Cover boat ARTEXPLORER
Frédéric Jousset's boat is no ordinary boat. While most yachts have no more than a handful of guests on board at any one time, 46.5-metre catamaran ArtExplorer will entertain up to 2,000 of them a day. Businessman Jousset won't know these guests, they'll be total strangers; ordinary members of the public invited on board to view a unique cinematic art exhibition. The Perini Navi yacht will spend the next two years touring the Mediterranean (thereafter, the world) – the cornerstone of Jousset's lifelong dream to pluck art from the stuffy walls of museums and galleries and bring it to the masses.
It's a trailblazing project, and the same can be said of the yacht, because ArtExplorer is not just a floating museum. When she shuts up shop every autumn, she will transform into a luxury charter yacht and head off to warmer climes for the winter. This headline-grabbing dual design has made her one of the most-talked-about yachts of the decade – not least because she is also breaking records as the world's largest sailing catamaran.
“I don't see myself as a yacht owner, more of a museum director,” says Jousset when we speak via Zoom. Softly spoken with a laser-like focus, the French tech entrepreneur and philanthropist founded outsourcing giant Webhelp in 2000 – which started out as a pre-Google search engine and expanded to employ more than 120,000 people around the world. Art is his great love, he tells me. At 35, a box-fresh multimillionaire, he forwent the Ferrari and donated €1 million to the Louvre.
He is also a self-confessed came when he was climbing Mount Everest in 2019. “One always says the man who comes down is different from the man who climbs up. And literally, this is where I had an awakening moment,” he recalls. Chartering a sailing yacht cemented his plan. “I started to think about how much I loved culture and what I could contribute. I could add another museum, but it's nothing new. Private foundations have been done, but I thought no one has thought of the sea, of using a boat as a platform.”
