After Kristy Balliet’s introduction, Victoria Camblin, principal of the editorial and content consulting agency Magazine.capital,

As editor of “Art Papers”, based in Atlanta, she investigated how art and culture intersected with architecture and the urban planning, and developed the idea of art as the ultimate luxury good.
Camblin characterizes her work as editor of the Berlin-based magazine “032c”, as focused on critiquing the language used to describe the contemporary, especially narratives of novelty, in thematic issues of the magazine like “Culture crisis” (#43, Summer 2023), and “dossiers” like “Black hole catalog” (2020), riffing off the “Whole Earth Catalog” (1968-1998).
She discusses the idea of luxury as “a tool for integrating and navigating the world we inhabit, specifically as cultural producers”. She argues that luxury is no longer defined by rarity or content, but by excessive non-necessities, or excessive versions of necessities. She cites Bataille’s notion that societies are defined by their non-necessary expenditures.
Camblin discusses the Bourse de Commerce (1889), renovated by Tadao Ando in 2020, to house François Pinault’s art collection in terms of Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre’s idea of the “enrichment economy” – capitalism based on tourism, luxury, cultural heritage, and the arts, in which historic real estate is central.
She concludes by mentioning a current project where these ideas are employed to craft a curriculum for architectural education.