(Photo: Patrick McMullan)

Olivier Sarkozy, the French president’s financier half-brother, is getting a bit outré. On November 13, he’ll allow Vito Schnabel to open a show of paintings by Terence Koh, in Richard Avedon’s former studio, which Sarkozy owns. Koh makes pricey works from his own feces, semen, and blood. “Art is art, and whether it’s sexual, whether it’s gross, whether it’s all sorts of things, it almost always ends up pushing things forward,” Sarkozy says. “This will be paintings; whether they will be provocative paintings, I have no idea.” Sarkozy purchased the building, where he lives with his wife, Charlotte, for $6.5 million in 2005. “Art had become like everything else,” he says. “It had become spoiled, in a way, with the ease with which money was being made. My hope is that something better and healthier comes out of it.”

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