Even in relatively sedate Paris, the galleries are getting bigger and the competition fiercer as art's arms race hots up
A white horse quietly munches hay in the corner of a new warehouse-sized art gallery in the Paris suburb of Pantin, an oblivious player in a giant exhibit featuring rust-coloured paintings, creepy embryo sculptures and a black and white projection of an artist reciting Goethe.
Welcome to the world of the megagallery, a larger-than-life testament to the booming power of the $1.2bn (£0.75bn) contemporary art market and the latest battleground for flamboyant art dealers and their increasingly valuable big-name artists.
While the French capital tends to be seen as a sleepy second fiddle to London in terms of market share, on Monday was staging the latest round of the fight for collectors' cash as two rival spaces opened days apart, with works by the same artist.
In one corner is the Austrian-born dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, whose new gallery in Pantin is a 2,000 sq m space housing a horse, its hay bale and a series of gloomy works by the cerebral German artist Anselm Kiefer, including doll-sized dresses skewered by branches.
In the other is the US dealer Larry Gagosian, who has opened a huge gallery at Le Bourget airport, on the outskirts of Paris, also featuring work by Kiefer.
Kiefer's purpose-built sculpture of a crushed, caged field of wheat, inspired by a secret US plan during the second world war to turn Germany into a pastoral, humbled land, fills up the entire hangar housing the airport gallery, which is seen as obvious bait for deep-pocketed art buyers from abroad.
"These galleries are a symbol of the business and marketing of art … It's a war machine," said Laurence Dreyfus, art adviser and curator of the Chambres à Part exhibit at France's flagship FIAC contemporary art fair.
"Gagosian is especially targeting a clientele that lives in the air. They land, fill their boots, and take off again."
According to the online auction house Artprice, Kiefer was the 12th-highest earner in the contemporary art market between June 2011 and June 2012. His work brought in $14.3m of revenue at auction, with a maximum hammer price of $1.49m.
These numbers matter in a market that on the surface has shrugged off the financial crisis with barely a paint smudge but which below the high end has shown signs of scarring the current, younger crop of artists.
Despite the obvious belief that Kiefer's art is sufficiently sought-after to win buyers for a double whammy of new pieces, this kind of showdown is a situation dealers would rather avoid when it comes to big-name property.
Ropac dismissed the toe-to-toe clash over Kiefer with Gagosian as a specific situation. "We planned our show two years ago," he said on the sidelines of his gallery's opening. Kiefer, speaking as the Gagosian show opened, also shrugged it off as an "accident".
But others say this kind of incident will be a continuing trend as galleries fight to capture a global market and artists fight to get the most exposure. "It's the artist that has the upper hand at the moment," said Dreyfus, "which is as it should be."