For French entrepreneur and patron Frédéric Jousset, our most irrational ideas can sometimes be the best. That thought has led the 52-year-old thrill seeker to race 170mph endurance cars, cross the Atlantic, climb Everest, battle it out in an army fighter jet French Air Force, but also – and why Artnet News sat down with it – to build a giant museum ship, deploy a fleet of buses to bring 100,000 children to the British Museum and visit the masterpieces of artwork from museums across the country in a truck.
“I wanted to find ways to make art and culture accessible and exciting for as many people as possible, and that’s when I started getting these ideas,” Jousset said, leaning over a small table. at the Café de Flore in Paris. “I saw that the same people were always the ones who went to exhibitions and art fairs. No one had really found the right formula,” he explained.
Jousset takes a shot with art exploring, the international foundation he launched with 4 million euros ($4.4 million) in 2019. The group works in collaboration with local artistic associations and institutions to organize and support projects aimed at attracting new audiences towards culture, and where no idea is on the table. Led from France and London, “we are not stuck between four walls. Our team moves, creates and sometimes fights to get things done. They are activists,” Jousset added. Over time, he hopes, Art Explora “will be to the world of culture what Greenpeace is to the environment”, a “reference on the question of access to culture” and a “movement”.
Rendering of the rear deck of the ArtExplorer boat. ©Art Explora.
The arts NGO also offers a prize for innovative programs from European arts organizations working to engage new audiences; a free online art history course in French and English developed with Sorbonne University; an artist residency in Montmartre; as well as cultural solidarity programs in retirement homes and hospitals led by thousands of volunteers in France and the United Kingdom. its designer, Axel de Beaufort, will embark for Marseille. This is the first leg of a two-year art festival tour of more than 15 countries around the Mediterranean.
The concept for Art Explora came to Jousset in 2019, after surviving his ascent of Everest. Once safely at base camp, he experiences an “awakening” and decides to leave his operational duties at Webhelp, the customer service company he co-founded in 2000 and which made his fortune, listed in 2022 under the name of 143rd in France, worth around 835 million euros ($915 million). Instead, he would dedicate his professional time to expanding cultural reach. “I wanted to change my life,” he said. “I had come to the end of a cycle.”
In 2020, he created a $119 million (€100 million) impact investment fund for arts and culture, called ArtNova, the proceeds of which help support Art Explora. Jousset said he donates around $7.64 million (€7 million) a year to the foundation. He also owns artistic publications, Fine Arts & Co. And Art Daily, and has been actively involved in cultural patronage since 2005, when he donated 1.09 million dollars (1 million euros) to the Louvre. It was a rare feat for a 35-year-old Parisian, and the museum quickly put it in the spotlight. This led to other prominent roles in French art institutions, and Jousset was eventually tasked with driving the country’s success Cultural Pass youth program.
“Art has played an important role in my life”, by developing creativity, self-confidence, aesthetic judgment and human relations, analyzes Jousset, who is also writing a book on the subject. Raised by a father who worked in finance and a conservative mother in the design department of the Center Pompidou, Jousset remembers how he used to go to the museum to see his mother. “It gave me this virus, and I wish it was contagious,” he said.
But how best to distribute it? Contemporary art museums are already not lacking, with their regulars. “I needed to take side roads, to reinvent new cultural proposals around a few strong ideas. And the first thing to remember is if people aren’t coming to you, you have to come to them,” Jousset said.
With a focus on engagement, participation and technological innovation, Art Explora seeks “alternative entry points” to the arts, “because we have noticed that many people do not feel comfortable with arts and culture when presented in a top-down approach,” Jousset explained later. Their first gesture is the European Art Explora Prize – Academy of Fine Arts rewarding cultural projects that challenge the status quo. The winners receive up to $54,600 (€50,000) and included the Museum of Ixelles in Brussels, for their program of lending a work of art to neighboring households in a socially diverse neighborhood for a few days. More recently, Madrid’s Teatro Real was awarded for its traveling outdoor opera truck in Spain.
As its programs continue to expand, Art Explora faces challenges. “We invent completely new things that don’t exist. So we have all the issues you have with early attempts,” Jousset said. Getting permission to take national treasures on the road is one. The process can be particularly difficult in the UK, where security protocols can be “drastic”, Jousset said. There, his organization has partnered with the Tate for their Art Explora Mobile Museum truck, bringing the ‘Radical Landscapes’ exhibition to the Liverpool area this month.
Mobile Museum of Art Explora. Photo by Peter Byrne/PA Wire.
“I think we have shown that the [museum] truck is safe, it works,” said Jousset, who feels confident about its development. The truck works in collaboration with MuMo, creator of the French mobile museum-truck concept founded in 2011 by Ingrid Brochard. However, the conditions on the Artexplorer museum ship are not suitable for the conservation and exhibition of physical art, so the catamaran will offer a digital exhibition and a film made in collaboration with the Louvre. Physical works of art from neighboring institutions will be exhibited simultaneously on the adjacent harbor in a temporary pavilion. “My belief is that boats fascinate people,” said Jousset, who hopes the massive catamaran will work as an “eye-catcher”, drawing crowds to the duo, land and sea festival.
At Café de Flore, while rubbish was still piling up around the French capital from striking sanitation workers taking part in the ongoing protests against the raising of the retirement age, Jousset was speaking earnestly and was all ears. Dressed in his signature black mandarin collar jacket with invisible zippers that he had worn the night before to host the packed grand opening of a new cultural space he renovated and now runs, called Hangar Y, in the south -west of Paris, Jousset presented the insecure James Bond French-style WHO “rarely shows excessive modesty“, according to the French media. The world said the philanthropist “dreams of being the new prince of the French art world”. A claim he categorically rejects, while feeling the need to prioritize the French art scene over any other.
“I hope to develop something that is self-contained and continues after me,” Jousset said of Art Explora. He added that the “secret” of his achievements is to “know how to surround yourself with people who perform, love what they do and do it well”.
As for talking about favoritism because of his close ties to the French president, Jousset insisted, “these projects are totally foreign to any type of political agenda linked to the president. In three years [Macron] won’t be president, but in 30 years Art Explora will still be there.
More trending stories:
Follow Artnet News on Facebook:
Want to stay one step ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to receive breaking news, revealing interviews and incisive reviews that move the conversation forward.
