After Paris, Bordeaux and Les Baux-de-Provence, Culturespaces continues its conquest of the world by installing its Hall of Lights ( hall des lumieres) in Manhattan.
Ah, New York! Here we are in the Tribeca district. Wall Street is a few blocks away, the One World Trade Center a handful of minutes. In the streets, tourists come across men in a hurry in suits and women trotting on huge heels. There, opposite City Hall, the intimidating historic headquarters of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank. Entering here gives the feeling of being Harry Potter discovering Gringotts, the wizarding bank. Its high columns, its wooden counters, its high ceilings decorated in a Beaux-Arts style give the building an extraordinary presence.
It is in this bank, which once accompanied Irish migrants on their arrival in the United States, that Culturespaces has set up its Hall of Lights. Like the place, these spaces are steeped in history… Behind them, Bruno Monnier, the founder of Culturespaces, convinced that art should be accessible to everyone. “Initially, I wanted to invent a new way of managing cultural establishments and organizing exhibitions,” he confides. With him, the Hôtel de Caumont in Aix-en-Provence and the Jacquemart-André museum in Paris come alive with new events . Concern: “We quickly realized that only 25% of the population comes to museums. Whatever we do, it's always the same audiences, and we quickly found ourselves to be places of art among others. »
In 2010, Bruno Monnier got wind of a call for tenders for quarry management in Baux-de-Provence. Screenings with musical background are organized there from time to time, and the city wishes to develop this activity. Culturespaces wins the contract but has no control over the digital practice. Then enters the scene Gianfranco Iannuzzi, artistic director who has some notions on the subject. The two men decided to revolutionize the genre and to no longer simply project images of works but to make videos of them. “It's like staging a show, describes Iannuzzi. You have to define actions, tell a story through paintings and sounds. In 2012, the Carrières des Lumières opened and, unprecedented in twenty years of experience, Bruno Monnier saw attendance increase each month.
It was the ideal solution for the art to be visible to as many people as possible.
An unusual, more family-oriented, more popular public comes to confront art. “We immediately thought that we had to decline the concept, says Monnier. Especially since it saved us from rowing for three years to have paintings loaned to us, to insure them, to transport them. It was the ideal solution for the art to be visible to as many people as possible. Because organizing an exhibition requires a lot of time and investment. Bringing Botticelli to Jacquemart-André this year required 400,000 euros just to transport the canvases and 1 million euros for production.
To avoid these inconveniences, Bruno Monnier, six years after the Carrières, opened L'Atelier des Lumières in Paris, a space intended to host temporary digital art exhibitions. The million visitors were quickly reached. A craze that has not escaped investors. Korea and Dubai have landed, wanting their share of the digital pie too. Sold ! The Bunker of Lights opened in Jeju in 2018, The Infinity of Lights, in Dubai in 2021. These franchises must meet the only criterion imposed: “lights” must appear in the name… and in French! The rest is provided by the house. Because projecting Van Gogh or Monet requires top-flight equipment: a hundred projectors, unique software in the world to manage the 12 TB of storage, speakers with impeccable sound… “Nobody knew how to coordinate all that! We have an installer who comes to train the local teams and, if there is a technical problem, the equipment is sent to France so that we take care of it ourselves, explains the manager of Culturespaces. We have had bad surprises in the past…”
And they can be expensive. It was necessary to pay 10 million euros for the installation in Paris, 20 million dollars for that of New York. A colossal but profitable investment because, as Monnier wished, exhibitions can tour the world with a simple click. Without any additional cost. No image rights are even required if the artist died more than seventy years ago.
For New York, its last opening, Culturespaces did not have an easy task. It will have been necessary to survey the Big Apple in length, in width and across before finding a wall on the scale of its projectors. Church in Harlem, fish market in Brooklyn… and, finally, this deserted bank. The problem: the sleeping beauty dates from the beginning of 1900 and is classified as a historical monument. Each modified plot had to be the subject of endless paperwork, slowing down the work. And allowing the competition, in this period of time, to offer ersatz digital exhibitions.
Three years later, the Hall finally opens its doors with Klimt on view. Far from the museum district but in a highly touristic corridor and at an almost unbeatable price: 30 dollars. The double of Paris but a trifle compared to the surrounding attractions, at more than 50 dollars. “The price should not be a subject. We want people to come with their families, to come back. We want to settle down... not make a money machine out of it. Culturespaces has chosen IMG as a special partner in the United States, a global entertainment group that has helped with the financing and is in charge of promoting the place. Easy mission for a show of this magnitude. Imagine this unreal building dressed in images of Klimt, the warm yellows, the sparkling greens invading these immense columns, these floors with superb mosaics, these incredible stained glass windows. Classical music sometimes animates, sometimes lulls the whole. Magical. In the basement, the more intimate space offers the same spectacle: the visitor remains for hours, admiring these delicate features, between the pillars covered with mirrors and the bank vault.
Paris Match: Florence Duranton
Art expert: https://www.vwart.com/