You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name
Your e-mail (optional)
Website (optional)
My Original Nic        Pic-a-Nic        Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Bold Italic Underline Strike Bullet Blockquote Small Big Link Squish Foto Photo
Submit your comments on this article
Europe
Audience boos and walks out at art festival -- in France
2005-07-22
One can only be avant garde for so long before one becomes garde. And it looks as if the "art" community has worn out its welcome even in La Belle France. Heh.
This year's edition of one of Europe's top summer arts events was described as a pretentious catastrophe Thursday after angry audiences booed or walked out of a series of performances. Critics attending the three-week Avignon theatre festival in southern France said it had plumbed new depths of intellectual obscurity and warned that a contempt for the mainstream public was placing the future of a prestigious national institution in jeopardy. "What purgatory!" headlined the news magazine Le Point on its culture pages, "Loyal spectators are sad, disorientated and haggard,"
Ouch.
while a commentator for the Communist newspaper L'Humanite said this year's offerings were marked by "a triumphant sense of masturbatory autism."
Double ouch.
But the most searing attack on Europe's most important drama venue after Edinburgh came from the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, which devoted its daily editorial to "the festival's worst crisis since 1968. It is chic, it is hip, it is conceptual. And it is totally cut off from the real country," the paper thundered.
Prolly just mad they didn't have any pink tanks or effigies of GWB, but it is fun to see the paying customer figger out they've been had.
"Prototypes are being launched for the public to test, but the real audience is a tiny in-crowd, drunk on its own pathetic audacity .... Most spectators are not totally new to the world of the arts and can make up their own minds. Every evening they come out revolted. Does the festival have the right to survive this artistic and moral disaster?" it concluded.
More at the link descibing the "art" that festivalgoers were forced to sit through.
Posted by:Seafarious

#8  "a triumphant sense of masturbatory autism."

Gad, even the commies went for 'em with a pick handle. It must've been bad...
Posted by: mojo   2005-07-22 12:15  

#7  It is long past time for a total overhaul of art in the West. Pop artists are now nothing more than scatalogical humorists--their minimalist, redundant, and derivative art philisophy is best demonstrated in Penn Jillette's "The Aristocrats" movie, but even that is better than the usual crapola, because at least it has a sense of control, editing, and direction. More than anything else, artists need to be expelled from the United States, and forced to live somewhere else for even a few months, just to see life, any life, beyond their tiny realities. They need to see, if not experience firsthand, real human emotions, the highs and lows of real people. They need to see nature, and not on television. They need to sweat, feel hungry when they want to eat and can't, be surrounded by those who don't speak English, and have to struggle just to get by. Send them to South America, send them to Africa, then them to SE Asia or Oceania. The quality of their art would skyrocket.
Posted by: Anonymoose   2005-07-22 10:45  

#6  How far the French have come from the riot at the premiere of "The Rite of Spring." Pro-Stravinsky patrons battled protestors to the point that the dancers could not hear the orchestra. There is hope for arts yet.
Posted by: SR-71   2005-07-22 09:12  

#5  In 2004 and earlier this year, there was a "theater" danced performance called "The crying body", original title, by Jan Fabre (who offered anew piece at the Avignon festival, themed around blood this time), in which basically the dancers urinated on stage, spat on each others, simulated sex, and masturbated in front of the audience, with of course a nod at christianity, as one dancer was dressed as a priest.
This caused a stir in some conservative circles, but didn't truly reverberate in the MSM (the piece was judged "contreversial", tough, but was liked by "Le monde" or the city of Paris art department). Link to a critical article (in french) http://www.france-echos.com/actualite.php?cle=3231

Of course, this was gvt-funded, and the then minister of art and culture (yes, we got one), Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres was of course one of the spectators (who included some children)... and was splattered with p*ss along with the first row as the dancers jumped in the poddles they had just made on stage... somehow, there is a moral in that... if that isn't decadent art, then I don't know what it is.
Posted by: anonymous5089   2005-07-22 03:51  

#4  "a tiny in-crowd, drunk on its own pathetic audacity"

Sums up the elites, of all stripes, rather nicely.
Posted by: .com   2005-07-22 01:10  

#3  Reminds me of one chapter of David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day.
Posted by: Rory B. Bellows   2005-07-22 00:33  

#2  Sounds like a rousing success!

Screw the common people - Art is not for them.
Posted by: gromky   2005-07-22 00:27  

#1  Let me guess it's government funded too.
2 screwings for the price of one.
Posted by: Sock Puppet 0’ Doom   2005-07-22 00:03  

00:00