There is a young boy, pale blue from head to toe, hanging upside down in the vast Berlin studio of Elmgreen & Dragset. At first it is surprising to see him, then comic, as you realise he is a sculpture, then unsettling — a range of emotions which the pair’s works, from swimming pools and club nights to a fake Prada store in the desert, have been evoking for the past 30 years.

The boy (later lacquered white) is part of the artists’ new show at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which opens next week, but he is not being turned right-way-up there. Indeed, most of the sculptures in the show will also be upside down, suspended from a temporary structure in the grand central sculpture gallery.

“We could have placed them around on the floor,” says Norway-born Ingar Dragset as we sit upstairs in the studio’s airy living space. But hanging them upside down “was us wanting to let the sculptures be in dialogue with existing sculptures, but still not just blend in and disappear”. There is no chance of that: the boy pensively sitting on a washing machine will grab attention, as will the boy peering off the end of a diving board (this one upright), a common motif for Elmgreen & Dragset. It represents “that very existential moment” when you have the choice to jump in or, which might be more courageous, bail out, says Denmark-born Michael Elmgreen.

The pair started working together after they met at a club in Copenhagen in 1994 and discovered they lived in the same building. (They were a couple until 2008.) At first their practice was ephemeral — they unravelled white knitted skirts they were wearing, for example — but once they moved to Berlin in 1997 it developed into something more solid, taking ordinary objects and spaces and making them unfamiliar or, as Dragset says, unheimlich, a German word close to “uncanny” yet more deep-seated. Their first major sculpture, at the Louisiana museum in Denmark, was a diving board, to all appearances a rather normal one, except half the board was sticking out through a window looking out over the sea. Familiar and practical but utterly functionless.

This unsettlement has a greater purpose. When Elmgreen & Dragset installed an empty swimming pool in London’s Whitechapel Gallery, or created an airport in a Seoul museum, or put a hospital hallway complete with patients in beds in Bergen, they were asking us to turn that out-of-place feeling into questions about bigger issues such as the structures of power in our society, who has that power — and how we can alter it.

“In the way we speak of power structures,” says Dragset, “there’s an inherent idea of something being able to change because any structure can morph or transform.” It is a critique which has shaped their sculptural ambitions, especially in an art world they found was “much more rigid, much more conventional and routine-based than we had expected”.

Artworks, especially when you place them outside, are like children — at some point they move from home and they take on their own life and you need to accept that

An early part of their work was challenging the generic modern gallery space, whose white walls suggest neutrality but in fact conceal questions of power, money and access. They buried a gallery in the ground so visitors could look in from a (literally and metaphorically) different perspective; they white-painted, hosed down and repainted a gallery’s walls for 12 hours. “We say we dress up the white cube in drag,” says Elmgreen in his slightly gravelly voice. “It temporarily gets another identity in order to perform a different role . . . We want visitors to dare to be a little less respectful, not disrespectful but a little less respectful — ”

“Unafraid — ” adds Dragset.

“Fearless. And explore and question when they are in our more immersive installations. At the Whitechapel it was amazing how people were reacting. There were people who claimed that they had been to the swimming pool when the Whitechapel was a swimming pool. It was beautiful. Then you really feel like you’ve done an OK job.” For an installation to be so convincing that people have false memories — the Whitechapel was never a swimming pool — is a new realm for art.

As Elmgreen gets up to close a large window before it rains, I turn to my right and am confronted by an unnerving sight: a lifelike sculpture of a vulture perched on a branch, looking directly at me. “That’s one of the models for this figure we developed called ‘The Critic’,” says Dragset.

The pair’s institutional critique may seem sombre but is leavened by wit and campness. Their best-known work is “Prada Marfa”, a luxury-goods store recreated in perfect detail, complete with shoes and handbags from the brand’s 2005 autumn/winter collection, which sits by itself on a lonely stretch of Route 90 in the Texan desert. (“There were like 30, 40 people at the opening, mostly local ranchers,” says Elmgreen.) Originally seen largely by those en route to the town of Marfa for minimalist sculptor Donald Judd’s foundation, it gained global renown thanks to appearances in TV series Gossip Girl and The Simpsons; Beyoncé was photographed doing a star-jump in front of it.

“Prada Marfa” has Instagram to thank for becoming a touchstone of contemporary art. Social media “[changed] the identity” of the work, says Elmgreen, but they don’t mind: “Artworks, especially when you place them outside, are like children — at some point they move from home and they take on their own life and you need to accept that.”

“We of course believe that the core idea is strong enough to survive whatever is happening to it,” says Dragset.

“But it is kind of satisfying,” resumes Elmgreen, “that artworks morph beyond your control.” He seems almost delighted that the work has become something beyond their envisaging.

He is slightly less delighted when I read out a quote from a 2002 review, which says — in an apparently supportive way — that Elmgreen & Dragset had staged “a ‘gay infiltration’ of minimalism’s famously macho high aesthetics”. “Minimalism has been infiltrated by queerness from the very start,” Elmgreen says. “I’m sorry, dear heterosexuals, but you can’t trademark minimalism as yours that will [then] be infiltrated by queers . . . You don’t need to accept being boxed in as a queer artist and having certain sets of aesthetics that are provided to you because you are not a heterosexual man.”

Queerness has certainly been a subject for the pair — they staged a gay club night at Victoria Miro gallery in London; a frisson of sex surrounds a sculpture of two pairs of jeans and two pairs of Calvin Klein boxer shorts lying on the floor. But queerness has also been a perspective, says Dragset, a way of looking at society from oblique or unexpected angles.

“Sometimes I have a feeling we haven’t been quite queer enough to be, for instance, included in the most important queer and gay shows in the last 20 years, because our aesthetics have morphed,” he says. “We’re trying out a lot of different things and are harder to pin down maybe than some other artists. But for us that’s also maybe a part of queerness, that you have this way that you’re adapting.”

Adaptation goes both ways: as much as Elmgreen & Dragset have changed within the art world, the art world, in its new growth of diverse voices and untold perspectives, has surely changed thanks to them.

October 15-February 2, musee-orsay.fr

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

When Myriam Mihindou was in her 20s, she suffered from aphasia, an inability to speak or understand speech. The French-Gabonese artist’s process of rehabilitation helped her find her voice, both literally and artistically, and she has since developed a multidisciplinary practice in which collaboration plays a central role.

This autumn, a trio of major French exhibitions — at the Palais de Tokyo, the Musée du Quai Branly and the Biennale de Lyon — are set to solidify Mihindou’s reputation as a key figure in contemporary French and African diaspora art. But it was in 2000, when she created her first video installation, that she first struck upon her current mode of working. “I became conscious that I was a performance artist,” she says from her studio in Vitry-sur-Seine, a south-eastern suburb of Paris, dressed in a T-shirt and yoga trousers.

This early video, “Folle” (“Mad Woman”), is part of the artist’s new retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo, the French capital’s foremost contemporary art space. Projected on to the floor of the gallery, it shows Mihindou’s feet from a first-person perspective. The viewer hears laughing and jeering as her toes nervously explore the crack between two paving stones. After much hesitation, the feet leap from one stone to the next and the laughing stops. It’s a simple but potent visual metaphor for overcoming one’s fears.

Born in 1964 in Libreville, Gabon, to a French Catholic mother and a Gabonese animist, political activist father, Minhindou recalls her childhood as a rich source of inspiration, but also one of terror. “My father was often arrested,” she says. “He spent 14 years in prison for defending his political ideas.”

It was against the backdrop of her father’s opposition to the regime of President Omar Bongo Ondimba that Mihindou fled to France in the 1980s. In Bordeaux, she studied the architecture of the French colonial buildings that she had seen being razed. “When I was a child, the destruction of old colonial houses began,” she recalls. “In place of these houses, they built multistorey buildings, which drastically changed the atmosphere and the architectural memory of the neighbourhoods.” The destruction made her angry, she admits. “But I was able to separate the system from what that [same] system produced in terms of cultural heritage.”

Her studies did little to appease the pain of exile, however, and, to the dismay of her parents, Mihindou abandoned architecture to pursue a career in art. She enrolled in night courses at the University of Bordeaux, where a class on ruins provided the conceptual bridge between architecture and the internal conflicts that pressed her towards art-making. “I’m sort of obsessed with the idea of how to reconstitute the whole from a fragment,” she says. “Making things is, for me, a way of thinking through that.”

In 2004, Mihindou filmed “La Colonne Vide” (“The Empty Column”) in homage to her late sister. It shows a double image of the artist standing on a pedestal; as the figure on the right begins to move, walking backwards in a small circle, the one on the left follows with a few seconds of delay. Every so often, Mihindou stops to pose. She seems to represent herself and her sister as monuments of a very personal and individual kind. The subtle intertwining of personal story with political subtext is a recurring motif in her work.

It’s hard not to read these images against the context of ongoing debates regarding the presence of monuments to racist oppressors in public spaces. “I’m not an activist”, Mihindou insists at first, before conceding: “Alright. I am an activist when it comes to the question of pursuing certain goals. But I don’t like political structures. I don’t want to belong to a political movement or party.”

I’m sort of obsessed with the idea of how to reconstitute the whole from a fragment. Making things is, for me, a way of thinking through that

Themes of death and mourning are also present in her exhibition Ilimb, the Essence of Tears at Paris’s ethnographic Musée du Quai Branly. The show pays tribute to the Punu mourners of Gabon — an order of the ethnic group to which Mihindou belongs. In “Moñu” (2023), a long wickerwork braid snakes through the gallery; an embedded copper cord responds to the visitor’s touch, activating a sound recording of a Punu mourning ritual, guiding the souls of the deceased to the afterlife. Another work, “Nzumbili” (2023), presents what at first appear to be Gabonese wooden instruments, but which are actually trompe-l’oeil ceramic pieces. It both demonstrates Mihindou’s technical and conceptual sophistication and questions the museum’s conservation techniques and obsession with authenticity.

While these works dialogue closely with the concerns and contradictions of a colonial trophy museum, the installation “Lève le doigt quand tu parles” (“Raise your hand when you speak”, 2023-24), which was presented at the 2024 Biennale de Lyon, touches on broader social concerns. Impaled on a scaffolding of metal rods, cement casts of women’s arms point towards the sky in a gesture that speaks to the making invisible of women’s roles and highlights their demand to be heard.

When I ask Mihindou about this piece, she reorients the question, preferring to tell me about the collaborative process of making it. “At first, it was tough, laborious,” she recalls. “The poor crew, I think they were cursing me. After a while, each found their place. Then, each person started to deploy their intelligence, to push forward in their own capacities. We were constantly inventing. When you start inventing, it’s moments of laughter and joy. Depending on what’s invented, you really discover personalities, and that’s very beautiful.”

Palais de Tokyo, October 17-January 5, palaisdetokyo.com. Musée du Quai Branly, to November 10, quaibranly.fr; La Biennale de Lyon, to January 5, labiennaledelyon.com

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

France’s flagship art and antiques fair has a chequered recent past. At one time the most glamorous fair in the world and an event of real cultural significance, the Biennale des Antiquaires has faced changing tastes, dipping attendance and a high-profile forgery scandal that rocked the French furniture trade. Reinvented as La Biennale, it merged with a younger initiative, Fine Arts Paris, in 2022, changing its name to FAB Paris the following year.

The event’s 100 or so exhibitors will convene this year under the great glass dome of the newly renovated Grand Palais (November 22-27). This return to the Biennale’s spectacular Art Nouveau home is, according to fair president Louis de Bayser, “the beginning of the rebirth”.

Unlike the extravaganzas staged in the 1980s and ’90s, the focus now, he maintains, is on the dealers and their objects rather than the mise en scène. At the same time, it is looking to the future and the next generation of dealers and, hopefully, also inspiring a new generation of collectors.

The two are not unrelated. “New dealers bring their own taste and a fresh perspective on handling works of art,” he explains. “Sometimes they bring collectors of their own generation.” In November, five emerging gallerists will contribute to a dedicated stand decorated by Victor Bonnivard, a young interior architect interested in combining the modern with the historical. Prices here will be under €25,000.

De Bayser describes the displays — and the fair itself — as an “invitation to become a collector”. Its two loan displays are aspirational as well as inspirational, and also dramatically contrasting. One represents — literally — the so-called “goût Rothschild” tradition of collecting the grandest of 17th- and 18th-century French furniture, boiserie, paintings, porcelain, tapestries and carpets.

It will feature 50 pieces from the vast and little-known collection amassed by the heiress Béatrice de Rothschild (1864-1934). Between 1907 and 1912, the Baroness created the magnificent Italianate mansion and gardens now known as the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera. She bequeathed the villa and some 5,000 works of art from her numerous residences to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, including one of the most important collections of porcelain in France.

“Béatrice was an important figure in the art market during the first decade of the 20th century,” explains Oriane Beaufils, director of collections at the villa, which opened to the public in 1937. “She acquired works from legendary sales and from dealers whose descendants are still working in Paris.”

Despite her interest in the ancien régime, the Baroness’s collecting was eclectic, embracing early Italian paintings, Coromandel lacquer screens, and contemporary art. “She represents the crazy branch of Rothschild taste,” Beaufils enthuses. Among the loans there will be a 14th-century Sienese panel by Bartolo di Fredi, a Vincennes porcelain vase made for Madame de Pompadour and a 1904 Renoir — all set in an evocation of the villa’s opulent interiors by the acclaimed designer and collector Jacques Garcia.

The diversity and depth of Béatrice de Rothschild’s eye is relevant to a fair that offers everything from antiquities — among them an ancient Egyptian burial mask that once belonged to Coco Chanel — to Old Masters and modern art and design, by way of Asian and tribal art. Her eclecticism will also be echoed in the second display: a monumental, almost whimsical, “cabinet of curiosities” greeting visitors at the fair entrance.

Here, the architect Sylvie Zerat has conceived an immersive installation featuring two 6.7-metre-long walls pierced by apertures of different scales and shapes. Inside will be 400 objects — from artists’ palettes and plaster casts to globes and reliquaries. Most are drawn from the collection of the illustrator, designer and owner of La Boutique, Marin Montagut. He describes them as “humble tokens of everyday life and folk art” found in flea markets and artisanal workshops. It is proof that collecting is not solely the preserve of Rockefellers or Rothschilds.

There is, however, ample opportunity to follow the Rothschilds’ lead. At Galerie Steinitz, a gilded bronze clock with painted glass panels by François Vion was reputedly a gift from Marie Antoinette and latterly in the collection of Baron Edouard de Rothschild (€650,000), while a set of three 18th-century, ormolu-mounted Chinese “clair de lune” celadon porcelain vases once belonged to Baron Guy de Rothschild (€1.2m). The Baron Alphonse is represented by a Japanese lacquer secretaire by Adam Weisweiler circa 1790-95, offered by Pascal Izarn.

De Bayser notes that the market for antique furniture remains a little subdued unless the pieces are of the very best quality or boast a sparkling provenance. Those looking for more contemporary inspiration, meanwhile, might find it at newcomers Maison Rapin, whose offering will include the likes of a coral and rock crystal chandelier made around 1980 by the late goldsmith and jeweller Robert Goossens.

“It takes time to build a new fair,” he concludes. Not every dealer invited to participate took up the invitation, and the proportion of foreign dealers is well below the 45 per cent of the Biennale’s heyday. Selection and vetting are key, he believes, as is the element of surprise. “We hope visitors will return year after year because they will never know what to expect.”

November 22-27, fabparis.com

The artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has amassed close to a $3.2 trillion market cap, making it one of the world’s largest chipmakers. It now consumes more than 6% of the broader benchmark S&P 500 index. Over the last five years, Nvidia has grown annual revenue by 458% and the stock is up an incredible 2,009%. Given the potential for AI to disrupt life as we know it, it’s understandable that investors are so excited about the stock.

But the lure of these kinds of gains is naturally going to attract competition. Now, one of Nvidia’s competitors is planning an initial public offering (IPO) and claiming to manufacture chips that can vastly outperform Nvidia at a fraction of the price. Let’s take a look.

20x better than Nvidia?

Last week, the AI chipmaker Cerebras filed its registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with the intent to go public. In a press release from 2021, Cerebras said it had a valuation of $4 billion after a $250 million series F financing round. The company is targeting a $1 billion IPO at a $7 billion to $8 billion valuation.

In its registration statement, Cerebras cites Nvidia as a competitor, as well as other large AI companies such as Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, Microsoft, and Alphabet. Here is a description of what Cerebras does:

Cerebras’ pitch is that bigger is better. That’s because the company has designed a chip that is the size of a full silicon wafer, and the largest ever sold. The company believes that the size advantage leads to less time moving data. Furthermore, Cerebras has a flexible business model in which clients can buy Cerebras products to have at their facilities or through a consumption-based subscription through the company’s cloud infrastructure.

Cerebras clearly wants investors to compare, or at least associate, the company with Nvidia. Nvidia is mentioned 12 times in the registration statement. Cerebras also provides a side-by-side comparison of its Wafer-Scale Engine-3 chip versus Nvidia’s H100 graphics processing unit (GPU), which is considered the most powerful GPU on the market.

Story continues

Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman publicly said the company’s inference offering is 20 times faster than Nvidia’s at a fraction of the price. In 2023, Cerebras generated about $78.7 million of revenue, up 220% year over year. Through the first half of 2024, Cerebras has grown revenue to $136.4 million. The company still hasn’t earned a profit, having reported a nearly $67 million loss through the first half of 2024. These numbers also pale in comparison to Nvidia, which recently reported second-quarter revenue of $30 billion and a profit of roughly $16.6 billion.

Will Cerebras make a splash?

With big publicity from news publications and claims of being 20 times faster than Nvidia, I think it’s safe to say that Cerebras already has and will continue to make a splash.

Depending on the excitement investment bankers can drum up during the company’s road show and market conditions, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Cerebras go public at a higher valuation than expected. AI has been all the buzz and the IPO market has been flat for a few years now, so there could be pent-up demand on Wall Street.

Will Cerebras overtake Nvidia? Only time will tell. Its product offerings are impressive, but it still has a ways to go to get its financial profile in line with Nvidia. Furthermore, there may be some advantages to Nvidia having smaller chips and it remains to be seen whether Cerebras can compete with Nvidia’s software language CUDA — although the company does say that its software program “eliminates the need for low-level programming in CUDA.”

While everything sounds great, there is likely still a “show me” component to this story. After all, the bulk of Cerebras’ revenue comes from one customer. Nvidia also has a leading market share in the AI chip space and relationships with many large clients. Who’s to say Nvidia couldn’t use its size — and likely resource — advantage to develop a similar large wafer chip? There’s a lot left to play out, but this could be one of the more interesting developments for market watchers to pay attention to.

Don’t miss this second chance at a potentially lucrative opportunity

Ever feel like you missed the boat in buying the most successful stocks? Then you’ll want to hear this.

On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a “Double Down” stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you’re worried you’ve already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it’s too late. And the numbers speak for themselves:

• Amazon: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2010, you’d have $21,266!*

• Apple: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2008, you’d have $43,047!*

• Netflix: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2004, you’d have $389,794!*

Right now, we’re issuing “Double Down” alerts for three incredible companies, and there may not be another chance like this anytime soon.

See 3 “Double Down” stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of October 7, 2024

Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Bram Berkowitz has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Intel and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft, and short November 2024 $24 calls on Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The Newest Artificial Intelligence Stock Has Arrived — and It Claims to Make Chips That Are 20x Faster Than Nvidia was originally published by The Motley Fool

On some levels, Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) looks increasingly like a competitor to Nvidia in the artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator market. While almost everyone perceives Nvidia as the dominant player in this market, AMD raised some eyebrows by winning a contract from Oracle.

Still, for all these accolades, AMD is barely profitable, and its revenue growth rate remains mired in the single digits. Also, despite the Oracle contract, AMD is not yet in Nvidia’s league regarding AI accelerators.

Nonetheless, one AMD metric has shown a dramatic improvement. As that figure continues to grow, the semiconductor stock could take its place as a full-fledged Nvidia competitor in the AI accelerator market.

Where investors should look

The important figure is not so much data center revenue as it is data center revenue as a percentage of total revenue. Here’s why: In the second quarter of 2024, AMD’s revenue of $5.8 billion grew by only 9% yearly. But this figure is deceiving. Gaming revenue dropped 59%, while embedded revenue fell 41%.

However, data center revenue, the segment designing AI accelerators, was up 115%! This is significant because Nvidia’s data center revenue was 88% of the company’s total in the latest quarter. Three years ago, it was not Nvidia’s largest revenue source. Now, the same pattern seems to have appeared in AMD’s financials.

In Q2, the data center was 49% of AMD’s revenue, up from only 25% one year ago. Assuming it is going to follow in Nvidia’s footsteps, AMD’s data center revenue appears on track to continue growing rapidly.

Furthermore, the chip industry is cyclical, meaning the gaming and embedded segments are unlikely to experience revenue declines comparable to the ones over the last year. Both factors should mean that AMD’s overall revenue — and, by extension, net income — are likely to experience dramatic surges, helping to draw more investors into AMD.

Ultimately, market leadership for AMD is unlikely anytime soon. However, as long as the data center segment continues to grow as a percentage of the company’s revenue, it should take its stock dramatically higher.

Don’t miss this second chance at a potentially lucrative opportunity

Ever feel like you missed the boat in buying the most successful stocks? Then you’ll want to hear this.

On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a “Double Down” stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you’re worried you’ve already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it’s too late. And the numbers speak for themselves:

Story continues

• Amazon: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2010, you’d have $21,266!*

• Apple: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2008, you’d have $43,047!*

• Netflix: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2004, you’d have $389,794!*

Right now, we’re issuing “Double Down” alerts for three incredible companies, and there may not be another chance like this anytime soon.

See 3 “Double Down” stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of October 7, 2024

Will Healy has positions in Advanced Micro Devices. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia, and Oracle. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Every AMD Stock Investor Should Keep an Eye on This Number was originally published by The Motley Fool