A hint of genuine French pessimism to remind that too many tourists can easily turn the beauty into a beast

 

“Churches, altarpieces, liturgies, impressiveness of offices: the ancient times practised the culture of cult. Museums, “installations”, exhibitions, art fairs: nowadays we surrendered to the cult of culture. From cult reduced to culture, from sacred effigies of Gods to imitations of the secular art, from artworks to the trash of the avant-gardes, in fifty years we have fallen into “the cultural”: cultural affairs, cultural products, cultural hosts, administrators of cultural organisations, directors of cultural development, and, why not?: “mediators of the nouvelle culture”, “intermediaries of creations”, and also “directors of cultural marketing”… All part of a complex organisation of the life of the intellect, or better to say of the remains of the ancient culture, with its curia, its clergy, its grey eminence, its synods, its conclaves, its counciles, its inspectors to the Creation, its sycophants and its imprecators, its popes and its inquisitors, its guardians of the faith and its merchants of the Temple… ”

 

Jean Clair, L’hiver de la culture, 2011

September 7, 2014