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On Thursday evening, a glittering Parisian cocktail party hosted by LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault, Comcast NBCUniversal chairman and CEO Brian Roberts, Louis Vuitton men’s creative director Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour (along with Charlize Theron, Serena Williams, Rosalía, and Omar Sy) gave joyful new meaning to the phrase Olympic Games.
Ahead of Paris 2024 (the opening ceremony, conceived as a grand procession down the River Seine, is tomorrow), multihyphenate par excellence Pharrell Williams had an idea. He called on a small group of top-flight contemporary artists, largely based in New York, to create interactive, carnival-style games and amusements based on the Olympic ones.
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The results—installed in the vast auditorium of the Louis Vuitton Foundation amidst more traditional pinball machines, foosball tables, and a claw machine filled with items from LVMH maisons—were fantastically varied. For some artists, the main action was adapting a motif from their body of work for this playful new context. Just take Brian Donnelly, known around the world as Kaws, who reimagined one of his iconic cartoon characters—once likened by Christie’s to “a dystopian Mickey Mouse”—as the bull’s-eye of an archery target. The painter Julia Chiang, to whom Donnelly happens to be married, did something similar, transforming the mesmeric geometries of her tensely colorful canvases into cones for cotton candy. (Had the couple’s two young daughters attended, one could easily imagine them getting a kick out of this.)
Others, like Derek Fordjour and JR, reconstructed or reiterated existing projects for the occasion. In a nod to the Olympics’ equestrian sports, Fordjour brought his Red Queen’s Race (2023)—a kinetic diorama peopled with miniature painted jockeys riding miniature rocking horses—to the foundation, while JR, known for his large-scale photographic street art, brought his Inside Out photo-booth truck, which allowed guests to generate posters of themselves in a matter of minutes. (When, in the spring of 2013, JR parked the truck in Times Square, scores of New Yorkers plastered the streets with their faces.)
Daniel Arsham and Honor Titus, whose teeming oeuvres have long included images and objects from the world of athletics, did some version of the same. Arsham, the creative director of the Cleveland Cavaliers—his hometown NBA team—since 2020, often incorporates basketballs into his work; just see his eroded basketball sculptures or the Tiffany Blue basketball he debuted in 2022. (The fact that basketballs are sometimes slangily called rocks had never seemed more appropriate.) For Thursday’s event, he reinvented a classic basketball arcade game—with stacked hoops and an electronic scoreboard—using those same Tiffany basketballs.
Based in Los Angeles, Titus, for his part, is a big tennis guy: Last summer he had a show at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery called “Advantage In,” and in November he unveiled a customizable poster for the Nitto ATP Finals in Turin, Italy. His contribution to the foundation’s soiree was a sculpture from “Advantage In,” made of an artificial grass court with an ornate iron fence instead of a net, and a painting of a tennis player. Like the night’s other installations and activations, Titus’s works were engaging and dynamic—and guests could get up close without breaking a sweat. Allez to that.