alain elkann interviews
Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto

BREAKING THE MIRROR. Michelangelo Pistoletto is one of the most celebrated artists in Europe.  Born in Biella, Italy, in 1933 and a leading figure of the radical Italian Arte Povera movement, Pistoletto created his first Mirror Paintings in 1961–62. These influential...

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James Snyder

James Snyder

BUILDING RESONANT CONNECTIONS. James Snyder was Deputy Director of MoMA from 1986 to 1996. He then led the Israel Museum in Jerusalem through 22 years of dramatic growth, securing its stature as one of the world's foremost museums. In 2023 Snyder became Helen...

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Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei

COMPLETELY FRESH. Ai Weiwei is a contemporary artist, writer and humanitarian activist. Born in China in 1957, from 1981 to 1993 he lived in the United States. He currently has three exhibitions in New York:  Child's Play is at the Vito Schnabel Gallery at both 455 W...

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Norman Rosenthal

Norman Rosenthal

STILL PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES. Sir Norman Rosenthal celebrated his 80th birthday on November 8th 2024. ​A curator and art historian, he was Exhibitions Officer at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and for many years...

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Joseph Rykwert

Joseph Rykwert

IN MEMORIAM. Joseph Rykwert CBE died on October 18th 2024 at the age of 98. One of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation, Rykwert spent most of his working life in the UK and the USA. He was the Paul Philippe Cret Professor Emeritus of...

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Lorenzo Fiaschi

Lorenzo Fiaschi

CONTINUING THE RENAISSANCE. Lorenzo Fiaschi is one of the three friends who founded the very prestigious Galleria Continua art gallery in San Gimignano, the town with a fantastic and famous skyline of medieval towers in Tuscany, Italy.You can listen to the podcast of...

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Karla Otto

Karla Otto

BRAVE AND DETERMINED. Karla Otto built her eponymous full-service brand-building communications agency into an organisation which handles press, communications strategies and events for many global brands and operates from 15 cities across the world. Today her company...

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Thomas Persson

Thomas Persson

AN HOMAGE TO FRIENDSHIP. Thomas Persson is a creative director, editor and brand consultant. His understanding of fashion, culture and corporate identity is a resource for global fashion and beauty companies in their visual communication and brand building projects....

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Erdem Moralioglu

Erdem Moralioglu

CELEBRATING INDIVIDUAL SELF-EXPRESSION. Erdem Moralıoğlu is a British fashion designer and the eponymous founder of London-based fashion label Erdem, which he established in 2005. His Spring Summer 2025 collection was shown at the British Museum’s South Entrance...

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Amin Jaffer

Amin Jaffer

EXPLORING HYBRIDITY. Dr Amin Jaffer is Director of The Al Thani Collection. He is responsible for working with the Centre des Monuments Nationaux and a global team in the creation of a museum space for The Al Thani Collection at the Hôtel de la Marine, Paris.  He is...

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Massimo Piombo

Massimo Piombo

DOES LUXURY BELONG TO HISTORY? Massimo Piombo is the Creative Director of the Italian clothing company OVS. Born in Liguria, where he still lives, as a boy he preferred the sea, architecture and romantic literature. His first important trip as an adult was to...

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Christine Macel

Christine Macel

CRUCIAL QUESTIONS AT A PIVOTAL PARIS MUSEUM. Christine Macel is an art historian and curator who began her career at the French Ministry of Culture as an inspector of artistic creation at the Delegation of Fine Arts. Christine established and ran the Contemporary and...

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Kamel Mennour

Kamel Mennour

WRITING NEW CHAPTERS. Kamel Mennour is an Algerian-born French art dealer. In 1999 he founded Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris. Today Mennour is a contemporary art gallery representing over forty artists with four exhibition locations in Paris.You can listen to the...

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Maria Balshaw

Maria Balshaw

PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES. Maria Balshaw is Director of Tate since June 2017. The author of Gathering of Strangers: Why Museums Matter, published by Tate Publishing in June 2024, previously Maria was Director of the Whitworth, University of Manchester; Director of...

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Leonardo Ferragamo

Leonardo Ferragamo

REINTERPRETING HERITAGE IN THE NEW WORLD. Leonardo Ferragamo, the fifth son of Salvatore and Wanda Ferragamo, is the Chairman of Salvatore Ferragamo S.p.A. since 2021. He studied economics at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), then at Columbia University. He started...

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Amanda Levete

Amanda Levete

AN ARCHITECTURE OF OPTIMISM. Amanda Levete CBE is a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Stirling Prize winning architect and founder and principal of AL_A, an international award-winning architecture studio in London. Since its formation in 2009, AL_A has...

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Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago

A FIGHTER FOR EGALITARIANISM AND JUSTICE. Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, cultural historian, and educator who lives and works in New Mexico, USA. In 2018 she was named one of Time Magazine’s most influential people, and she has garnered an enduring...

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Charles Zana

Charles Zana

CLASSIC WITH A MODERN TWIST. Charles Zana is a highly sensitive architect who imagines each project through the lens of a French lifestyle. He is also a passionate collector like his father, and has done in-depth research on the great Italian design masters of the...

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Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare

THE ARTIST IS UTOPIC. Yinka Shonibare CBE RA is a celebrated British artist whose work explores cultural identity, colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. His show Suspended States is at Serpentine from 12th April until...

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Jennifer Clement

Jennifer Clement

THE PROMISED PARTY. Jennifer Clement is the President Emerita of PEN International and the author of multiple books, including Widow Basquiat and Gun Love. The recipient of many awards, her books have twice been a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Under her leadership...

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Minsuk Cho

Minsuk Cho

ENJOYING A NEW CHALLENGE. Minsuk Cho is the South Korean architect who has envisioned the Serpentine Pavilion 2024, the 23rd pavilion in the series, in London’s Kensington Gardens. It is titled Archipelagic Void as a unique void surrounded by a constellation of...

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Angelo Crespi

Angelo Crespi

A GREAT MUSEUM OF THE WORLD. Angelo Crespi succeeded James Bradburne as the Director General of the Pinacoteca di Brera in January 2024. The main public gallery for paintings in Milan is an outgrowth of the cultural program of the Brera Academy. It shares the site in...

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Vera Michalski-Hoffmann

Vera Michalski-Hoffmann

FOR THE SAKE OF THE WRITTEN WORD. Vera Michalski-Hoffmann spent her childhood in the Camargue, France, then studied at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. Together with her husband Jan Michalski, a Polish native, she founded the publishing company Éditions...

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Sergio Roger

Sergio Roger

SCULPTING WITH FABRIC. Sergio Roger graduated from Berlin’s Art Academy (UdK) where he studied Sculpture and New Media Art. He has received several important awards and his work has been exhibited in international galleries such as Galleria Rossana Orlandi and...

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Andrea Califano

Andrea Califano

EDUCATING THE IMMUNE RESPONSE. Andrea Califano is President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York. He is the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and also holds appointments in the Departments of...

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Victoria Siddall

Victoria Siddall

ART, SUSTAINABILITY & FUNDRAISING. Victoria Siddall is a non-executive Director of Frieze, a co-founder and trustee of Gallery Climate Coalition, and the Founding Director of Murmur, a new initiative that enables the worlds of visual arts and music to play their...

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Graham Steele

Graham Steele

GOING THROUGH STAGES. Graham Steele is a private art dealer, adviser and collector who lives between Los Angeles and Brazil with his husband, Ulysses de Santi, and their young daughter, Asher. Born in rural Vermont, Steele attended Georgetown University, Washington...

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Joel Mesler

Joel Mesler

HERE TO SERVE. Joel Mesler is an artist whose career in the art world started as an art dealer and gallerist.  A Master of Fine Arts graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, Mesler worked for almost two decades as an art dealer in Los Angeles and New York City,...

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Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen

WHO WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE. Sir Steve McQueen CBE is a British film director, film producer, screenwriter, and video artist. Over the last 30 years he has created some of the most innovative works of moving image designed for gallery spaces. He has also directed...

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Ambrogio Beccaria

Ambrogio Beccaria

POWER IS NOTHING WITHOUT CONTROL. Ambrogio Beccaria was born in Milan in 1991 and gained a degree in nautical engineering. In 2019 he became the first Italian in the history of sailing to win  the Mini-Transat – the historic solo competition that crosses the Atlantic...

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// FEATURED

Money Must Stay in the Family

The plot of Money Must Stay in the Family, unfolds around the family matriarch’s last will and traces the story of an upper class Jewish family from Turin, the fictional Ottolenghis. The multigenerational saga begins with the flight from Mussolini’s Racial Laws of 1938 and continues with the arrival in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the dispersion from New York to Rome, Paris, Tuscany, South America, and Jerusalem.

// PUBLICATIONS

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