Study 138: LVMH Métiers d’Excellence: Artistry’s Structural Captivity to Speculative Velocity

LVMH’s Métiers d’Excellence, backed this year by Bulgari through the Fondazione Bulgari, has named nine finalists for the fourth Premio Maestri d’Eccellenza: independent Italian artisans working in textile, Sicilian puppetry, gold-thread embroidery, ceramics, paper jewelry, and fashion. Winners, announced September 14 at the Bulgari Hotel in Rome, each receive €10,000 to reinvest in their own workshops, alongside mentoring and media coverage. This OAC study reads the prize not as charity but as an Aura Transaction: the mechanism by which a house that manufactures at scale imports the Material