Sydney Ehrmann did not enter our story the way one enters a company. He was born into it. He grew up amid what we were building, with one particularity that changes everything: for him, the Lumière Stations, Groupe Serveur, Artprice, the Abode of Chaos, the machines, the teams, the visitors, the endless proceedings, the worksites, and the nights of work were never abstract concepts. They were simply the landscape of his childhood. That is an immense difference.

You can join a company at twenty-five and learn its culture. You can visit a work and gradually understand its language. Sydney had no initial distance from any of this. He grew up inside the system before he even knew it was a system. I believe that is both an opportunity and a difficulty.

An opportunity because he absorbed very early things that cannot truly be taught in a school: how a decision takes shape, what real responsibility is, what an error costs, what it means to receive the public, what it means to work with people each of whom carries a different kind of knowledge.

A difficulty because when you are born into such a dense universe, you then have to learn to distinguish what you received from what you choose. Every transmission worthy of the name begins there. Do not manufacture an heir. Allow a human being to become himself.

I watched him grow up in this strange permeability between family life and professional life. A computer might be open on a database problem while, a few yards away, craftspeople were working on a monumental piece. Artprice employees crossed through the Abode of Chaos. Journalists arrived. Artists. Researchers. Visitors.

Meals could be interrupted by a technical problem, a delivery, or an emergency. Day and night did not necessarily follow the schedule of a traditional family. That was our life.

For Sydney, it was also his childhood. He did not yet have the words to describe the situation. He simply saw adults working enormously hard, building things, sometimes fighting for them, then getting up again the next morning.

I often think about what it means to grow up among adults who are constantly talking about the future. In many families, the child receives the story of the past.

In ours, the past was very present, but the future was constantly entering the conversation. X.25, the Internet, networks, databases. The Balkans, the Middle East, China, the United States, geopolitical movements. The Art Market, emerging technologies, research and development, the first forms of artificial intelligence, the demiurgic worksites of the Abode of Chaos. Sydney had heard about all of this for as long as he could remember.

He was obviously not involved in our decisions as a child. But a child hears much more than we imagine. Above all, he observes. He sees the intensity with which adults take certain things seriously. He understands which values are actually applied and which are merely words. That is how a family culture is transmitted: less through sentences than through the repetition of actions.

He saw Nadège organize. He saw me accelerate. He saw our debates. He saw the teams enter our existence. He understood very early that none of what looked spectacular from the outside could stand without an immense amount of invisible work.

That is probably one of the most valuable things he received. The public sees a finished work. The shareholder sees a result. The journalist sees an event. The child living inside sees the nights, the mistakes, the files, the breakdowns, the discussions, the anxieties, the starting over. He knows that reality lies behind the image. That builds a different way of seeing.

Yet I did not want him to become a passive witness to our own legend. I deeply distrust families that end up turning their history into a private mythology and then ask their children to live inside it. It is a terrible burden, imposed by an unresolved parental ego.

I wanted him to be able to look at us with his own eyes. Including to disagree. Including to consider that some of our ways of doing things belonged to our generation and not to his. A transmission that forbids contradiction is already a compromised transmission. If you truly give something to a child, he must be able to transform it.

Sydney would gradually find his own place through direct contact with reality. Not through a title given too early. Not through the idea that he would automatically be legitimate because he was our son. He had to learn. See the teams. Understand how a group works. Know the visitors to the Abode of Chaos. Know what it means to welcome people. Know what a listed company represents, with its rules, responsibilities, procedures, shareholders, market constraints, and ethics. Also understand a scientist father who never stops questioning the enigmas of this world.

And finally live day to day with the World and its geopolitics as his space.

Family lineage gives no right to incompetence. Quite the opposite. It can create an additional requirement. Someone who inherits a history has to prove that he does not take it for granted.

I believe Sydney understood that.

He entered Artprice not only from the top, but through the hands. That expression matters to me. He had to see the men and women who actually make the structure work. The technical teams. The databases. The art historians. The mediators. The magistrates. The people who receive, classify, answer, verify, and organize.

A global company exists because thousands of ordinary gestures are performed correctly. I wanted him to know that reality. Governance should never become for him an abstraction located above those who actually produce the work.

He also grew up with the public of the Abode of Chaos. That profoundly changes one’s relationship to the work. I am the sole author of the whole that constitutes the Total Work of Art of the Abode of Chaos, and I hold its conceptual authority. Nadège, his mother, possesses the architecture of continuity I have described. She constantly brought meaning and rigor to my excess and to my obsession with seeing what lies behind the mountain.

Sydney, for his part, developed a way of seeing that comes largely from his relationship with those who enter. The visitors. The mediators. The reactions. The questions. The new generations. He saw what the work produced in people who knew nothing beforehand about our history. That gave him another kind of knowledge.

Knowledge that is less vertical. More immediate. More sensitive to the way the work lives once it has left its author’s intention.

That is where his personality truly begins to modify the system.

A successful transmission is not one in which the child repeats the parents’ choices exactly. It is one in which he brings a new element the parents would not have produced alone. Sydney has that capacity.

He looks at certain problems from within his generation, through his relationship to images, networks, the public, and contemporary uses. He did not experience digital technology as a conquest. He experienced it as an environment. That naturally changes his intuition.

I witnessed the birth of the Internet. I therefore always retain somewhere in my mind the world before it. For Sydney, the separation is far less pronounced. The network is already there. The image is already digital. Globalization is an environment. That is a profound difference in perspective.

That difference interests me enormously.

It sometimes produces disagreements. That is very good. A father who cannot bear for his son to see differently from him does not want to transmit. He wants to reproduce himself.

I did not want that.

I wanted to transmit to him tools solid enough that he could later use them against some of my own certainties if he believed it necessary.

That is probably one of the hardest tests for someone who has built something. Accepting that another person may arrive and say: this part has to evolve. This method was extraordinary for twenty years, but it no longer responds exactly to the world as it is now. That perspective can be uncomfortable. It is necessary.

Nadège knew that too.

She was probably the one who best preserved the space that allowed this difference to grow without turning into a rupture. She protected Sydney without putting him under glass. She knew the harshness of our world. She also knew that one day he would have to enter it for real. The person had to be protected, but not protected from reality.

That nuance is extremely difficult when you are a parent. We want to spare our children the wounds we knew. But if we remove every ordeal, we also remove some of the tools that allow them to become adults.

Life took it upon itself to remind us brutally of that fragility.

There are moments when every intellectual construction disappears before a single reality: someone you love can be lost. In those moments, companies, numbers, battles, reputations, and works suddenly seem to belong to a secondary world. What remains is the essential. Life. Fear. Waiting. Love. I do not want to turn some of the ordeals Sydney went through into spectacular scenes.

They belong to him first. But they profoundly changed the way we looked at things. They reminded us of what we knew intellectually and what existence sometimes forces us to understand physically: nothing is guaranteed. A transmission can be interrupted in a second. A future you thought self-evident can disappear. It is at moments like these that the word family recovers its absolute truth.

Sydney continued.

And something in the way he looked at the world necessarily changed.

I believe one never crosses certain boundaries without changing one’s relationship to time. The question of what must be done becomes more urgent. Appearances lose some of their power. You understand that living is not simply prolonging an existence but choosing what you want to do with it.

I will never claim to speak in his place about what those experiences produced in him. I can only say what I observed: an added depth, a different relationship to fragility, and an ability to carry certain responsibilities that I would never have wanted to impose on him through inheritance alone.

This notion of responsibility is central.

Artprice is not merely a family business. I reject that reduction. Over the decades it has become a global documentary infrastructure of the Art Market. Millions of pieces of information. Archives. Reports. Relationships with Auction Houses on several continents.

A memory built by generations of researchers, documentalists, and historians. Someone who assumes responsibility within such a structure does not merely receive a position. He receives a debt toward those who helped build it.

That is what I had learned with Enrique Mayer.

With Le Mireur.

With Peter Hastings Falk.

With Wan Jie.

With the thousands of guardians of memory who entrusted us with their collections.

I wanted Sydney to understand that.

Never believe that legally owning something means morally being its absolute owner.

We are only custodians. This idea runs through our entire family.

It concerns Artprice. It concerns the Abode of Chaos. It concerns our archives. It concerns knowledge. And in a way, it also concerns family life. You do not own your child. You accompany him until he becomes sufficiently himself for your role to change.

That is one of the things I am still learning.

For a long time, the child looks to the parents to understand the world. Then one day, almost without warning, the parents begin looking to their child to understand a part of the world that is beginning to escape them.

That is the normal cycle. I find it magnificent.

Sydney teaches me things today that I could not learn in exactly the same way without him. About new generations. About their relationship to the work. About certain digital uses. About the way a public receives signs that my generation reads differently. He has a sensibility that does not try to imitate mine.

That is precisely what I hoped for.

The Abode of Chaos has been an extraordinary laboratory for this difference. It was already a work made up of several thousand interventions when Sydney became an adult. He could have viewed it as a paternal monument that must never be touched. That would have contradicted its very nature.

A Total Work of Art that invents itself as it is made cannot suddenly become a mausoleum because its author grows older.

Sydney brought his perspective.

The mediators.

The public.

New readings.

Sydney gradually built his own relationship with the Abode of Chaos, through the perspective of his generation, his experience of the public, and his personal sensibility. That relationship belongs to the transmission I am discussing here; it does not concern authorship of the work. I remain the sole author of the whole that constitutes the Total Work of Art of the Abode of Chaos, I hold its conceptual authority, and I own the copyrights attached to that whole. What I therefore wish to transmit to Sydney is not the status of author, but a memory, a culture, and an ability to understand the Total Work of Art in its continuity.

Sydney is therefore beginning to occupy a position that is neither that of a disciple nor that of a successor in the monarchical sense of the word.

I hate the idea of succession when it means one person simply waiting for another to disappear before taking his chair. True transmission has to begin while both generations are still present. They have to work together.

Contradict one another. Observe one another. Learn from one another. Gradually distribute responsibilities. That is the only way tacit knowledge can be transmitted. Because not everything can be written down.

Nadège can document thousands of processes.

I can write thousands of pages.

Artprice can preserve billions of data points.

Something will always remain that passes through presence. The way you sense that someone across from you is not sincere. The moment when a negotiation has to be stopped. The moment when, on the contrary, you have to wait. The way you look at a place. Recognize a weak signal. Distinguish a real difficulty from a bad excuse. Know that when you begin a war, you never know when it will end.

These forms of knowledge are almost bodily. They are transmitted through time spent together.

Sydney had an enormous amount of that time. Not in the form of scheduled instruction.

By living.

And I believe that is where the fundamental difference lies between receiving an inheritance and receiving a culture.

An inheritance can be transferred by an instrument. Culture takes years. It also requires the person receiving it to choose what he keeps.

I do not know exactly what Sydney will retain from me thirty years from now. I do not want to know in his place. I only hope that certain values will remain deep enough to survive our differences.

Curiosity. Respect for knowledge. Fidelity to what has been handed down. A refusal to erase memory for convenience. The ability to work relentlessly when a mission warrants it. And above all, the idea that power has meaning only when it protects something greater than itself, and that true power is exercised from the shadows.

I believe Nadège and I meet very deeply on that point. We never wanted Sydney to receive only the instruments of power.

He had to receive the reason for using them. Without that, everything we built could become exactly the opposite of what we intended.

A database can serve transparency or domination. A digital infrastructure can liberate or surveil. A company can produce knowledge or only financial value. A work can question or become a mere object of prestige. Ethics is never permanently embedded in the structure. Every generation has to choose it again.

Sydney will therefore have to make his own choices. I find that both unsettling and deeply reassuring. Unsettling because a father never controls his child’s future. Reassuring because the absence of control is precisely the proof that the other has become free.

I understand today that our true success as a family can never be measured by the exact continuity of our companies or our works. It will be measured differently.

Will Sydney have received enough not to have to start again from zero?

And enough freedom not to become our copy?

That point of balance is what interests me. Because ultimately the trilogy is not a hierarchical architecture.

Thierry.

Nadège.

Sydney.

Three mental architectures.

Three ways of entering the world.

Mine, often through anticipation, relationships, conceptual struggle, and that kaleidoscopic thinking that connects distant disciplines.

Nadège’s, through continuity, organization, protection, the memory of processes, and that intelligence of invisible structures.

Sydney’s, still defining itself, with his generational proximity to the digital world, his view of the public, his internal experience of everything we built, and his own sensibility.

This triangle exists only because no vertex can replace the other two. And I believe that is what prepares the future.

Not an heir. A plural continuity.

But a plural continuity has meaning only if it knows how to open itself. The Thierry-Nadège-Sydney triangle must not become a family enclosure. If what we transmitted to Sydney is alive, it must be able to encounter people we did not choose, be displaced by them, and build with them an order that no longer belongs to his parents.

This is where Célia Chatillon enters our story.

Amid the noise that inevitably surrounds a family associated with companies, large economic interests, a work as visible as the Abode of Chaos, and all the representations of power that accompany these things, I saw Célia do something much rarer: she saw Sydney before she saw the Ehrmann name.

She saw him for what he was, but also for what he could become if someone agreed to go through with him those periods when his anxieties and intensities occupied all the space. Célia sometimes speaks of his “tunnels.” The word seems right to me. A tunnel is not an identity. It is a passage in which, for a time, the outside landscape disappears.

I would be tempted to use an almost religious vocabulary here—vocation, redemption, salvation—but such words must be handled carefully. Célia did not “save” Sydney in his place, and above all I do not want to reduce their love to a cathartic relationship. She is his wife, not his caregiver. What she gave him is both simpler and deeper: a point of stability solid enough for him to live with his own intensities without being entirely governed by them.

Among other things, she taught him something that seems almost banal if you do not know this inner mechanism: being happy does not necessarily mean that a catastrophe is about to happen. For someone whose mind can anticipate risk to the point of sometimes turning calm itself into a threat, that discovery is anything but banal.

Célia did not eliminate the curves. She helped make them inhabitable. In psychiatric language, one might speak of balance or compensation. I prefer to say that she gave him ground. A base stable enough for him to become a father, and then gradually shift part of his attention toward others.

In my own vocabulary, I would say rather that she gave him the ground necessary for an inner discipline he had to build gradually. A form of ascetic practice: knowing his own variations, learning not to surrender every decision to them, holding a line when intensity threatens to displace it. Such discipline can last only if it has somewhere a point of return. Célia was also that point of stability.

Célia works in social services, which, to my mind, represents a true vocation today. I do not believe this is a secondary detail—quite the contrary. This work requires empathy and daily contact with human vulnerability, disrupted life paths, and people going through periods when their equilibrium becomes harder to maintain. I see in it, in a contemporary and secular form, something that resonates with a very old idea of charity: placing oneself in the service of another without demanding that the other become you. I obviously do not claim to reduce social work to a religious genealogy. But within our family history, that resonance exists.

Célia herself has a relationship to theism that cannot be reduced to dogmatic adherence. She transmitted no religious doctrine to Sydney. Yet her daily altruism reawakened in him something that already belonged, through older layers, to the Christian values of the Ehrmann family: charity understood not as moral discourse but as action.

Charity may have been in the inheritance. Célia triggered the gesture.

Sydney himself puts it that way. The decision to commit himself to assisting a blind person belongs entirely to him; but he connects Célia to the movement that led him toward volunteer work. At the time, he was passing through what he calls his “long night,” a period when the question of sight, its limits, and what can no longer be seen had for him an almost initiatory dimension.

He chose to place his sight at the service of a blind person. Not to claim to see in that person’s place, but to share what he himself perceives of the world. And that gesture moves me all the more because he knows the limits of his own vision. He knows that no perception is neutral, that each of us sees from within a history, wounds, and blind spots. He therefore lends a gaze he knows to be partial to someone whose access to the visible is different from his own.

I find there something that runs through this entire book: seeing is never seeing everything. But what we do see can still be placed at the service of another.

There is also in their relationship an irony they themselves handle with humor. Sydney readily says that only Célia can put up with him. He sometimes jokes that her experience in social work may have given her a few extra tools for dealing with his “tunnels.” But the joke stops there: what binds them obviously has nothing to do with any professional relationship. When Célia is asked the same question, she often replies that at least, with Sydney, she is never bored—without always specifying whether she considers that an advantage.

That laughter matters. It prevents difficulty from becoming an identity and psychology from becoming the only language available to tell their story as a couple.

Finally, Célia played a much lighter role, but one that says something else about transmission: she brought with her the codes of a younger generation. In particular, she was the one who truly brought us into YouTube as though it were an almost infinite library. Sydney and I found ourselves there like two vampires of knowledge suddenly discovering new galleries in a library we already thought immense.

Every generation has its secret passages. Sometimes it takes someone younger to show you the door.

That is why I would not make Célia a fourth vertex of our trilogy. She reveals its openness. A successful transmission is not a triangle condemned to reproduce itself. It is a triangle alive enough to become a network, receive new people, new values, new uses, and allow itself to be transformed by them.

Sydney grew up inside our system. With Célia, he began building his own with two wonderful children: Naia, the eldest, and her brother Dimitri.

The question is therefore no longer simply whether he will know how to preserve what we transmitted to him. It is what he will choose to do with it, together with those he himself has chosen.