THE contemporary

THE ARTPRICE HEADQUARTERS
The Abode of Chaos houses Artprice.com’s archives of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts,
art books and catalogues from 1700 to the present day, covering 118 million artworks.
knowledge grid disseminating outwards through its
network.
The Abode of Chaos is a “state within a state”, a veritable
kernel of the Republican system.
The duality of my existence as a founder of The
server Group and Artprice (listed on the Paris Euronext
Premier Marché) and my life over the last
25 years as an artist is reflected and complemented
by the duality of the place. The “Organe” Museum,
for its part, is a place where the public are welcome
- an open-air free museum visited each year by
120,000 people who come to see the Demeure’s collection
of thousands of art works, but also to discover
how art lives with proteiform 21st century industry.
The Abode of Chaos is a place where scholars work;
but it is also my personal residence and that of my
clan. Without any concession, I mark each stone,
each roof, each floor, each tree of my works in accordance
with the axium of 09/12/1999.
This duality that confronts my commitment as a
sculptor and author over the last 25 years with my
role as founder of Artprice, The server Group and
its 12 subsidiaries, is often criticised, sometimes violently,
by a conservative and conformist business
community. However this duality does allow me -
assisted by the dream-like atmosphere of the place
- to host the most learned academics and experts
capable of wining in any economic system, and on
any continent. The impressive number and diversity
of the nationalities on the site bears witness to this
new digital Babylon that the Demeure du chaos has
evolved into.
The incisive and pertinent remarks of the French
Financial Markets Authority (AMF) in our now famous
reference documents for the regulated market
translate the evolution of my artistic thought and its
mutation into action in the economic sphere. Certain
regulated agreements between the Abode of
Chaos and the group have become self-fulfilling
prophecies where the power of art invites itself into
the world of finance. My dual approach provides
both spiritual enrichment for the Abode of Chaos -
and material: our 18,000 shareholders…
How can one build, from nothing, Artprice, a mythic
company providing copy for 90% of the global art
market press - without being oneself, both in mind
and in body, an artist with a passion for art history?
The Abode of Chaos is a redoubtable war machine,
a Trojan horse at the heart of the financial markets.
It produces and diffuses unimaginable quantities of
knowledge about the art market, law, the economy
and science, while day and night, our other artists
occupy 9,000 m2 to (re)write - with our artistic viewpoint
- the “history of the world without subtext”.
Our radical deconstruction of the traditional barrier
between living space and work space and of
furniture in these spaces has had an impact on the
2,500 sq.m of offices where The server Group, its
subsidiaries and Artprice are resident. This humanist
approach is shared by the artists and em-
THE contemporary art market REPORT 2015
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