Listen Up | A French Movie Star Turned Sultry Singer-Songwriter

Kate Barry

Lou Doillon was born into French cultural royalty — her mother is Jane Birkin, her father the director Jacques Doillon. So it’s something of a surprise how much American soul runs through her debut album, “Places.” She sings in English, in a throaty, charismatic drawl backed by warm, midtempo arrangements that sound like they were laid down in Memphis, not Paris. Doillon’s half-sister, Charlotte Gainsbourg, was an established actress in Europe who gained a fervent following in the United States only after turning her attention to music. From the sounds of it, Doillon, already a popular model and actress in France, could be on the same path. Verve; $10 on iTunes.

Arnold Newman/Getty Images

Pablo Picasso photographed in his studio near Cannes, France in 1956. The Thonet rocking chair in the distance appears in many of his paintings.

In 1955, when Pablo Picasso moved to the villa La Californie in the hills above Cannes, France, with Jacqueline Roque, who was to become his second wife, he was considered to be the greatest and most famous artist in the world. Yet he lived simply. The studio was at the center of his life: the ground floor rooms were formerly the salon and dining room of the house, with enormous Art Nouveau windows that gave out onto a large, untended garden, filled with his bronze cast sculptures. He usually started work after lunch and carried on until past midnight. It was where he would receive friends and family, eating, drinking and clowning around as he donned one of his many masks that littered the corners of the rooms. During the years he spent in the Mediterranean, he was surrounded by the things he loved — the water, the sun, Jacqueline — igniting the last great outpouring of his genius. Picasso once compared himself to King Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold. He was not wrong.

Photographs by Van Sarki

Perry Chen and Theaster Gates.

The Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen understands how communities can fuel creativity. The artist Theaster Gates knows how creativity can invigorate a community. What happens when they put their heads together?

At first glance, an Internet entrepreneur and an artist seem to operate in different creative spheres. Yet Perry Chen, the co-founder and C.E.O. of the crowd-funding Web site Kickstarter, and Theaster Gates, a Chicago art star-cum-urban planner, actually think they have a lot in common. Kickstarter began in 2009, and since then the site has raised more than $500 million for 40,000 projects — from Iraq war documentaries to Brooklyn restaurants — revolutionizing the way creative ideas are financed in the digital age. Theaster Gates’s artistic practice, which encompasses everything from sculpture to a roving choir, is in its way just as groundbreaking. On his own block on the South Side of Chicago, Gates has engineered a miniature urban utopia, turning the once-blighted buildings that surround him into artist residencies, a library and even a cinema house that shows works by aspiring filmmakers from the neighborhood. Both Gates’s and Chen’s work may inspire social change, but it’s the power of creativity, not of compassion, that spurs them from one genre-defying innovation to the next.

Theaster Gates: I remember not long after we met, we were in Davos, Switzerland, and everyone from presidents on down wanted an audience with you, this 36-year-old punk kid, because you had created something that was important — a platform that could be more democratic and more immediately generous than the National Endowment for the Arts, or the disbursements of a European nation. It was wonderful to watch people stand in line. I thought, Wow, artists or creative people can have significant consequences in the world.

These interventions that we imagine to simply support our community could be the most important and most prolific inventions in the world.

Perry Chen: But everything comes from somewhere. I didn’t even know this till later on, but we found out that Mozart and Beethoven and Whitman and a lot of 19th-century authors used pre-Internet models like Kickstarter — you know, not just going to rich patrons or the Medici or the Church to get the big check, but people going to dozens or even hundreds of people to fund a creative work, a book where their names might be inscribed in the first edition or a concerto. And the Internet, as it can do, can scale things up and make this same model accessible to millions and billions of people.

Gates: There were a series of moments when I decided that art was important, and it was an important vehicle for me to express my interest in spaces. Like: “Oh, urban planning isn’t the way that I want to talk about urban planning, or talk about the city. Art is the way that I want to reflect on what works and doesn’t work in the city.” I think about Jane Jacobs a lot because she was kind of a normal-person journalist, who was just like, “You’re not gonna tear down my neighborhood.”

And there was a way in which she was willing to be on the ground and imagine that the voice on the ground was intelligible and acute and right. She’s different from Frederick Law Olmsted, or Daniel Burnham, or these other guys who are like, “City Beautiful is important, and to do it, we got to eradicate the poor. Because we should have a lagoon there and a practice range.”

Chen: A lot of the stuff that you’re working on and thinking about is art wherever it is. It can be in the white box; it could be out of the white box. . . . There’s so much of that kind of stuff on Kickstarter, which is just a platform for creative projects and artists.

Gates: I actually no longer use “art” as the framing device. I think I’m just kind of practicing things, practicing life, practicing creation. I’m making a cafe, yes, it’s a cafe — and a cafe isn’t art necessarily. But if I were an entrepreneur opening a cafe, I would definitely do that differently. If I had the mantra of developer over my head, it would imply certain things about a return investment. Instead I just said to myself, “There are no venues in my neighborhood for listening to live music. There’s nowhere to get a good pastry. I want those things. I’ll apply whoever I am to make it happen.”

Sometimes the creating that we do is creating a platform that allows other creative people to pitch in. Lately I’ve been saying, “I no longer want to make the thing,” which might be a cup. “I want to make the thing that makes the cup.” I want to be responsible for the ceramic manufacturing company that made that thing.

Chen: It’s like purposeful infrastructure. Like so much infrastructure in the last 100 years has been built for economic reasons, to profit, to make a lot of money.

Gates: Your point about purposeful infrastructure is right, but I’m not the community do-gooder. I rehabbed my building, and the building across the street was jacked up, so I cleaned it up, because I didn’t want to look at it. I was really just being a good neighbor. I wasn’t trying to be like Mr. Community Builder Man.

Chen: That’s such a good point! I remember early on, in the first couple of years especially, I would run into some people that would try to put Kickstarter under the “social good” label. And I actually had this very visceral reaction — I just didn’t like that at all. It was as if I had started out with, “I want to do something good,” and then just came up with Kickstarter. And that’s not true. I was just scratching my own itch. I wanted something like this to exist in the world, and I thought other people would, too. I wasn’t calibrating how much good it was going to do.

Clockwise from top left: Courtesy of Landfill Harmonic; Stefan Ruiz; Tod Seelie.

Projects on Kickstarter include Landfill Harmonic (bottom left) which turns trash into musical instruments, and the Music Box, (top left) a temporary shantytown for experimental art and music in New Orleans. Right, Gates’s artwork extends to urban renewal, like transforming a run-down building into a cinema house.

Gates: People try to create the box that defines the work that we do. I know a bunch of capitalists who put a spin on their hunger for a particular kind of capitalist end: they call it “social do-gooding.” But in fact, I want to kind of resist that and say, “Look, if there’s anything that ends up looking like an activist notion, it’s secondary to just doing the thing that I wanted to do.” The reality in the neighborhood that I live in is: if I don’t constantly reconcile what I have against what other people don’t, either I need to leave and be around other people who have what I have, or I’m constantly engaged in this kind of dynamic flow of opportunity and sharing. And that just feels like smart living. Like if my mom made too much food, she’d send a plate down the street. She doesn’t know how to cook greens for two people. She knew how to cook a pot.

I don’t want my creativity to be usurped under some spirit of “social good.”

Chen: Another reason that me and you got along so well so fast was because I think we’re both kind of happy right now, at this moment.

Gates: But happiness is funny. There are days that are really heavy and complicated and dark. And I think that if I were to look at the trajectory of life, what has been consistent is that there are highs and lows. I mean at the moment I found out that I was accepted into Documenta, my mom died. In a way I felt like, in late 2010, my mom’s death was the thing that somehow actually activated these other future opportunities. But there was tremendous sadness. So, there was a way in which these valences live next to each other all the time.

Perry, I want us to make art together. What would that look like?

Chen: Bales of electrical wires? It should deal with these themes that we’re talking about now. Just by spending time together, we have found, and we’re going to find, other commonalities. . . . For instance, we both like Depeche Mode. [Laughter.]

Gates: [breaks into song] “And I don’t mean to sound/ Like one of the boys/ That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

Chen: We’re gonna do something together.

We’re gonna go into a bar. And then you never know. You walk out — you walk out with just Depeche Mode as a bond or you walk out with, like, a scalable platform community.

Gates: What are you most excited about right now, in the work that you’re doing?

Chen: I think I’m figuring that out. Kickstarter has been such a heads-down thing. We’ve been open four years, and I was working on it for years before.

Gates: Has it only been four years? That’s phenomenal.

Chen: People often ask me, “Do you appreciate it?” But it is a little hard for me to kind of step back. I think because that time before we launched was so stressful and so hard and the fear was just that it wouldn’t exist. Everything that’s happened since the launch, good or bad, I’ve actually kind of felt in this very narrow band of emotion. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten too low or too high. I’ve just been concentrating on: “What else do we do now?” Here we are in this moment. We’re having a great conversation; we’re excited. Let’s feed on that.

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