The French Nuit Blanche festival is an all night post modernist happening that’s become a popular annual event for many revelers for whom a night of drunken debauchery among the dull, lifeless imaginings that passes for art is considered culture. Pretentious in that unsophisticated you find mostly on college campuses, it seems more a last grasp at potency from a flaccid culture deveined by Marxism than celebration of modern civilization.
Or as Tiberge of GalliaWatch so artfully puts it:
Virtual reality, gigantic parabolas, music from outer space, a mixture of real and digital images – everything to please the contemporary mentality. Since I wasn’t there, I should not talk about it, but I have the distinct feeling that this sort of thing is not for me. It sounds mindless, gimmicky and purely technical, although some of the visual aspects were undoubtedly “interesting”, in the way fireworks are interesting – a temporary charge and then silence.
Ultimately, the display of purely technical prowess becomes a unique form of violence, devoid as it is of a human message, of an interpretation of life, which is one of the purposes of art. This technical virtuosity has a deadening effect on the spirit, and perhaps that is what it is supposed to do. It’s the “circus” part of the “bread and circus” promise made by pagan governments to the people.
However, I may be too harsh, not having been there.
It should be no surprise to anyone to hear that in such an environment a group of drunken barbarians broke into a Museum and attacked the life affirming true art that is the antithesis of Nuit Blanche, and indeed modern art everywhere. From the AP:
Intruders entered the Orsay Museum early Sunday and punched a hole in a renowned work by Impressionist painter Claude Monet, “Le Pont d’Argenteuil,” the French Culture Minister said.
A surveillance camera caught a group entering the museum, located on the Left Bank of the French capital along the Seine River and housing a major collection of Impressionist artists like Monet.
An alarm sounded and the group left, but not before damaging the painting, an aide to Culture Minister Christine Albanel said by telephone.
No arrests were immediately made.
Albanel told France-Info radio that the painting could be restored, but she deplored what she said was an attack on “our memory, our heritage.”
“This splendid Monet painting (was) punched right in the middle,” the minister said with emotion.
According to the aide, a 10-centimetre tear was made in the Monet, perhaps with a fist. The official, not authorized to speak publicly of the matter, asked not to be named.
It was not immediately clear how many people were in the group that broke into the museum.
Monet led the 19th century Impressionist movement, experimenting notably with light and colour in works now deemed priceless.
While I tend to admire more the fashionable despair, as I heard it put, of the literary works of French authors like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, or the perverse wickedness of La Bas (the written word captures more emotion than the canvas ever can, in my opinion) than the admittedly genius compositions of the impressionists, I am saddened by the knowledge that the work of a great artist would be treated so disrespectfully in his own country.
Yet another way in which western civilization is being destroyed by the cancer from within.