The Louvre museum on a diplomatic and commercial mission.

"Can a museum be managed like a luxury brand?" wonders the editorialist Gerard Dupuy as France negotiates a commercial partnership with Abou Dhabi in order to create a museum under the label Louvre over there. Institutions as prestigious as the Guggenheim Museum or the Tate Gallery have taken entrepreneurial copycatting very far. Coming from a different tradition and endowed with considerable public funds, French Museums maintain their distance from this, even if sponsors' logos are beginning to edge their way onto facades. ... In actual fact, to send the Louvre on a diplomatic mission [to Abou Dhabi] is as absurd and as utterly opposite to its intellectual intent, as treating it like a multi-national perfumery or lace-maker. It is a good thing that there remains a veil of ignorance between the Musée d'Orsay and the Quai d'Orsay [French ministry of foreign affairs]".

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