'The World As It Goes' from the Pinault Collection opens at the Stock Exchange

Anyone reading this article will almost certainly have purchased a luxury item produced at the Kering Group. A unique exhibition, 'The World As It Goes', allows you to discover how its founder spent his profits. It turns out very wisely.

The world as it goes, or The World As It Goes, which opens Wednesday on the Stock Exchange, is entirely selected from the Pinault Collection, assembled by billionaire François Pinault. It is an atypical set of works by artists who try to express their reaction to a world that sometimes changes violently, and a testimony to the infallible vision of this French businessman.

The World Today is also often a highly politicized commentary on a rapidly changing world and humanity's varying reactions to change. Prominently displayed is a quote from Voltaire: “Irresponsible mortals! How can so much baseness and so much greatness, so many virtues and so many vices come together?

François Pinault started buying art even before he bought his first luxury brand. Today, Kering, the listed company controlled by his family and run by his son François-Henri, is an empire that includes such luminous brands as Gucci, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and Alexander McQueen.

And there are luxury items within this exhibition, including a supercar, the damaged Ferrari Dino, although destroyed in a car accident and placed on a white pedestal by artist Bertrand Lavier. A cataclysmic vision, in a section titled making ruinswhere the idea of ​​destruction becomes a way of opposing authority.

Many of the works on display are luxurious due to their high price. Like a brilliant 10-foot-tall steel Balloon Dog in magenta by Jeff Koons, a similar work in orange sold for $58.4 million at Christie's New York, a world record for a sculpture. Koons's art hound prowled inside a section called Art, love and politics.where one wall displayed Damien Hirst's famous cabinet of curiosities titled The fragile truth. A stainless steel and glass cabinet full of medications and pharmaceuticals that Damien Hirst created after discovering the immense amount of prescription medications his grandmother took daily. For Hirst, science is our new modern religion, designed to avoid death for as long as possible.

Politics also plays a role, especially in a pile of crisp white shirts worn by plantation workers through which a steel shaft is driven. Entitled Entitled by Doris Salcedo is a reference to two massacres carried out on banana plantations in her native Colombia.

Even the most beautiful works of art have a sense of menace. Like Peter Doig's stunning oil painting of a man in white shorts appearing to dance on the water on a tropical paradise beach in Trinidad. A figure that the artist came across, but upon closer inspection it turned out that he was killing a pelican.

The human comedy of life seen with black humor in the largest room, where the Chinese duo formed by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu created a series of life-size sculptures of very old and jaded men: from retired officers, withered writers or pilgrims to Mecca. – who wander around in automatic wheelchairs. All before two magnificent monumental black and white tapestries of a collage of artists and intellectuals by the Polish artist Goshka Macuga, seen in front of the Darul Aman Palace and the Orangerie Museum in Kassel.

Throughout, artists question the very meaning of a painting, such as Anne Imhof, a German known for her works of performance art, the first of which showed two boxers righting themselves on a table dance pole. His still life is actually a punching bag hanging in front of a window overlooking Les Halles and the Pompidou Centre. A reminder that while the center of the art world may have moved to New York after World War II, the city with the largest collection of museums and art institutes is still Paris.

One of the most recent was built inside the Stock Exchange thanks to a 50-year lease from the city of Paris. Paid for in full by Pinault Sr., 87, and skillfully restored by Japanese master architect Tadao Ando, ​​who added a massive interior circular wall to the central circular trading hall, where Korean artist Kimsooja installed a perfectly reflective floor called Breathe – Constellation.

Who, since retiring in 2003 and handing the reins of Kering to his son, has, by all indications, taken a hands-off approach to his group of fashion brands. No wonder his collection, so strikingly displayed in this exhibition, keeps him quite busy.