The Spectacle of Mark Rothko

To get to the Louis Vuitton Foundation, you must pass by the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a historic amusement park built under Napoleon III in the Bois de Boulogne, a huge green area in the sixteenth arrondissement on the western border of Paris, one of the  city’s most historically affluent districts. It was renovated by the LVMH group in 2018 in a costly operation that restored most of the historic buildings and attractions in a steampunk, retro-futuristic guise.

Its refurbishment began four years after the opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which was instead built for one of our present-day emperors: Bernard Arnault, the world’s richest person worth $233 billion according to Forbes. Designed by Frank Gehry and financed by the LVMH group and its subsidiaries, the foundation cost almost 900 million dollars and is run as a legally separate, nonprofit entity as part of LVMH's mission of “making art and culture accessible to all” — but it’s also very beneficial for tax purposes, which led to an investigation (later dismissed) into the construction of the foundation as a means for committing fraud and tax evasion.