The powers that be turns to the group populists oppose to the people: the elite. But who exactly are “the elite”? Are they intellectuals, billionaires, academics, those born to rule, the professional-managerial class, the chosen ones, the ‘so-called’ experts? Or are the elite just an invention, an image drawn up to reveal a competing idea of the people, a mere political category used to sharpen the weapons of populism?

This exhibition enlists the elite to tell us about power and value in art and society. These newly commissioned works address topics as diverse as the religious (or pseudo-religious) motivations for almsgiving; dynastic media empires and financial powers; and the luxury trappings of linear time.