Guillaume Cerutti: Passion, Profit and Power in the Art World

September 2025, FT Chinese Columnist Fanyu Lin

“I began at the Ministry of the Economy and Finance, because it is the most powerful in France. But even there, I chose to specialize in culture. In France, the non-commercial cultural field is of great importance.”

In this installment of the Global Leadership Conversation series, I spoke with Guillaume Cerutti in his roles as Chairman of the Board of Christie’s and President of the Pinault Collection, positions that place him at the very center of today’s global art world. To follow his path is to watch the supposed border between public duty and private enterprise collapse under the weight of a passion for art. But what happens when passion collides with power, and when profit hovers in the background?

The Public Servant Who Crossed the Divide

Guillaume Cerutti’s career reads like a counter-argument to the false binary between public mission and private enterprise. He came of age inside France’s ministries and the Centre Pompidou, mastering the grammar of policy, public trust, and the ethics of stewardship.

“I was very young at the time, but Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the newly appointed President of the Centre Pompidou, entrusted me with a very important mission. At 30, I was already number two — and that was the beginning of my story in museums, and later in the art market,” he recalls.

Guillaume Cerutti © Claire Dorn / Pinault Collection

“I have no family background in the art world, nor in the service, by the way. But it happened that I was interested in the cultural fields,” he tells me. Cinema and music drew him first, but he soon discovered the power of visual art, guided by mentors who opened doors.

That interest quickly expanded into policy. He drafted the legislation that gave France its landmark tax incentives for cultural sponsorship. “These proposals… were implemented and voted in the parliament and therefore are still, until today, enforced as a major tool in the French system to trigger donations from the private sector,” he says with composed pride. In that moment, Guillaume helped build a bridge between public culture and private support, a theme that would define his life’s work.

He then crossed to the other side of the spectrum. “I really wanted to continue my career by doing something radically different in the private sector… and it happened that at that time Sotheby’s in France was looking for a CEO,” Guillaume remembers. For him, leaving government for the private art market was not betrayal, but evolution. He has a way of describing auction houses as “temporary museums,” where connoisseurship, research, and carefully staged exhibitions prime the public to see differently. The same imperatives of access, scholarship, and responsibility to audiences were carried into a field often caricatured as purely transactional.

The Orbit of François Pinault

Guillaume’s path soon brought him into the orbit of François Pinault, the self-made magnate who rose from a modest timber business in western France to build a global luxury empire. Pinault channeled his success into a lifelong passion for art, becoming one of the most visionary collectors of our age. In 1998, he acquired Christie’s, folding the storied auction house into his family holding company, Artémis.

“I stayed at Sotheby’s in France for seven years, and then the Pinault family — as you know, they own Christie’s — came to me and said, We would like you to become CEO. So at that time, I moved from Paris to London with my family. I stayed there for nine years as CEO of Christie’s, and now I serve as chairman,” Guillaume recalls.

The story of Christie’s is inseparable from the Pinault family’s long-term stewardship. “I’m honored to have their trust and to be very close to Mr. Pinault, who built the empire and, above all, is a passionate collector. They have been very stable shareholders for twenty-five years. Christie’s is 100 percent privately owned by them, and that stability is an asset they cherish,” Guillaume explains. “The second generation, François-Henri, is also very interested in what Christie’s and the Pinault Collection can bring to their other holdings, including luxury group Kering and talent agency CAA in America. They see it as a constellation of great brands.”

At the heart of that constellation lies the Pinault Collection: more than 10,000 works and three museums, one in Paris and two in Venice.“ Mr. Pinault has always been a collector, and with the Collection he has built one of the most important holdings of contemporary art in the world,” Guillaume says. “He is now honorary president, since I became executive president, but there is not a single day when I don’t speak with him. He continues to follow everything very closely, and he is very involved. Very involved.”

Punta della Dogana, Venice © Pinault Collection

Palazzo Grassi, Venice © Pinault Collection

Bourse de Commerce, Paris © Pinault Collection

François Pinault is the collector who says a work “calls out to me,” who admits that in art, he allows himself the emotion and vulnerability that business forbids, and who built public rooms in Venice and Paris so that private conviction enters common life. The Bourse de Commerce is more than a museum; it is a wager that a historic, mercantile rotunda can be turned through Tadao Ando’s meditative architecture into a chamber for the present tense, where Lyonnais limestone and poured concrete hold the friction of now.

That wager took twenty years to resolve and became a lesson in endurance: when Paris stalled, he pivoted to Venice; when the time was right, he returned and opened the doors in the city’s heart. The collection’s ethos is risk held with care: contemporary art as a field where shock, doubt, and devotion can coexist without fear.

The collection they tend is not a random accumulation of masterpieces but a living organism. “Our visitors feel that it’s not only an addition of masterpieces. There is a spirit behind the collection. It’s the eye and the vision of one collector,” Guillaume explains. Unlike institutions that acquire broadly, Pinault builds deeply, following artists over years, collecting in depth, weaving relationships that shape entire careers.

In this vision, value is not indexed to price but to intensity, to the degree a work moves the heart, shocks the heart, or heals the heart. This is the legacy Guillaume now stewards: not an inventory of ten thousand works, but a coherent sensibility made public, a continuity project that must outlast its founder without losing his nerve.

Passion, Profit and Power

In business, Pinault grasped earlier than most that an auction house brand Christie’s could anchor a wider cultural constellation, where luxury and art meet the same discerning clientele, and where the auction house’s reputation fuels long-term soft power rather than short-term arbitrage. In this way, the market is not the measure of value but the means of sustaining it, with commerce underwriting culture rather than consuming it.

“Mr. Pinault is a collector in the first place. He loves Christie's. He loves to discuss with our specialists about art. He's really passionate about this company,” Guillaume emphasizes.

This passion stands in stark contrast to other models in today’s art world. In the same years that Pinault’s projects matured into museums with public resonance, Sotheby’s entered an era defined, fairly or unfairly, by financial engineering. The French-Israeli telecom billionaire Patrick Drahi’s 2019 acquisition promised speed, efficiency, and a new cost discipline; what followed, according to deeply reported accounts, was turbulence: debt pressure, short-lived experiments with new fee structures, a steady exodus of talent, and an identity tug-of-war between a connoisseurial house and an aggressively optimized platform. Even defenders concede the art market’s cyclicality; the question is whether the means of adjustment erode the house’s intangible capital, its specialists’ morale, its credibility with consignors, its long memory for quality, precisely the assets that cannot be printed on a balance sheet.

Guillaume never names rivals, but both Pinault’s and his own philosophies make the contrast unmistakable. Guillaume is unequivocal on one of the art market’s most seductive myths: art as an investment. “I’ve always been very cautious about this. Frankly, I don’t believe you can approach art as an asset class or as an investment. You first need to be interested in the artwork itself,” he says. The very nature of art makes financial logic collapse. “You need to remember that the artwork is unique. You cannot rely on averages about the value of a work to predict what it could produce in the future if you resell it. That’s impossible. In an auction, the difference in price between two bidders and three bidders can be huge. So it is non-rational in many ways. It is about passion and desire. If you think you can invest and resell with a certain yield, it doesn’t work like this. You need first to be interested in what you collect. If it produces a return, that’s an extra. It cannot be the objective.”

That is the advice he repeats to clients who come seeking guarantees. “People ask me: what should I buy to make sure I have a good return? What is a good investment? I always say: first, don’t think like this. Think about what you want, what you are interested in. Talk with our specialists if you don’t know yet. Discover what moves you. Then, yes, we can advise you about value and provide data, but it needs to come from your own interest in the work first, always.”

The Paul G. Allen Collection at Christie’s totaled $1.62 billion in 2022, the biggest sale in auction history

Guillaume insists that if you chase money alone you fail, and if you ignore it you fail as well. Balance is not compromise; it is craft. “If you are too oriented only on the cultural aspect, forgetting that there is also money at stake, investment you need to finance, and making sure the company is sustainable in the future… you will fail either.” For him, leadership in the art business means holding the two aspects together, commercial discipline and cultural conviction, without letting either devour the other.

Pinault’s world plays a longer game: when the market cools, you keep building the rooms where art can keep speaking. It is not that one model is bad and the other holy; it is that only one is explicitly organized around intrinsic value as the first premise, with the bottom line treated as necessary but not sovereign. That difference feels more than stylistic; it reads as a wager on what endures.

The Bourse de Commerce makes that wager concrete: capital restoring a civic stage for contemporary art, with legitimacy drawn from curatorial risk and public trust, not simply from the collector’s resources.

As the Executive President of the Pinault Collection, Guillaume’s view rhymes, tellingly, with Glenn Lowry’s parting reflection from MoMA, that museums are exactly where contested civic energies should surface because they matter. The point is not that one model is purer; it is that both can be held to a shared test: do they enlarge the space where art does its work on us?

As Lowry calls museums places where our competing modernities, globalist and nationalist, plural and parochial, get negotiated in public. The Pinault model answers: then give those negotiations rooms of real beauty and seriousness, and give them time.

The recent exhibition Corps et Âmes (Body and Soul) at the Bourse de Commerce illustrated that role. “To depict the body is to depict humanity,” curator Emma Lavigne observed, and the show revealed how artists use the body as a seismograph of history’s shocks and society’s fractures. Kara Walker’s chaotic silhouettes of racial violence, Arthur Jafa’s searing film Love is the Message, the Message is Death, and Niki de Saint Phalle’s exuberant nanas all spoke of pain, resistance, and joy written into flesh. Nearly half of the Pinault Collection touches on this theme, and long before the market followed, Pinault was acquiring seminal works by African American artists such as David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall. In this way, the museum becomes not simply a showcase of art but a civic forum, where private conviction becomes public meaning, and where the value that endures is not price but humanity.

Arthur Jafa, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, 2016 « Corps et âmes », Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. Photo by Florent Michel

Kara Walker, The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos, 2010 « Corps et âmes », Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. Photo by Nicolas Brasseur

« Corps et âmes », Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. Photo by Florent Michel

Visitors were moved to tears, confronted with violence as well as with resilience and hope. This, Guillaume argues, is the reason museums matter: because they connect history to the present, and private vision to collective experience. But how can that power endure? Are individual institutions enough, especially in Europe?

Guillaume’s own proposals point toward an answer: a European fund for joint acquisitions that would allow museums to pool resources and share stewardship across borders. “The European Union has the power to act as a catalyst,” he argues, calling for a €50 million pool to help museums purchase together rather than compete apart. It is policy thinking dressed as pragmatism, but the underlying claim is more ambitious: that value coheres when we share what we love, not when we warehouse it; that institutions can be guardians of memory without becoming mausoleums; that leadership is the art of keeping passion alive while giving it structure. In a fractured world, isn’t it culture that still binds?