Maurizio Cattelan is a renowned – and highly sought after – Italian conceptual artist.
His fame skyrocketed when, in December 2019, he presented at Art Basel Miami a banana attached to one of the walls of the renowned fair with a piece of adhesive tape, a work valued at $120,000 that ended up being devoured by a
performer
before the event was over, without even giving the fruit time to rot.
Other works of his, no less controversial, are more durable.
And they are the ones that could have opened a box of thunder that threatened to shake the entire art world: the French sculptor Daniel Druet, who produced, under instructions from Cattelan, the wax figures that formed an essential part of several of his most renowned works , demanded that their copyright be recognized.
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The French justice has dismissed his demand this Friday.
A claim that, according to experts in the art world, beyond monetary issues (Druet asked for five million euros), would have "opened the door to the disqualification of conceptual art", as they warned in a column published in
Le Monde
last May .
more than sixty gallery owners, museum directors, curators or collectors.
"If Druet wins, all the artists will be denounced and it will be the end of conceptual art in France," Emmanuel Perrotin, a Cattelan gallery owner since the 1990s and one of those sued by the French sculptor, highly reputed among experts for his hyper-realistic figures of wax and other materials, but widely unknown beyond his circle.
The sentence is forceful.
Not only does it declare Druet's claims inadmissible, but it also condemns him to pay 20,000 euros as compensation for court costs to two of the defendants: the Perrotin Gallery, which commissioned the figures on Cattelan's behalf, and the Museo de la Currency of Paris, which exhibited a retrospective of Cattelan in 2016 without including Druet's name in the sample.
But for Perrotin's defender, Pierre-Olivier Sur, the ruling is even more important because, as he explained to journalists at his Paris office after receiving the court's ruling, he makes jurisprudence, for the first time, on what is art. concept, its authors and its limits.
And this type of art, indicate the judges of the section specialized in intellectual property that took on the case, is not limited to the figures themselves —which are those that Druet created for Cattelan—, but to the “staging” of the work, the installation as a whole and not individual elements of it.
Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan poses next to his artwork "Untitled" (2001) in 2016 in Paris. Chesnot (GETTY)
“It is not disputed that the precise guidelines for the staging of the wax figures in a specific configuration, especially in regard to their positioning within the exhibition spaces with the intention of playing with the emotions of the public (surprise, empathy, amusement, repulsion, etc.) only emanate from him [Cattelan]”, highlights the ruling.
“Daniel Druet is not capable, nor did he seek to do so, of assuming the slightest participation in the decisions related to the scenic device for staging these effigies (choice of the building and the size of the rooms that house a certain character, direction of the look, lighting, even destruction of a window or parquet to make the staging more realistic and more striking),
“We have won in law and in substance”, celebrated the South lawyer.
"For the first time, the judges have defined in law what conceptual art is and have drawn the legal consequences on who is the author, etc.", he explained to journalists.
In his opinion, this sentence is "decisive" because "it can constitute jurisprudence to define conceptual art, which had never been legally defined", at least in France, he specified.
“Beyond this decision, it is all conceptual art that is protected”, also valued Law Professor Pierre-Yves Gaultier.
An extreme that is denied by Druet's lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Bourgeois, who, however, indicated by telephone that he has not yet decided with his client if they will appeal.
Art installation by Italian Maurizio Cattelan, 'La Nona Ora', in which the figure of Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite appears, in Paris, in October 2017. Chesnot (GETTY)
Druet claimed that he was the one who made many of the Italian's visions a reality, who on numerous occasions has admitted that he does not know how to paint or sculpt.
“I am an artist because I was not good as a forger”, he ironized in an interview with this newspaper in 2018. The Frenchman, who collaborated with the Italian between 1999 and 2006, is the hand (of labor, more than that?) behind even nine pieces commissioned by Cattelan, two of them key in the consolidation of fame, and the bank account, from the Italian:
La Nona Ora,
which shows Pope John Paul II crushed by a meteorite and was sold for three million dollars (about 2.7 million euros), and
Him,
which represents Hitler kneeling and praying and which also had a hefty price: 17 million (15.8 million euros).
Although the pontiff and the genocidal tyrant —of which the French sculptor still keeps a replica in his workshop in Saint-Ouen, on the outskirts of Paris— were made by Druet, it is Cattelan who devised the works and gave the French the instructions to make the figures.
The precision of these instructions, which the Frenchman's lawyer described as vague during the trial, was one of the keys to the process and the final decision of the judges.
"I have kicked the anthill," Druet told EL PAÍS in an interview in May, referring to what he describes as the "system" in force: that of conceptual artists who claim full authorship when a part of the work It is made by other artists or artisans like Druet himself.
The judges, however, have covered that "anthill" again.
And the art world breathes a sigh of relief.