coherent in the case of antiquities and works of art from the workshops of old masters, even watches or automobiles from prestigious brands whose production has been interrupted. But, in the case of other sectors that play important roles in an enrichment economy, the features borrowed from the collection arrangement have to be inflected or adjusted to allow their valorization.

Places, insofar as they are objects of commerce, can generally be valorized in the same way as things, but with the constraint that they cannot be moved. The exemplary case of a place valorized according to the standard form is that of the serially manufactured individual house. In the collection form, places such as monuments, neighborhoods, cities, villages, or rural sites, even entire regions, are most notably valorized by processes of heritage creation. In this case, things that come from the past and may be undergoing a process of degradation are selected, on the same basis as collectors’ items, then rehabilitated and associated with a presentation narrative – that is, a historical narrative intended to orient their interpretation and to augment their value. One consequence is that long-distance association has to be substituted for the physical juxtaposition that characterizes collections of objects.

Considered from the standpoint that interests us here, the notion of culture can be interpreted within a logic that opens pathways to the collection form. This is the case when buildings or ruins are declared “historical monuments,” attractions “created by humans,” which are more powerful factors in determining tourists’ choices than those based on “natural resources (beaches, nature preserves, etc.).”14 But the term “culture” can also be understood in a sense derived from the one attributed to it by ethnology and folklore studies. According to this logic, ordinary objects – cloth, soap, or knives, for instance – can be collected, valorized, and preserved in museums, like the plastic bags exhibited in 2013 in Lausanne’s museum of contemporary design and applied arts.15

The subject of luxury poses different problems. Let us first recall that the existence of luxury is by no means really new. Luxury and the manufacture of luxury items intended for the wealthiest consumers have been striking facts in various historical formations, both as economic phenomena and as objects of moral debates in which the desire to illustrate the benefits of luxury (as was Voltaire’s case) is sometimes opposed by simple indignation, often Christian in inspiration, especially in periods and in places marked by practices tending toward the formation of capitalism: as examples, we can point to the city-states of northern Italy during the Renaissance16 or to Western European metropolises such as Paris and London in the nineteenth century.17

The term “luxury” has not always been claimed by the enterprises that are nonetheless associated with it in the early twenty-first century. We can bring this variation to light by looking at the Lettre mensuelle du Comité Colbert.18 In 1976, firms presented themselves as stemming from the “fields of art, fashion, and creation.” In the following decade, “luxury” appeared as a “new idea.”19 In fact, it was viewed as “obsolete” in the 1970s, as we see from a comment regarding a survey published in the same Lettre:

But a generational change that also corresponds, as Thomas Piketty has shown, to an incipient modification of the relation between work and patrimony is transforming the meaning attached to the word “luxury”: now “luxury is a young phenomenon, totally integrated in the way things are for the new generations.”20

As the same survey explains:

With the formation of an enrichment economy, justifications of luxury and of the prices of luxury items have taken a new turn that owes a great deal to the way in which they have benefited from social arguments and relationships associated with the collection arrangement. The thematics of collection have penetrated luxury on the one hand through the new personal, organizational, and financial links (identified in the previous chapter) that have been woven, especially during the last couple of decades, between luxury firms and the world of contemporary art. Luxury firms also endow themselves with “arty” images, for example by buying works and organizing exhibits; or, more directly, by asking known artists to associate their names with models that they are supposed to have inspired or conceived; or by asking artists to decorate the sites where these models will be presented for sale. The firms can then blur the banalization of objects reproduced in numerous copies – even if the number is limited – by attaching the signature of an artist, considered not as if he or she had personally made the work of art but as if the artist had set forth a certain number of rules for the production of the work that made its determination possible.21

The new representation of their activities that luxury firms have thus sought to establish, and that owes a great deal to the valorization of their links to art, has benefited from the extension given to the term “creator.” This has consisted largely in treating the objects that the firms put into circulation as though they were things worthy of figuring in collections and destined for buyers who had the ethos of collectors. This orientation may seem all the more paradoxical in that, during the same period, the universe of luxury relied more and more on industrial arrangements. Whereas the creation “by hand” of objects intended for a single client, or produced in very limited series, once occupied the center of this universe, fabrication by hand today is reserved for extremely expensive objects.22 The artisanal workshops that are still operating are mostly devoted to the creation of prototypes and/or serve as showcases for the major companies in the “luxury industry,” whose product lines are discreetly manufactured and managed industrially (and often outsourced, as we have seen)23 in order to respond to a growing demand, especially for export.

Nevertheless, these firms strive to maintain or construct an identity associated with a proper name (the “brand”) that is intended to mark them as lasting and designed to support their claim to exceptionality. Whereas in the fairly recent past the exceptional character of luxury items was most often justified by their innovative character, it is now more and more often justified by reference to tradition or, to be more precise, by the construction of subtle compromises between tradition and innovation – that is, between features drawn from the past and features projected into the future. This alchemy owes a great deal to insistence on the timeless fame of certain brands, on the connection that their histories are said to maintain with those of historical personalities, countries, regions, and, especially families, whose members have devoted themselves generation after generation both to maintaining certain traditional skills and to supporting innovation, that term being understood in its aesthetic dimension. This explains, for example, why the big globalized luxury firms are competing to purchase very old brands, ones that are declining or even failing, but whose past and pedigree make them worth the price and justify investments intended to bring them back.

One of the procedures that has allowed elements from the collection arrangement to be integrated into the luxury industry has been the production in limited series of certain items put into circulation. This practice breaks with the canons of the standard form, in which series are in principle unlimited and their production continues as long as there is demand (except in cases of planned obsolescence, as we have seen). In many instances, customer orders for certain things produced in a limited series face a waiting period of a year or more. In other instances, when the initial series has reached its limits, the production of objects in conformity with the original prototype is presented as a reproduction or a “reissue (the latter term is used frequently for example with furniture in the design category). But while the objects in the original series may become collectors’ items and see their prices increase over time, “reissued” objects, even if they are in every respect similar to the originals, will generally lose part of their value as they age, on the same basis as any standard product.

In addition, firms specializing in luxury goods have made abundant use of the marketing technique known as storytelling24 in support of commercial strategies that aim to singularize their products, models, and brands by associating them with historical figures, with famous persons (such as actors), and/or with well-known contemporary plastic artists. The story that is told may also be the story of the brand owner’s family, whose historical roots are supposed to guarantee the venerability of the things produced and offered for sale (for example, the story of the Italian bootmaking Ferragamo family), or the story of the “creator” who imprints his style on the brand (for example, Yves Saint Laurent, who became an icon of taste celebrated in literature, film, and televised fiction). This way of valorizing things – embellishing them with their own history and associating that history with stories of individuals who either created or possessed them and in any case physically touched them, since in a way they lived with them – plays a central role in the collection arrangement.

One of the major defining features of the collection form is scorn for reproductions. The enrichment economy thus borrows from the collection arrangement this preference for the authentic, even in the case of the luxury industry, which, however, is not loath to produce a portion (and sometimes the largest portion) of its production industrially and in series: hence the importance of attaching to a standard object the name of a particular person who is said to have deposited his or her traces on the object, even though there may not be a firm basis for such a claim.

If we turn now to buyers of exceptional goods, we have to acknowledge that, by approaching them as if they were real or potential “collectors,” luxury firms place the emphasis on a prestigious lifestyle in which buyers are prepared to take pride, if only to the extent that it justifies the accumulation of things that are costly and useless. In fact, luxury objects, even though they can be presented as intended for use, are not acquired primarily in order to meet and satisfy a need. Their purchasers already possess, by and large, a number of functionally similar objects (several high-end automobiles, many leather bags from top brands, and so on). The fact of appearing before others, of being seen in public surrounded by costly objects, can obviously be a source of pleasure. And these distinguishing effects, which have been invoked since Thorstein Veblen25 by sociologists and economists in an effort to account for – and to denounce – expenditures on conspicuous consumption of luxury goods, certainly play an important economic role. Nevertheless, in many instances these costly things seem to be collected in such numbers that they are stored away without being exposed to the eyes of others or even, in the case of major collectors, to their owners’ eyes. They are thus accumulated chiefly in order to be preserved and placed in relations of proximity to other objects of the same type, in a logic close to that of the collection form.

On the use of the collection form by luxury firms

The study of two major groups manifesting strong growth, LVMH and Kering, whose owners and principal directors are based in France (or in Belgium, in LVMH’s case, for tax purposes) and whose revenues are very high (46.8 billion euros for LVMH and 13.6 billion for Kering in 2018, as compared to 29 billion and 9.7 billion respectively in 2013), allows us to document the way in which the collection form functions at the center of a reorientation of capitalism.26 This reorientation can be read very clearly over time if we follow the changes in the Kering group’s activities from the 1960s on. LVMH and Kering share the distinguishing feature of targeting the fortunes of the wealthiest consumers, both in the richest regions of the world (Europe, the United States, Japan) and in those where the conjunction of strong growth and significant inequalities in income and patrimony guarantees the presence of great wealth (in particular China, India, Mexico, and Brazil). In order to capture this wealth, the two companies rely on commerce in luxury goods with high profit margins, goods endowed with brand names “rooted” in the past of a country whose very lifestyle is depicted as a patrimony (Italy, France, and Switzerland in particular, but also China). These goods, which are on display in a large number of magazines, are either standard products endowed with a “collector effect” (fashionable clothing and accessories) or else products likely to be collected (wine, jewelry, watches); certain standard products (for example, leather goods) can even become collectors’ items, and any of them can be hybridized or associated with contemporary art.

From lumber to luxury goods: the transformation of the Pinault group into Kering

The LVMH and Kering groups both bring together brands associated with luxury products. However, the groupings have different historical origins. The LVMH group resulted from merging the luggage company Louis Vuitton with the champagne firm Moët Hennessy, the latter being itself the result of the 1971 merger between two champagne producers, Moët et Chandon and Hennessy.

The history of the Kering group brings to light the displacements of capital, and thus of capitalism since the second half of the twentieth century in France, and beyond in the world’s wealthiest regions.

In 1963, François Pinault created an eponymous group specializing in the lumber business, eventually including its distribution and its transformation. The group was thus devoted to commercializing a raw material destined to produce standard objects. Beginning in the 1990s, the group extended its distribution activity to electronics (with the acquisition of Cfao in 1990), mass-market furniture (a controlling interest in Conforama, 1991), standard products in general (a controlling interest in Au Printemps, including 54 percent interest in the mail-order company La Redoute), and cultural products (a controlling interest in FNAC, 1994). In 1994 the group changed its name to Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR), to acknowledge its transformation into a firm dedicated to distributing standard items, thus a firm present in virtually all aspects of daily life among the middle classes, from furniture to clothing, including electronic and digital technology along with books, records, and other cultural goods. The group completed its ambit, in effect, by adding an enterprise that distributed office supplies and furnishings (a controlling interest in Guilbert, 1998) and another that distributed micro-computing equipment (the acquisition of Surcouf, 2000).

Nonetheless, in the 2000s, the PPR group had to reckon with several mutations. On the one hand, digitization was dematerializing most cultural goods, first and foremost those involving music and video productions, as far as the group’s activity in that sector was concerned (via FNAC); on the other hand, the development of the Internet considerably increased competition in online sales of standard products. Moreover, inequalities in revenues and personal holdings were increasing, and it was becoming particularly advantageous to focus more specifically on the wealthiest among potential customers.

In 1999, the PPR group entered the sector of luxury goods by acquiring 42 percent of the Italian brand Gucci and then the Yves Saint Laurent and Sergio Rossi brands. The luxury apparel firm Gucci itself acquired the jewelry firm Boucheron the following year and the Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga firms in 2001. Gradually increasing its share in Gucci’s capital, PPR finally acquired 99.4 percent in 2004, following a takeover bid.

At the same time, starting in 2002 and continuing until 2013, the group gradually backed out of all the enterprises distributing standard products that it had acquired during the previous decades, shedding them one after another: Guilbert (2002–3), Pinault Bois et Matériaux – the original core enterprise from the 1960s (2003), France Printemps (2006–7), Conforama (2008–11), Surcouf (2009), FNAC (in stages, starting in 2010), Cfao (2009–12), and La Redoute (2014).

During the same ten-year period, the group pursued the acquisition of luxury brands and also firms focused on sports (such as Puma). During 2013 alone, PPR acquired majority stakes in two jewelry brands, one Chinese (Qeelin) the other Italian (Pornellato), a deluxe designer brand (Christopher Kane), and a leather goods firm (Croco). To make its new transformation visible, the group changed its name once again: abandoning PPR (which had been reduced in 2005 to Pinault-Printemps-Redoute), it became Kering, almost entirely specialized in luxury goods and, to a limited extent, in sports-related products.

Capturing the wealth of the wealthiest

Why, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, did a group wholly transform itself in the space of a decade, completely changing its activities and even its name, abandoning the distribution of standard products to focus on producing and trading in luxury goods? The reason is straightforward: the group was managed by holders of capital who made the same observation that economists in the academic world were making, namely, that inequalities in revenue and in individual wealth were increasing in a large number of countries. But whereas certain economists proposed to reduce these inequalities, the holders of capital proposed for their part to profit from them – that is, to offer products and services that would allow them to capture the money of the wealthiest without at the same time allowing these wealthy consumers direct control over company decisions. The problem in the displacement of capital is that it can in fact make it possible for investors to hold rights over those who are proposing ways to attract it. This is most obviously the case for stockholders in a company. But in the case of luxury products, and of objects belonging to the collection form in general, the new owner holds the luxury object or the collectors’ item without being able to exert personal influence over the fate of those who have produced it and offered it for sale, and without being able, either, to make free use of the brand name of the object acquired, since brand names are protected by intellectual property laws.

As a market analysis of luxury brands worldwide carried out by Xerfi Global for the period 2013–18 explains, the quest for wealthy consumers requires luxury groups to reason in terms of income inequality and personal wealth:

The emerging countries hide a significant and rising class of wealthy consumers.

Per-person income and income inequality can be used to measure the market potential of consumers of luxury products. Income per person is higher and more equally distributed in the developed countries, making them important markets for personal luxury goods.

However, developing countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, and China are characterized by lower per-person income but also have significant inequalities. If we consider the size of the populations of these countries, great inequalities consequently imply a significant number of wealthy consumers. The growing revenues of these countries illustrate why they have become the target of luxury industries.27

The Kering group’s annual report also emphasizes, among the growth factors in the luxury market, “the number of HNWIs” [high-net-worth individuals], not only in “developed countries,” where most of them live, but also in “high-growth countries,” has increased rapidly in recent years.28 The number of wealthy clients in the world is evaluated at 12 million in 2012, representing 46,200 billion dollars overall, and it was expected to increase by 6.5 percent per year, reaching 55,800 billion in 2018.29

Thus most luxury product sales occur where these extremely wealthy people live. Europe is the number one region in terms of revenues in the luxury sector, evaluated at 74 billion euros or 34 percent of worldwide revenues in 2013 (the four countries with the greatest revenues were Italy, with 16 billion euros, France with 15 billion, the United Kingdom with 12 billion, and Germany with 10 billion). The United States alone accounts for 62.5 billion euros in revenues. Japan (17 billion), China (15 billion), South Korea (8 billion), and Hong Kong (7 billion) are the Asian regions with the highest revenues in luxury goods.30

INCOME DISTRIBUTION

From Xerfi Global’s market analysis (p. 34)

For Kering, the revenues of the luxury branch in 2013, which rose to 6.4 billion euros, were thus logically derived as follows: Western Europe, 33 percent, the Asia-Pacific region, 41 percent (with 10 percent from Japan alone), and North America, 19 percent. For LVMH, revenues from the “watches and jewelry branch” (TAG Heuer, Hublot, Zenith, Bulgari, Dior Watches, De Beers, and Fred), which rose to 2.7 billion euros in 2013, were divided among Europe (34 percent), Asia (40 percent, including 13 percent from Japan alone), and the United States (12 percent).

Values and prices of luxury product brands

Luxury goods can capture part of the wealth of the wealthiest in a more significant way than standard products, because the profit margin set at the time of the exchange can be especially high. For LVMH, in 2013, the operational margin rate for apparel and leather goods rose to 32 percent (operational results of 3.1 billion euros for sales amounting to 9.8 billion); the rate for wines and spirits was 33 percent (operational results of 1.3 billion euros for sales amounting to 4.2 billion). This rate is much lower, however, for watches and jewelry, reaching “only” 13 percent (operational results of 375 million euros for sales amounting to 2.7 billion euros). The same year, in the Kering group, Gucci realized 1.1 billion euros in operational results from overall revenues of 3.5 billion.

The central notion of “brand” lies at the heart of the model for this type of enterprise, hence the importance of protecting it via intellectual property laws and the struggle against counterfeit merchandise.

But what is the price of a brand? Taking into account high margin rates, a brand is clearly not reducible to production costs, nor can it be apprehended by the work of its employees alone. Kering and LVMH use different calculation methods to evaluate the brands among their assets. For Kering, the value of Gucci, the most important brand in the group, is calculated on the basis of future income from license fees received on the assumption that the brand will be exploited in the form of lease contracts by third parties;31 this so-called royalty method is also used by LVMH. The latter group also uses a method based on “comparable transactions (i.e. using the revenue and net profit coefficients employed for recent transactions involving similar brands) or of stock market multiples observed for related businesses.” However, LVMH also uses two other methods: “the margin differential method, applicable when a measurable difference can be identified between the amount of revenue generated by a branded product in comparison with a similar unbranded product,” and that of the cost of reconstituting an equivalent brand, in particular in terms of the costs of advertising and promotion.32

These different calculation methods applied to brands33 allow us first of all to demonstrate the full extent to which values justify prices. In addition, they help reveal what ultimately characterizes a brand: it is at once a thing endowed with a price comparable to that of similar things that are sold and bought, a name that has a reputation and for which significant expenses (for advertising) are tolerated in order to maintain or even increase that reputation, a name protected by intellectual property laws that can thus be exploited by bringing in royalties, and, finally, a name that allows an enterprise or a group to generate a profit margin in relation to production costs and to other names. In comparison, the vineyards owned by LVMH are evaluated on the basis of their market value alone – that is, with reference to recent transactions in the same region.

One major difference between standard products and luxury brands is that standard products are typically developed within a large company, in a research and development department, for example, while a luxury brand is generally launched by a person in his or her own name and is then purchased and developed by a large company. In order to grow, luxury firms are thus led to acquire new brands, ones that already exist but are not yet in the fold. Once acquired, these brands are at once preserved in their “artistic” positioning and reoriented in economic terms. Kering thus applies a management model, which it calls “freedom within a [financial] framework,”34 for brands, as their annual report explains, “that offer genuine and significant potential to improve financial performance, which [Kering] can identify and exploit in the long term.”35

A luxury brand usually involves a proper name (often that of the founder, such as Yves Saint Laurent with Kering or Marc Jacobs with LVMH) that is associated with a territory – whether a very localized region as with wines (Ruinart, Hennessy, Moët et Chandon, Krug, Dom Pérignon in Champagne, or Château d’Yquem with LVMH) or a larger region, even a country (France, Switzerland, Italy) – and also with a date of creation. Proper name, territory, history: these three intertwined qualities are at the heart of the economy of enrichment, and they can be inscribed in, or are compatible with, a patrimonial politics directed by public authorities, either on a local or a national scale.

Apart from the Château d’Yquem, most of the oldest brands go back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for watchmaking (in the case of Kering, Jeanrichard dates from 1681, Girard-Perregaux from 1791 in Switzerland), to the nineteenth century for jewelry (Kering: Boucheron, 1858, in France), and leather goods (LVMH: Louis Vuitton, 1854), and to the twentieth century for fashion (Kering: Balenciaga, 1919; Yves Saint Laurent, 1961), or even the twenty-first (Kering: Stella McCartney, 2001). The narratives associated with these brands anchor them in a territory or even in a localized craftsmanship. Thus the Bottega Veneta brand (Kering), founded in 1966, is presented as having originated in the Veneto region of Italy and as having been “originally specialized in the leather goods made famous by the celebrated technique of intrecciato,” a method invented by craftsmen to reinforce soft leather. As Kering explains in its annual report, the company seeks “brands that have a truly distinctive identity: well-rooted values and a sought-after legacy.”36

But anchoring in the past is not enough: the process has to be brought up to date. The products of the enrichment economy succeed only if they entail an alliance between the “contemporary” and the “traditional” – that is, only if there is a narrative that anchors the present in the past or, for more recent brands, a narrative that presents products as if they were unquestionably going to be anchored in the past. If they were associated only with the present, the objects would be tainted by the idea of disposability – that is, they could become unfashionable; if they were associated only with the past, they would already be unfashionable, outdated, trash. The alliance by way of a narrative connecting past and present is what allows objects to attain “immortality.” Thus Gucci is presented as “the combination of tradition and modernity, craftsmanship and innovation.”37 Another example is found in the “Pom Pom” collection of the Milanese jeweler Pomellato, for which “every ring is created around stones that are unique in their rarity, large size, or irregular shape. This results in sophisticated, excessive, contemporary jewels whose value combines culture with an unconventional flair.”38

Standard products with a “collector effect” and collectors’ items

The various luxury products of the LVMH and Kering groups are put on display and brought together in articles as well as in advertisements in many journals and magazines: wines and spirits, clothing and leather goods, perfumes and cosmetics, watches and jewelry.

Nonetheless, these products can be sorted into two different sets. On the one hand, many of them are still products made in the standard way, and like standard products they are characterized by depreciation once they have been offered for sale. This is the case for fashionable clothing, in particular, and to a lesser extent for leather goods. These products are distinguished from those in the ordinary standard form, however, in that they are endowed with what we call a “collector effect.” In other words, while fashionable items of clothing are unquestionably destined to go rapidly out of fashion, thus inscribing themselves in a cycle proper to the trend form, their presentation nevertheless takes place in the collection form: the term “collection” is used explicitly to designate “fashion weeks” during which a given designer’s fall–winter collection is presented, followed a few months later by a spring–summer collection.

On the other hand, wines, jewelry, and watches function directly as collectors’ items. Their value may in fact increase over time after their initial sale; they are sought by collectors and resold as collectors’ items on the secondary market. The jewelry brand Boucheron presented its 2014 collections during the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris: it showed novelties alongside older objects, thus preparing the future of the former as collectables.39

It is significant that these objects can be associated or even hybridized with contemporary art. Thus in 2013 the champagne brand Dom Pérignon called on the artist Jeff Koons to create a sculpture, “Balloon Venus for Dom Pérignon,” for the launching of Dom Pérignon Rosé 2013. A champagne brand in the LVMH group, Ruinart, was proud to be associated with international contemporary art fairs; it called on the artist Piet Hein Eek to create a work in homage to the house’s legacy and imagined two collections in limited editions. Finally, let us recall that the two founders of these groups (who remain owners, as of this writing), Bernard Arnault of LVMH and François Pinault of Kering, are the two greatest collectors of contemporary art in France.

One of the most successful instances of the use of the collection form by the luxury industry is that of the LVMH group’s showcase brand: Louis Vuitton. The company was originally a rather ordinary luggage manufacturer; it distinguished itself by the adoption of a monogram, invented in 1896, thus after the founder’s death. The operation by means of which these ordinary objects, produced in series, became luxury objects and collectables was particularly well presented in an exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2015–16. In fact, this exhibit presented trunks as collectors’ items, associating them with a narrative that evoked “the work of Louis Vuitton”: the luggage-maker became a “creator” (“he renews fabrics and motifs, as much to protect himself from counterfeiters as to stand out”) and was linked with stars of the contemporary art scene (Damien Hirst, Richard Price, Takashi Murakami), with writers (“the Louis Vuitton House has accompanied the travels of well-known writers and anonymous amateurs for whom writing is a necessity”), with musicians (“Whether for a violin, a guitar, or a conductor’s batons, the protective cases are conceived by the luggage-maker as jewel-cases made of velvet and benevolence”), and with movie stars (a “Deauville bag in monogram fabric that belonged to Elizabeth Taylor” or a “wardrobe trunk in monogram fabric that is believed to have belonged to Katharine Hepburn”).40 The principle of collection as a way of valorizing things that would otherwise have been quite ordinary and worth very little was first deployed by Gaston-Louis Vuitton (“Apart from the old trunks, I also collect everything that has to do with the luggagemaker’s trade, in particular old tools such as hammers, pliers, planes, … old papers, that is, bills, letterheads, address cards”); it was also spelled out in the presentation of “hotel labels from the personal collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton.”41 The intersection with another dimension of the enrichment economy, tourism, was all the more easy to achieve in that tourists move about with luggage, but the term itself had given way to the nobler one of “voyage” or “travel,” by “automobile,” train, ship, or plane.

The collection form and contemporary art

The role played by the collection form in the insertion of contemporary art into an enrichment economy also needs to be clarified. The link between contemporary art and collecting may seem to go without saying, especially given that trade in contemporary artworks plays a very important role today in the commercial activities spurred by collectors’ practices. This is all the more the case when, as frequently happens, collectors acquire works less for the purpose of decorating their homes than for the purpose of accumulation: relying on the collection arrangement, they seek to fill lacks in a serial totality. This intent to acquire may seem secondary to the extent that these collectors, especially the wealthiest ones, spend time with artists, to the point of sometimes considering themselves as co-producers of their works.42 Thus the great collector François Pinault is described as being on familiar terms with artists and their galleries, from New York to Paris by way of Basel, and as taking pride in devoting a considerable part of his life to them: “To love artists, one needs time.”43 But the proximity between collectors and artists must not be allowed to obscure the fact that the former would not qualify as collectors if they did not become owners of works.

Besides, what is at issue is not so much the motivations declared by collectors and made public by the media and in works that celebrate these persons as the changes in state that affect the objects signed by artists when the productions of these artists have been recognized by collectors and have thereby been constituted as works of art. This process makes it possible to resolve a seeming contradiction between contemporary art and the collection form. We have seen that the collection form is oriented toward the appreciation of things extracted from the past. Now, nothing seems more contemporary than contemporary art, not only because it is shaped in the present, but also to the extent that it boasts of being turned toward the future. This seeming contradiction can nevertheless be overcome if we take into account the forms and stages of what can be called turning into art: that is, the process through which things attain the rank of work of art, either because the persons that have shaped them claim the status of artist, or because that status is granted them by others, from the outside, as it were, and sometimes without the artists themselves having asked for such a status; this latter case is exemplified by such phenomena as the so-called art nègre or art brut and, more generally, by the itineraries that have recently been studied under the term “artification.”44 One can confer on any artifact whatsoever the label of “artwork” only once it has succeeded in penetrating into the sphere of circulation where goods of this sort are exchanged; thus the clearest indicator that a thing has been transmuted into a work of art is its integration into a collection. This remark applies especially to modern or contemporary art, which, unlike art forms of earlier eras, has found itself more and more often deprived of external functions and has essentially become art for collectors.

Yet it must be noted that the process through which any objects whatsoever attain the status of artworks is highly selective. This is a way of saying, in passing, that few activities produce as much trash as artistic activities. It suffices to think of the vast numbers of canvases that have never found buyers and that are no longer anything more than stuff deteriorating in basements. Or we might consider public monuments that are not classified as historical: the authorities responsible for the national patrimony, for example, are reluctant to assume maintenance costs for the thousands of monuments to the dead of the First World War. We could make similar remarks about museums – which are by and large official agencies of authorization and preservation – within which the proportion of works that lie in storage and have never been exhibited, and may never even have been catalogued, is considerably larger than the proportion available for public viewing. And this is so even though the fact that they have been cared for so as to avoid their destruction still offers these works a modest chance of rehabilitation.

If we take into account this process of radical selection, we might consider that one of the principal signs attesting that an artifact has achieved the status of an artwork concerns its mode of temporal existence. In fact, selecting an artifact from among a mass of similar objects destined to become trash (which, as we have seen, is the ordinary fate of things in the standard form) and conferring on it the status of a work of art signifies that current viewers are asked to look at the work the way viewers are expected to look at it in the future. In other words, viewers are asked to carry out a retroactive movement by situating themselves, with regard to the work, in the present but from a vantage point to come, as if the work already belonged to the past or, rather, as if it were, in its essence, so to speak, exempt from the corruption of time. This movement, which consists in envisaging things from the standpoint of their possibility of access to a sort of immortality,45 constitutes one of the distinguishing features of the collection form.

The interactions between collectors’ strategies for selection and artists’ efforts to escape obliteration, which would be their normal fate from the vantage point of the present, produce effects of competition, on one side among artists, who seek to maintain their existence over time by capturing the attention of collectors, and on the other side among collectors, who seek either to fill in gaps or to shift the contours of the collectable by creating ties with and promoting artists not yet highly esteemed whose works are therefore affordable. These processes have occupied – and still occupy – an important place in the collective shifts that affect judgments of taste and whose effects are exercised simultaneously on the orientation of markets and on processes of aesthetic innovation.46 Aesthetic innovation has often been associated with the role played by a “norm of originality” characteristic of modern art or “art for art’s sake,” a norm whose rise in potency, especially from the second half of the nineteenth century on, is thought to have accompanied the avant-garde rebellions against the conformist effects of arrangements of academic control.47 In the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s work,48 and also that of Raymonde Moulin,49 it has been possible to see in the emergence of this “norm of originality” the result of the formation of specific and “relatively autonomous” fields within which artists and “creators” compete for recognition. Without challenging this type of structural interpretation, which stresses the strategies for achieving distinction on the part of the creators, we may nevertheless wonder whether it does not lead to underestimating the role of the selectors – that is, where artists are concerned, the role of collectors in interacting with merchants and critics. What has been called “art for art’s sake” is above all an art for collectors. Far from being devoid of all external (or “social”) functionality, as some have claimed, “art for art’s sake,” it can be argued, has its own functional (and social) orientation, imprinted on it by the constraints that collectors have to face in order to complete or extend their collections.

For collectors, as we have seen, and especially those newly arrived in the field, may well encounter difficulties as they try to get their hands on items that have become rare and expensive but that they need to supply what is lacking in their collections. They can then try to modify the contours of the collectable and to shift the criteria of pertinence, a process that leads them to turn toward new artists whose works are abundant, inexpensive, and thus easily accessible (whether these artists are lesser old masters heretofore forgotten or disdained50 or young artists who are still unknown). This project entails work carried out in association with art critics and curators for the purpose of valorizing such newcomers. Their specific differences will be incorporated into narrations and associated with certain names, often by associating different “creators” in such a way as to produce the effects of “schools.” When these operations succeed, the interests of a growing number of collectors will then tend to be oriented toward works that have been “recognized” by the persons or agencies, private or public, that play a role of mediation between the worlds of art and the worlds of collecting.

In other words, the multiple differences between works of different artists (even though these artists may tend to imitate one another at certain moments) depend on the simple fact that the artists are different individuals who find themselves selected by the agencies of mediation, in somewhat the same way – if we may be allowed the metaphor – that in a Darwinian perspective individual differences are selected by the environment from which the entities among which these differences are presented draw their subsistence. We can see this process at work currently in the socalled emerging countries – China, India, or Brazil, for example – where new collectors, motivated in part by nationalism, valorize works created earlier by artists from their countries of origin who had remained up to that point relatively unknown or underappreciated, notwithstanding the fact that some of the artists in question had settled in Europe or in the United States. The introduction of such works in new collections tends not only to raise the rankings of the works but also to modify the contours of the vast imaginary collection we know as the history of art by imbuing it with a global dimension.51 These processes have the effect of increasing the prices at which highly reputed art objects are exchanged, because prices are influenced by the constant growth in the number of collectors and also in the number of museums that must solicit “creations” to keep themselves supplied: in other words, they must select new differences from within the environment when the works bearing already canonized differences have become too expensive or unavailable owing to their incorporation into public collections.

The strategies for shifting the contours of the collectable can prove to be lengthy and difficult to carry through to fruition. If they are to have a chance of being crowned with success in the short or the long term, those who deploy them have to be able to claim a certain influence on the entire set of operators acting within a given domain, and this supposes a pre-existing accumulation of specific competencies and also of a certain renown. As it happens, the latter often depends on holding a position of authority such as, in the domain of the arts, that of influential critic, conservator of an important museum, commissioner of a widely recognized exhibit, or major collector highly reputed for reliable good taste and sound business sense. In the case of collectors, their capacity to link their personal activity to that of private institutions such as foundations, and especially to public institutions, museums above all,52 plays a very important role in the accumulation of power that allows them to shift the contours of the collectable.

The contradiction of the enrichment economy

The case of France is exemplary: the enrichment economy is more highly developed here than anywhere else, although it is not recognized as such. France is the number one destination in the world for tourism; it has a strong cultural sector with a system for compensating intermittent workers and many artists; it also has the two worldwide giants of the luxury industry in LVMH and Kering, whose principal stockholders are also two of the greatest art collectors in the world. One may wonder why the enrichment economy, relying on the collection form, although this economy is an object well implanted in the weft of reality, is nevertheless not construed as such, and in particular why it is not taken into account by the institutions of central government.

It is as though what we call the collection form, extended to the enrichment economy, has not yet given rise to the same enterprise of generalization as the standard form extended to the industrial economy, either on a descriptive level or in a critical mode. Thus the development of tourism in France has been relatively little studied in relation to its importance, and critical approaches to the subject always concentrate on mass tourism, conceived as a sort of standardized and therefore degraded form of travel, whereas the quest for profits from tourism concentrates more and more on exceptional forms of travel that propose to exploit authentic experiences available to cultured amateurs upon contact with heritage sites valorized for their unique historical features. More generally, the relation between commercial exploitation of the past and the development of ideologies emphasizing culture (the term being taken both in its elite sense and in the sense it has for social anthropologists), tradition, and local color have not yet given rise to broad overviews. Thus the world of art and culture can always be treated as though it were somehow external to capitalism, a fenced-off preserve, besieged to be sure but resistant – all this without taking into account either the significant profits generated by that world or the new forms of exploitation confronting the increasing numbers of people who work in it. As far as economic literature is concerned, luxury, tourism, culture, and heritage creation are grasped according to various modalities. Yet, as we have seen, these diverse activities are by no means independent of one another.

The connections among them have nevertheless not been officially recognized, either by economic institutions or by the official French institutions for statistical analysis, making it all the harder to bring the connections to light and study them in statistical terms. The enrichment economy, in this sense, finds itself in a position rather like that of the industrial economy before the statistical innovations of the 1930s up to the reform of the national accounting system and its statistical apparatus. At the same time, it lacks the visibility of the digital economy that is often presented as a radical turning point, and this presentation, conversely, tends to make people forget that the digital economy bears in part on objects; in this context, the emphasis on discontinuities obscures the continuities that have been crucial to the development of the enrichment economy.

One might think that we are dealing here simply with a delay on the part of institutions with respect to a change that is affecting social reality, and that this delay will be overcome in the near future. We may wonder, nonetheless, if this charitable hypothesis is the right one, and if the blindness of political, economic, and statistical institutions may not have a deeper cause.

For, if we examine the problem more closely, it appears that the relevant institutions in France are playing it both ways: on the one hand, they do not recognize the enrichment economy as a coherent totality, and they maintain in a separate sphere the relations they themselves sustain with the various activities on which this economy rests. On the other hand, as we have seen, through the intermediary of the language used, through price controls, and through the way they consider things in themselves, these institutions in fact govern the organization of such activities, inasmuch as they all have a commercial dimension. But the commerce associated with the various activities involved relies on forms of valorization that are not only different but even appear to be opposed to one another.

Thus it is not enough to explain the absence of recognition of the enrichment economy by a lag in the semantic, legal, and statistical frameworks on which the description of the economic and social world rests, as though, having been forged on the basis of the industrial economy, these frameworks had not yet been adapted to the changes in the economy, changes that are presumed to have escaped the attention of state administrators and, in particular, that of the national accounting system.

While novelists have been able to dramatize the changes of this type,53 there are nevertheless, as we have seen, no categorial arrangements or accounting frameworks that make it possible to determine with relative precision either the economic importance that is taken on by the nebulous phenomenon whose contours we are attempting to trace or the number of persons whose principal activity is connected to that phenomenon. This is the case in particular because the phenomenon brings together sectors (for example, art and tourism), activities (for example, museum direction and the production of crocodile bags), statuses (for example, that of people living in precarious economic circumstances, secure wage-earners, government employees, and people living on income from their assets), and professions that, in the official nomenclatures, are dispersed among sets constructed according to various logics of assembly that are more in harmony with the old classifications of the industrial world.

As a consequence, we lack statistical series capable of supporting the totalizations that would make it possible to highlight the specific processes at the heart of this evolution toward an enrichment economy and to track these processes as they evolve. This is why, in contemporary economic literature, presentation of the economic reorientation toward the wealthy is distributed among different domains, which are apprehended according to diverse accounting forms that often rely on heterogeneous definitions and categories.

But, given the amplitude taken on by the various cultural activities and the significance of the French government’s role (while the government did not initiate their transformations, it has consistently supported individual cultural endeavors since the 1980s), we can attribute to an institutional effect the fact that these closely related activities nevertheless remain unconnected. Not only is there no centralized effort at qualifying them that would seek to establish their interrelationships and to unify them, but, quite to the contrary, governmental institutions are actively working to keep them separate, or at least to represent them as independent phenomena.

Why? First of all, it is because there is a borderline that the institutions cannot fail to recognize. This is the borderline between cultural goods, whose purpose is to elevate the spirits of all (in the sense of culture as defined by Malraux, an object of democratization), and commercial goods, especially if they are intended for the wealthy. To associate explicitly, in an institutional logic, on the one hand art, often idealized and treated as if it were really achieved only when it is oriented toward “art for art’s sake,” and on the other hand the sale of perfumes or the proliferation of boutique hotels has something socially intolerable about it: it would be to accept the “commercialization” of everything and thus to expose oneself to becoming the target of moral critiques of commercialization.

But this is not the only reason. Such a juxtaposition, if it were to take an official form, would endanger the entire economy of enrichment. In fact, the links between tourism, culture, and luxury have to remain unofficial in order for each of these sectors to retain its own dynamics. And this is so despite the fact that none of them would experience such powerful dynamics without the benefits conferred on it by the relations it maintains with the other two.

The absence of recognition of the enrichment economy thus benefits the forms of capitalism that are engaged in it. On the one hand, they produce only for the wealthy, but they can claim to be producing for all, on the sole condition, obviously, that all become rich, but only in the long run. As for the difference between high culture, which is supposed to be exempt from commercialization, and ordinary things, which are commercialized, the former plays an essential role in this arrangement because things stemming from high culture can be sold at high prices only by being valorized with reference to their non-commercial dimension. This latter is attested, as it were, by connecting such high-culture goods with works that are kept in museums; this confers on them a promise of eternity, a promise likely to be extended, in a quasi-metaphorical way, to all the goods that have managed to be qualified through reference to the arts. Finally, the persons in charge of state institutions, for example the directors of the budget who are responsible for supporting and stimulating the activities arising from the enrichment economy, emphasize the difficulty of separating, among the entire set of “consumer goods,” those that belong to the domain of luxury from ordinary goods. As it happens, the fact that such a division is not institutionalized allows the luxury firms, brought together in France in the Colbert Committee, to decide for themselves what does or does not belong to the category of luxury goods.

There is thus a contradiction at the heart of the enrichment economy. Important features of this economy aim not to resolve the contradiction but to render it, if not acceptable, then at least customary, as if it went without saying, so that people can learn to live with it. This contradiction is particularly well illustrated in the use of the “France” brand we evoked earlier. The way it is put in place and managed attests to its participation in the enrichment economy, conjugating political interests – the will to maintain a discourse about the “values” of a community – and economic interests: those of the large luxury groups that, seen from abroad, embody the very image of France. As a highly placed official in the Ministry of the Economy and Finance has explained, “the image of France is Vuitton, Chanel, and so on. There is polarization around the major brands, for they convey the image of France. They have created the concept of the art of living, French style, as much as they benefit from it.”54 But what this “art of living” shows, as anyone who leafs through Air France magazines or the supplements of the major French newspapers can see, is first of all a culture: this is why one finds, under separate rubrics, advertisements for expensive watches, articles describing the lives of contemporary artists, and advice for making the most of one’s stay in Paris.

The contradiction at the heart of the enrichment economy is not a contradiction between a homogenization that would be inherent in the capitalist logic and a heterogeneity of cultural objects – that is, between a valorization of uniqueness, authenticity, particularity, and specialty on the one hand and “the bland homogeneity that goes with pure commodification” on the other, as David Harvey maintains in a study on wine and the city of Barcelona.55 The problem is not, in fact, that capitalism is confronted with “two dilemmas – veering so close to pure commercialization as to lose the marks of distinction that underlie monopoly rents or constructing marks of distinction that are so special as to be very hard to trade upon.”56 David Harvey conceives of capitalism only in its standard form; what is missing in his analysis is precisely the collection form. Now, as soon as we take into account the existence of several forms of valorization, one of which takes advantage of the exploitation of differences in the past of things, the contradictions posited by Harvey disappear.

Notes

  1. 1. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, [1819] 1928).
  2. 2. In the figure of Balzac’s Cousin Pons, an old bachelor ignored or rejected by women who has reoriented his impulses toward gastronomy and art, we can perhaps see the origin of this stereotype, which came to be widely deployed later on, especially if we turn to psychoanalysis for support. Psychoanalytic literature on collections and collectors is quite abundant, stimulated by the fact that Freud himself was a collector. See especially Michelle Moreau Ricaud, Freud collectionneur (Paris: Campagne Première, 2011); Gérard Wajcman, Collection, suivi de L’avarice (Caen: Jous, 1999); and Werner Muensterberger, Le collectionneur: anatomie d’une passion (Paris: Payot, 1994). Jean Baudrillard takes up the thematics that associates collecting and sexuality in the chapter of The System of Objects that deals with collecting (London: Verso, [1968] 1996), pp. 87–9.
  3. 3. See Luc Boltanski, “Pouvoir et impuissance: projet intellectuel et sexualité dans le Journal d’Amiel,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1/5–6 (1975): 80–108.
  4. 4. Steven Gelber, Hobbies, Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 114–24.
  5. 5. On the notion of otium as an activity cultivated in Roman antiquity, see Paul van der Grijp, Passion and Profit (London: Transaction, 2006), p. 11.
  6. 6. Russell Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society (London: Routledge, 1995).
  7. 7. See Jeanne Lazarus, “Le crédit à la consommation dans la bancarisation,” Entreprises et histoire, no. 59 (2010): 28–40.
  8. 8. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 37:

    This surplus eventually contributes to making growth more difficult, for growth no longer suffices to use it up. At a certain point the advantage of extension is neutralized by the contrary advantage, that of luxury …. Henceforth what matters primarily is no longer to develop the productive forces but to spend their products sumptuously.
    At this point, immense squanderings are about to take place: After a century of populating and of industrial peace, the temporary limit of development being encountered, the two world wars organized the greatest orgies of wealth – and of human beings – that history has recorded. Yet these orgies coincide with an appreciable rise in the general standard of living: The majority of the population benefits from more and more unproductive services; work is reduced and wages are increased overall.

  9. 9. This rarely discussed issue has been reconsidered recently in the language of contemporary sociology by Andrew Abbott in “The Problem of Excess,” Sociological Theory, 32/1 (2014): 1–26.
  10. 10. Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods: How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
  11. 11. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Los Angeles: Roxbury, [1829] 1998).
  12. 12. On the production of things destined for the poor as the new horizon of capitalism, see Coimbatore Krishnao Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2009). And, for an in-depth commentary, see Laurence Fontaine, Le marché: histoire et usages d’une conquête sociale (Paris: Gallimard, 2014).
  13. 13. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: NLB, [1960] 1976), pp. 122ff.
  14. 14. See Aurélie Corne and Laurent Botti, “Benchmarking, attraction et valeur touristique du territoire: une analyse par le secteur hôtelier français,” Management & avenir, no. 84 (2016): 179–96.
  15. 15. This exhibit, titled “Coup de sac!,” was held at MUDAC, Lausanne, from June 19 to October 6, 2013.
  16. 16. Werner Sombart was one of the first economic historians to stress the importance of the luxury economy in the formation of capitalism, especially in Italy: see Werner Sombart, The Future of Capitalism (Berlin-Charlottenburg: Buchholz & Weisswange, 1932), and, for an interesting commentary on Sombart’s positions and the often moralizing critics who opposed him, see Guido Guerzoni, Apollo and Vulcan: The Art Markets in Italy, 1400–1700, trans. Amanda George (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, [2006] 2011), pp. 11–19.
  17. 17. On the moral debates that accompanied the development of luxury in the eighteenth century, see Audrey Provost, Le luxe, les Lumières et la Révolution (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2014).
  18. 18. A document published monthly by the Comité Colbert, an association of company leaders founded in 1954 to promote the French luxury industry.
  19. 19. Lettre du Comité Colbert, no. 33, March–April 1984.
  20. 20. Ibid.
  21. 21. See Judith Ickowicz, Le droit après la dématérialisation de l’oeuvre d’art (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2013).
  22. 22. See Anne Jourdain’s work on artisanal art: “Réconcilier l’art et l’artisanat: une étude de l’artisanat d’art,” Sociologie de l’art, 21 (2012): 21–42, and “La construction sociale de la singularité: une stratégie entrepreneuriale des artisans d’art,” Revue française de socio-économie, 6 (2010): 13–30.
  23. 23. For a perspective on the luxury industry that is both internal and critical, see Marie-Claude Sicard, Luxe, mensonge et marketing (Paris: Pearson, 2010).
  24. 24. On the analysis of these techniques and on their use in marketing and in politics, see Christian Salmon, Storytelling: la machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formatter les esprits (Paris: La Découverte, 2007).
  25. 25. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin Books, [1899] 1979).
  26. 26. Our analysis is based primarily on the annual financial reports for fiscal year 2013 (published in 2014) of the two companies: LVMH, Consolidated Financial Statements, December 31, translation of the French financial documents, fiscal year ended December 31, 2013 (hereafter LVMH 2013), www.lvmh.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/lvmh_2013_financial_documents_va.pdf, and Kering, Investor Presentation 2013 (hereafter Kering 2013), www.kering.com/en/finance/publications/. The 2018 figures come from the annual financial reports published by each company in 2019: LVMH, Consolidated Financial Statements, December 31, 2018, https://r.lvmh-static.com/uploads/2019/02/comptes-consolides_lvmh_va.pdf and the 2018 financial document, www.kering.com/en/finance/publications/.
  27. 27. Alessandro Schiliro, Luxury Apparel Brands: World Market Analysis, 2013–2018 Trends, Xerfi Global, December 2013, p. 34.
  28. 28. Kering 2013, p. 16.
  29. 29. Ibid.; Kering gives its source as Capgemini/RBC 2013 World Wealth Report.
  30. 30. LVMH, Consolidated Financial Statements 2018, and Kering, 2018 financial document.
  31. 31. Kering 2013, p. 206.
  32. 32. LVMH 2013, p. 31.
  33. 33. On the methods used for the financial evaluation of brands, see Adel Beldi, Édouard Chastenet, Jean-Claude Dupuis, and Mohamed Talfi, “Pertinence des méthodes d’évaluation financière des marques: une étude empirique internationale,” Revue française de gestion, no. 207 (2010): 153–68.
  34. 34. Kering 2013, p. 10.
  35. 35. Ibid., p. 9.
  36. 36. Ibid.
  37. 37. Ibid., p. 22.
  38. 38. Ibid., p. 38.
  39. 39. Ibid., p. 34.
  40. 40. Louis Vuitton exhibit, “Volez, Voguez, Voyagez,” Grand Palais, Paris, December 4, 2015–February 21, 2016.
  41. 41. Ibid.
  42. 42. In 2014, Nathalie Moureau, Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux, and Marion Vidal carried out a survey among contemporary art collectors that received 322 responses. (It is difficult, as the authors acknowledge, to evaluate the extent to which their sample is “representative” of collectors in general, since there is no agreed-on population of collectors with administratively defined contours.) On the basis of this survey, they constructed a “typology” of collectors, identifying “quasi-professional collectors,” with collections that include more than 200 pieces whose maximum annual purchase price can exceed 200,000 euros, “invested collectors,” with collections that include from 100 to 200 works whose acquisition prices vary from 10,000 to 50,000 euros, “steady” collectors, and “independent collectors.” These collectors, especially those in the first two categories, frequent the art world assiduously, have connections with galleries, or visit workshops (in the case of 88 percent of the collectors in these categories) in order to spot “promising” artists who are not yet highly rated but who have a chance, they think, to rise in the more or less near future; according to the authors, “the majority of collectors – including the wealthiest,” declare that they are “incapable of following the steep climb of the prices associated with the current workings of the art market.” See Nathalie Moureau, Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux, and Marion Vidal, “Collectionneurs d’art contemporain: des acteurs méconnus de la vie artistique,” Cultures études, 1/1 (2015): 1–20.
  43. 43. See Pierre Cabanne, Les grands collectionneurs, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 2004), pp. 365–79.
  44. 44. See Nathalie Heinich and Roberta Shapiro, eds, De l’artification: enquêtes sur le passage à l’art (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2012).
  45. 45. The concept of immortality is invoked here in the sense Hannah Arendt gave it in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 167–74.
  46. 46. There are numerous examples in the work of Francis Haskell, who shows the importance of the role played by collectors in the formation of judgments of taste. See Francis Haskell, L’amateur d’art, trans. Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1997) [a collection of essays published in English between 1981 and 1994]; Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); and The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
  47. 47. On the notion of “regime of singularity,” see Nathalie Heinich, L’élite artiste: excellence et singularité en régime démocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).
  48. 48. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
  49. 49. Raymonde Moulin, L’artiste, l’institution et le marché (Paris: Flammarion, 1992).
  50. 50. In the case of old works that are already widely recognized, works that Moulin calls “established paintings,” one way of dealing with the growing scarcity of works on offer, which may extend all the way to their exhaustion, consists in “rediscovering” – that is, “recuperating” – the work of previously neglected artists: see Raymonde Moulin, The French Art Market: A Sociological View, abridged trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 144–51; for a more extensive discussion, see Raymonde Moulin, Le marché de la peinture en France (Paris: Minuit, 1967), pp. 417–32.
  51. 51. This process was attested, for example, by the exhibit “Modernités plurielles, 1905–1970,” presented at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2013–14 under the direction of Catherine Grenier. This vast exhibit aimed to sketch out a new version of art history by placing alongside famous paintings, veritable icons of modern art, works by peripheral artists that had been kept in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art, in certain cases without ever having been shown to the public. A number of those canvases had been created by artists who had more recently become sought after by emerging collectors in their countries of origin.
  52. 52. As the survey by Moureau, Sagot-Duvauroux, and Vidal has shown, this is how the collectors most committed to their activity seek ties with institutions, for example by collaborating on projected exhibits and working with exhibit organizers (35 percent collaborate in this way), by participating in the publication of catalogs of artists present in their collections (33 percent), by joining a society of friends of a given museum (60 percent), by lending works to museums (27 percent), or by serving on museum boards or purchasing committees (14 percent). The fact that “their artistic choices are confirmed by a museum” confers on them an “authority” that spills over onto the estimation of the metaprices of all the works they possess. As the authors of the survey also note, “the simple fact of belonging to a purchasing committee of an institution affords a power to influence” (Moureau et al., “Collectionneurs d’art contemporain”).
  53. 53. See Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, [2010] 2012).
  54. 54. Interview with Benjamin Leperchey, December 2015. The idea was expressed in similar terms by the same highly placed official in an article: “Luxury is an ambassador for France abroad: if the major French houses profit from the aura of France to ‘nourish’ their brands, the reverse is undeniably true.” The Comité stratégique de filière (CSF) of the fashion and luxury industries thus includes, in addition to representatives of professional federations, representatives of those who “give the orders” – that is, the major luxury houses such as Balenciaga, Dior, Hermès or Vuitton – and representatives of government agencies such as the Public Investment Bank (BPI) or the Ministry of Culture and Communication. See Benjamin Leperchey, “Le Comité stratégique de filière (CSF) des industries de la mode et du luxe,” Annales des Mines – Réalités industrielles, no. 4 (2013): 14–19.
  55. 55. David Harvey, “The Art of Rent: Globalization and the Commodification of Culture,” in Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 404, 396.
  56. 56. Ibid., p. 408.