Magnificence for Sale, Only 400 Euros a Year
Just when New Yorkers may be at their most suspicious of things that are beautiful and exorbitantly priced (see "Kristen," 5 feet 5 inches and 105 pounds), an Italian company is arriving in town to promote a luxury art magazine and the (questionable?) proposition that beauty makes the world a more ethical place.
The magazine FMR, which is now part of a larger corporate entity called the FMR Group, was founded in 1982 by the Italian publisher Franco Maria Ricci. Mr. Ricci described FMR as "the most beautiful magazine in the world"; others called it ornate fluff.
In 1984, Mr. Ricci introduced FMR to America with much fanfare, including appearances by his close friend Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Since then, FMR has been purchased by Marilena Ferrari, the founder of the artistic publishing house ART'E'. The FMR Group now includes the magazine and several series of art books, all produced by artisans and priced in the thousands of dollars. A mission statement declares that the company "has embarked on a project, known as the Officina dello Splendore (the Workshop of Magnificence), which came into being with the aim of reinstating a culture of art and beauty in contemporary society."
After two decades, in which subscriptions to FMR in America have dwindled to almost nothing, Ms. Ferrari has arrived to relaunch the magazine in New York, as a precursor to, this spring, offering one of the company's lavish art books — a study of Michelangelo's sculpture, produced in an edition of 99, with each book priced at $100,000 — to American collectors.
Ms. Ferrari is holding a press conference this morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she will be accompanied by a representative of the Italian Ministry of Culture and the New York salonnier Antonio Monda; there is also a dinner this evening in the Temple of Dendur. The festivities in May surrounding the book will be even more lavish. Ms. Ferrari said she was planning to re-create for New York a spectacle that Lorenzo de Medici commissioned Michelangelo to create for Florence in the early 16th century.
Ms. Ferrari, in an interview yesterday at the Carlyle Hotel, described the FMR Group as the only company that produces books by ancient techniques, but with a modern business model. The company is listed on the Italian stock exchange, and is self-financing its expansion to America. An annual subscription to FMR — which includes six issues of the main magazine, six issues of a new companion magazine called FMR White, focused on contemporary art, and a subscription to the new Web site, FMROnline — costs 400 euros. (Yes, the price is given in euros.) The magazine today follows basically the same formula as the original: lavishly illustrated historical texts and articles on often obscure art-historical subjects, selected without any conventional rationale of timeliness or topicality.
The latest issue, for example, includes an essay on the artist books produced by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, another article on a set of illustrations commissioned by a 16th-century Austrian ambassador of daily life in the Turkish Empire, and a translation of François-René de Chateaubriand's description of his ascent of Mont Blanc.
Asked if this is perhaps not the perfect time, economically, to be rolling out such a high-end product, Ms. Ferrari laughed. In 1992, when she founded her previous venture — a publishing house called ART'E' that has now merged with FMR — the Italian government devalued the lira. "I have a strange destiny," she said, smiling. "I always start my activities at the worst moment."
