A stunner of an exhibition at Paris’s flashiest new gallery

You can tell a lot about an art gallery from its attached eatery. The Tate has the grand but gratuitously naff Rex Whistler restaurant. The Serpentine its globular Zaha Hadid nouvelle cuisine joint. Then there’s the Mess Restaurant at the Saatchi Gallery’s newish space in the old Chelsea Barracks. To be charitable, the name is a bad but unfortunately appropriate pun.

Anyway, I report from a children’s park in BCBG west Paris, where Louis Vuitton have just opened a new art gallery. Obviously, a luxury (and erstwhile collaborationist) megabrand were never going to settle for an ordinary white cube. Oh no. Instead they hired virtuoso architect Frank Gehry to build something that would piss off the local nimbys. And piss them off it did, but it still got built. Perhaps in commemoration of this victory, the museum’s restaurant has been named ‘le Frank’.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton. Photo: Iwan Baan 2014

Yep. Like Madonna, Christo and, uh, Jordan, Frank Gehry has become not just Frank, but the Frank.