The cultural dumbing down of Paris continues as City Hall responds to the Covid closing of museums and theaters by organizing an exhibition on the Champs-Elysées of 20 monumentally insipid bronzes of Philippe Geluck’s Le Chat.
(While Paris promotes low cartoon, the city of Nancy offers high and accessible art to the general public, as noted at the end of this article.)
The exhibition Le Chat Déambule (Le Cat’s Walk) wouldn’t be so distasteful if there were a hundred other events going on at the same time, as there usually are in Paris. In less restricted times, seeing the sculpture of a dog peeing through a hoop being held by an enormous, rotund cat or Le Chat dressed as a ballerina might be a cute diversion while taking a stroll with a six-year-old. But right now this cat is the only game in town. So its orchestration along the why-does-anyone-still-call-this “the most beautiful avenue in the world,” even though originally planned before the pandemic hit, is like ordering restaurants and food shops to close then handing out dollops of Nutella to celebrate Gastronomy Day. Some will certainly say it made their day.
A collection of 10-foot-high Bugs Bunny sculptures would be more interesting. Bugs does irony and sarcasm far more incisively and expressively than Le Chat. Could be that I’m more attached to Bugs than Le Chat because I didn’t grow up with Geluck merchandizing as the French and Belgians have. Still, I can only imagine the outcry of crass commercialism and cultural imperialism if Bugs were the lead cultural offering of the season.
Belgian cartoonist Philippe Geluck created his rotund cat in 1983 and they’ve both been well known and highly marketable in France for more than three decades. Cute irony, charming incongruity and a bit of megalomania are Le Chat’s brand of humor. Even if the work as a whole—l’oeuvre, as they say in art circles—is trite, it presents the kind of harmless humor that spreads easily and innocuously and makes its creator rich from merchandizing royalties.
It isn’t Le Chat’s quaint humor or childish irony that’s objectionable, and this isn’t a discussion as to what constitutes art. What’s objectionable is the decision of the City of Paris’s to offer a monumental version of a hackneyed newspaper cartoon as the only-see in town during this phase of the Covid restrictions. Given one shot at an outdoor sculptural exhibition, the City of Paris went for this?
While the national government meanders through the minefields of the pandemic, the city government has decided to encourage herd immunity from critical thinking. The bronzes are cute enough in a simple-minded way, call them mildly amusing if you like, but with museums closed, the occasion called out for exhibiting something more thought-provoking or humorous or simply surprising in the public space—something to appeal to our sense of curiosity at a time when cultural gatherings are otherwise forbidden and many of our usual pleasures (not to mention loved ones) are out of reach. Instead, Le Cat has killed the curiosity.
The exhibition is present along the park bordering the Avenue des Champs-Elysées from Place de la Concorde to the Rond-Point from March 26 to June 9.
Sculptural Sedatives
It’s a misnomer to call the current restrictions lockdown. Instead, since November we’ve been locked out from cultural institutions and locked in for the evening. As displeasing as it is to be infantilized by a grab-bag of restrictions and fluctuating curfews decreed by the moderate right national government, the moderate left city government under Mayor Hidalgo clearly views Paris as a playground for uncurious children.
The Geluck exhibition will be gone soon enough but what will remain is the sense that insipid installations, permanent or otherwise, are a hallmark of the current occupants of Hidalgo’s vision of Paris. Two others examples, both installed in 2019, stand near Le Chat: One is Jeff Koons’ bouquet of anal/mushroom tulips in the park on the opposite side of the avenue. Koons’ sculpture was intended as a colorful call to weep for the victims of terrorism but it’s as unthought-provoking as Le Chat in a tutu: take a picture and move on. The other is the group of LED-lit tubular crystal and bronze fountains at the Rond-Point. The good news is that both of those are easily ignored: you’re unlikely to pass by the bouquet without seeking it out and you’re unlikely to notice the high-tech plumbing during the day despite their prominent position.
City Hall has repeatedly reminded doubters that the 3.5+ million euros for the tulips and the 6.3 million for the high-tech plumbing were funded through private donations in collaboration with the Fonds pour Paris – Paris Foundation, as though private funding makes more palatable and less public these mind-numbing installations. (Follow the money in one analysis here.)
All attempts to bring a contemporary touch to the city get criticized, city officials repeatedly proclaim. That is certainly true; Parisians and the Paris-based national press love to debate what’s going on in their backyard. Yet it’s also true that despite the distinct reasons for each these three closely-spaced installations—the grotesque bouquet, the fancy plumbing, the glorified cartoon—they reveal similar attempts to numb the mind of the stroller and the passerby. Each of them is distinctly uninspiring. City Hall would have us believe that any criticism of their public installations is a criticism of progress and of contemporary art or design. But you have only to realize that none of them holds your attention for more than one minute to understand that they are cultural and sculptural sedatives, intended to keep us from thinking anything at all.
Are You in Love?
While Paris promotes low cartoon, Greater Nancy is offering high and accessible art that premiered online on March 25, 2021.
Etes-Vous Amoureux? (Are You in Love?), a project by the Opéra National de Lorraine, may not have the mass appeal of Le Chat but it certainly makes an effort to engage the general public with the arts in an original manner during the pandemic. It premiered online on March 25.
Composed by Paul Brody, who’s American, and developed through NOX, the Opera’s laboratory for lyric creation, the opera is comprised of 12 lyrical short films presenting 12 love stories filmed at 12 locations in the Greater Nancy area. Nancy is a city 190 miles east of Paris. The films have English subtitles.
Watch contemporary opera when there’s so much else to do? I know, I thought the same thing. Then I clicked on the first film and patiently got drawn in. Will you? Have a look and listen here.
© 2021, Gary Lee Kraut
Hi Gary. Just a note. This expo was not planned to be right in the middle of Covid as the only expo in town. It was originally planned to be on the Champs last March and was postponed a year. The planning starting in 2019 or before. I’m disappointed that the expo is outside my 10km range and hope we’ll be let out before it ends in June.
Personally I get a kick out of Le Chat. The albums have all kinds of current events mockery as well as snarky observations on life in general. They are a good challenge for one’s level of French too with lots of word play.
Hi Lisa.
A thousand other events in the works in 2019 or earlier were planned for 2020 but the City of Paris went to lengths to maintain Le Chat over most others. So it’s not mere coincidence that the city is promoting Le Chat at this time. Furthermore, I don’t take issue with the humor that may be found in Le Chat. My issue is the presentation of monumental Chats to the exclusion of so many other outdoor possibilities, while culture venues remain shuttered. As to challenging one’s level of French, one would do better to read Loofe on fusac.fr, n’est ce pas?
Gary