Letter of Seminar
Estelle Zhong asks what art can do in the face of the ecological crisis. Considering this crisis as a crisis of sensibility, Zhong, following the studies of Bruno Latour, sees art less as an object that should make us feel a bit more “guilty”—we already have enough of that—than as an object of ...
Christine Peltre tells us of the status of “things” in the Orient imagined by nineteenth-centuries contemporaries: objects acquired in bazaars and souks, robes, cloaks, babouche slippers, turbans, headgear, carpets, etc. “Operators of belief, border agents, or reminders of proximity?” Everything would be a way of recalling sites and atmospheres, dazzling sights, even vain ...
“Disappearance” is at the heart of the studies and novels of Hadrien Laroche, who reexamines for us “the thing” in the work of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Meyer Shapiro. We are familiar with the discussion around Van Gogh’s shoes, a still life lively enough to give rise to some very keen, contradictory interpretations. ...
After his Paysages en mouvement. Transport et perception de l’espace, XVIIIe-XXe siècles (published by Gallimard in 2005), Marc Desportes has taken an interest in the singular presence of objects in twentieth-century art. He proposes to clarify the various ways in which these objects are used by artists, in accordance with varying circumstances, as well ...
Estelle Zhong studies here a very interesting case of artistic commitment undertaken in a new mode imposed by the contemporary international political context as it relates to war. Establishing “conversation” as a new political strategy does not necessarily culminate in an object that can be likened to a “work.” And yet, there really is ...
Estelle Bories, who wrote her dissertation at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) on contemporary Chinese art, reexamines for us the historical context within which this issue emerged. She is interested in the origins of the Chinese avant-garde, in the Woodcut Movement, and in the internationalist standpoint adopted by the writer Lu ...
Laure Murat is a historian and a professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. She has published several outstanding books, the most recent of which, L’Homme qui se prenait pour Napoléon. Pour une histoire politique de la folie (Gallimard, 2011), is of fundamental importance. She reexamines for us the relationships between ...
Fabienne Chevallier studies the connections between architecture, urban planning, hygienics, and politics. Here, she looks at the cholera epidemic of 1932 in Paris, where the inequality before life was confirmed to be a determining factor for inequality before death. The official decrees recommending expensive and inaccessible forms of nourishment—grilled meats and fish—were no more ...
In her last book, De la visibilité. Excellence et singularité en régime médiatique, Nathalie Heinach studied “visibility capital,” which grants a form of superiority to those who possess it. This phenomenon, which was constantly growing in scope throughout the twentieth century, offered her the opportunity to reexamine the notion of the “total social fact,” ...
And what if art were capable of implementing democracy? That is the wager laid down by the New Patrons, who open thereby a new chapter in the history of art. The instigator is François Hers, who has been the initiator of many other transformations, such as participating in the creation of Viva photo news ...