2023-04-18 11:57:11
The cross : The major French luxury groups are also major patrons of the restoration of Notre-Dame. What can they expect from the cathedral?
Olivier Assouly : The major luxury groups, LVMH and Kering, expressed their interest in saving the cathedral during the financial and media outbidding that followed the fire of April 15, 2019. Their source of prosperity seems a priori too far from what Notre-Dame represents to this day so that we can suspect them of exploiting its misfortunes. How to explain then that they pay such an expensive homage to the emblem of a diminished Christian religion, in a largely secularized country?
What put me on the trail of a possible link between the world of luxury and cathedrals, despite everything, was a text by Georges Bataille (1897-1962). Bataille highlights the transformations of luxury, which he attributes to the rise of capitalism: the transfer of a luxury of medieval origin, embodied by cathedrals, to a luxury of “couture houses”. Bataille equates the cathedral with a bygone age of luxury, reconfigured and replaced by that of luxury brands. His reflections allowed me to question the “return” of luxury groups to the cathedral today.
For what reasons can Notre-Dame interest the world of luxury?
OA : Luxury groups must constantly worry about justifying the symbolic and therefore market value of the objects they market, because these are products (clothing, bags, accessories, etc.) that are basically downgraded, linked to the body, to narcissism, and which wear out, degrade, in comparison to art. They have nothing of the monumentality of a cathedral.
The cathedral serves to enhance the symbolic value of these objects, by inscribing them in an almost timeless history. The rhetoric of luxury already draws on a reference to the past conferring authority on its products. This type of discourse goes hand in hand with a form of protectionism, by prohibiting entry into the luxury market to new entrants who do not have this past and this history.
How does this capture of symbolic value work?
OA : It can take place because the religious building is downgraded in some way and the golden age of Catholicism is relatively over. From the beginning of the 20th century, the question of the future and the reassignment of religious buildings arose: Proust then advanced the hypothesis that churches and cathedrals would be less and less places of worship and more and more more culturally preempted.
It is because Notre-Dame today has an essentially cultural value that it can symbolically fit into the horizon of luxury brands. Their operation does not consist in taking the building for its religious or sacred character, but for its cultural value, linked to a certain number of common denominators which are craftsmanship, the excellence of craftsmanship, monumentality, a a certain relationship to the sacred, within the framework of a scheme of cultural appropriation, like the purchase by LVMH of the name of the town of Vendôme.
Is this an assumed instrumentalization?
OA : I did not seek to describe a conscious or calculated strategy. Rather, I claim to shed light on a mechanism. Whether he is conscious or unconscious does not really matter.
When the LVMH group has its models pose in museums, in front of paintings by Monet or Joan Mitchell, is it in the same vein?
OA : Yes quite. Moreover, a conflict has just opposed the Joan Mitchell Foundation to the Louis Vuitton Foundation which makes manifest the process that I am describing. In this case, the Vuitton Foundation (who presented the exhibition « Monet-Mitchell », NDLR) used works by the painter in its advertisements, against the will of the Joan Mitchell Foundation and without its consent. If luxury brands assert the disinterestedness of their foundations, this case shows how cultural and economic issues are in reality difficult to separate.
What can communities of believers do to avoid this symbolic capture? Is it partly controllable?
OA : I think there is not much that believers can do. This transfer is only possible because the building has lost a large part of its religious vitality, but this reuse is also linked to the very nature of the building, to the disproportion between its monumental form and what we done there.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed out that one can translate one’s religious devotion into a simple barn. In fact, the cathedral is disproportionate to liturgical use. This means that the cathedral is structurally a figure available for symbolic reinvestments. He is a figure who, symbolically, never stops going beyond the religious framework. But we can project something other than the “values” of luxury.
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