Following in the footsteps of Dada and Marcel Duchamp, a number of artists have linked art and life, to the extent that they sought to do without the object itself, which the workings of the art market had sacralised. Particularly active in the 1960’s, at a time when the status of the author was ...
# 129 | Greeks, Etruscans and the image | Alain and Annie Schnapp
Using Il leone sogna la preda (2001), written by etruscologists Bruno D’Agostino et Luca Cerchiai, as a starting point, Alain Schnapp invites us to further our thinking on The Greeks, the Etruscans and images - the title of a previous book written by the same authors. The questions this text brings up are topical : thus of the visual culture ...
# 128 | Art is unpredictable | Alexis Anne-Braun
A work of art is only active if a certain number of conditions are met, implying the collaboration of various actors, not least the public. Alexis Anne-Braun raises here the question of restorative practices in art, as well as the ethical issues they present, through the concept of artistic activation found in the writings ...
# 127 | The proof | Julien Seroussi and Franck Leibovici
How does one give an effective visual shape to judicial debate? This is the question asked by Franck Leibovici, poet and artist, and Julien Seroussi, a former analyst at the International Criminal Court and previously part of the « mass crimes » section of the Paris Tribunal. Here, they put forward their concept of ...
# 126 | The body gold | Elvan Zabunyan
This is how Elvan Zabunyan summarizes the status of this precious and coveted metal, intrinsically linked with the history of slavery. The author unveils a significant reversal in this status : the men and women of soul and hip hop using gold, in the shape of heavy chains, most notably, in order to re-capture ...
# 125 | Exhibiting economic knowledge: esthetic spaces and dismal science | Sophie Cras
Putting the economy on show. Circumstances, it seems, have converged to give the economy an abstract dimension, keeping people at bay by impressing without convincing. With a long-held interest in artistic knowledge on the subject at hand, Sophie Cras has opened a new path of investigation. She questions how the economy has been exhibited since ...
# 124 | The textiles of the Order of the Holy Spirit | Anne Labourdette
Anne Labourdette, as a curator at the Department of Decorative Arts at the Louvre, is well placed to study the textiles of the Order of the Holy Spirit housed in the museum. Leaning on current research by specialists of the Order and of Renaissance Parisian embroidery, she draws back the veil on the knights ...
#123 | A game of marbles | Victor Claass
Victor Claass’ interest in billiards came from his reading of Michael Baxandall’s work on “influence”, and the use of the game as a metaphor. The English art historian upends the causal conception of the art world in order to put forward a new paradigm : the game is more open than we thought, artists ...
#122 | Radiant things | Sophie Houdart and Mélanie Pavy
Sophie Houdart and Mélanie Pavy travel to see what remains of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. They are looking, in order to talk about it, for the right shape. They fill notebooks upon notebooks. They observe with the greatest possible care. To talk about the world today, they start with the infinitely small. They ...
#121 | Sophie Leclercq | Objects from the colonies
Learning aids, used in schools, are the starting point in Sophie Leclercq’s search for part of colonialism’s visual history; for it is through things seen and touched daily that the student learned to think and feel. From the depths of various museums’ collections, she has extricated posters, gold stars, blotting papers, games, alphabets, and ...