Poster Boy
My Mucha
The city’s billboards are endlessly fascinating. No sooner had the billboard campaign for Martin Roman’s PORG schools disappeared (recall the posters, a model child beneath a silly play on words, such as 'Fraud is no Viennese Shrink' or something like that but not nearly so good) than the streets of the city were swamped by hundreds of billboards announcing Ivan Lendl’s exhibition of his Mucha poster collection.
Prague has never seen so heavily advertised an art exhibition. The scale of the campaign is easily explained. BigBoard Praha a.s., the largest billboard business in the country, is the investor behind the show. Lendl hinted earlier this year (see here) that he had leased his collection of Mucha posters to BigBoard's Richard Fuxa for 5 years. Some believe he has actually sold the collection to Fuxa for several million US dollars. A figure of $3.7 million is being mentioned in art circles.
So the business arrangement between Lendl and Fuxa, whatever it might be exactly, explains the scale of the billboard campaign. Fuxa must recover the cost of leasing or acquiring the collection.
But does Richard Fuxa have that kind of money? Or is he merely the front man for other investors, the poster boy for someone much richer than himself, someone who wishes to remain hidden?
Someone like Martin Roman perhaps? The Czech weekly Reflex claimed this month that Martin Roman is Fuxa's hidden business partner in BigBoard. It claims that Roman owns one third of the firm, with another third owned by Roman Janousek, and the remaining third shared between Fuxa and J&T Banka.
If these claims are true, this would explain why Roman’s PORG ran its fatuous billboard campaign. It would also explain why CEZ was the biggest sponsor of BigBoard's Lendl:Mucha exhibition in Obecni dum.
The possibility that the chairman of the board of PORG is an owner of BigBoard might not matter, given PORG’s legal status as a non-profit organisation. But it would matter greatly if the chairman of the supervisory board of CEZ was a related party to BigBoard.
We shall never know how much CEZ's shareholders contributed to this artistic event. This will remain a 'commercial secret'. And perhaps we shall never know who the owners of BigBoard really are and if Martin Roman is among them.
The city’s billboards are endlessly fascinating. No sooner had the billboard campaign for Martin Roman’s PORG schools disappeared (recall the posters, a model child beneath a silly play on words, such as 'Fraud is no Viennese Shrink' or something like that but not nearly so good) than the streets of the city were swamped by hundreds of billboards announcing Ivan Lendl’s exhibition of his Mucha poster collection.
Prague has never seen so heavily advertised an art exhibition. The scale of the campaign is easily explained. BigBoard Praha a.s., the largest billboard business in the country, is the investor behind the show. Lendl hinted earlier this year (see here) that he had leased his collection of Mucha posters to BigBoard's Richard Fuxa for 5 years. Some believe he has actually sold the collection to Fuxa for several million US dollars. A figure of $3.7 million is being mentioned in art circles.
So the business arrangement between Lendl and Fuxa, whatever it might be exactly, explains the scale of the billboard campaign. Fuxa must recover the cost of leasing or acquiring the collection.
But does Richard Fuxa have that kind of money? Or is he merely the front man for other investors, the poster boy for someone much richer than himself, someone who wishes to remain hidden?
Someone like Martin Roman perhaps? The Czech weekly Reflex claimed this month that Martin Roman is Fuxa's hidden business partner in BigBoard. It claims that Roman owns one third of the firm, with another third owned by Roman Janousek, and the remaining third shared between Fuxa and J&T Banka.
If these claims are true, this would explain why Roman’s PORG ran its fatuous billboard campaign. It would also explain why CEZ was the biggest sponsor of BigBoard's Lendl:Mucha exhibition in Obecni dum.
The possibility that the chairman of the board of PORG is an owner of BigBoard might not matter, given PORG’s legal status as a non-profit organisation. But it would matter greatly if the chairman of the supervisory board of CEZ was a related party to BigBoard.
We shall never know how much CEZ's shareholders contributed to this artistic event. This will remain a 'commercial secret'. And perhaps we shall never know who the owners of BigBoard really are and if Martin Roman is among them.
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