Macron invites the Carters to make art at the Louvre

So it appears that Emmanuel Macron and the Louvre Museum “scored a win” by letting Beyoncé and Jay-Z film a music video in-front of its parade of greatest hits art-work, garnering millions more to desire to come to Paris to recreate the Carter’s magical protestations.  Let’s just call it mutual exploitation, a symbiotic capitalist fantasy.

The truth is, this has been the long-term trajectory of the Louvre, which no longer seeks to just satisfy art-lovers with well-researched curatorial exhibitions of Old Masters and Antiquities.  For at least the past decade, the Louvre has embraced the Selfie-craze, and at any day of the year, when the museum doors are open, the implicit major activity inside the museum IS tourists taking selfies in front of whatever painting or object that happens to please their “aesthetic.”  The usual places, obviously, the lonely Mona Lisa, behind her impenetrable double layered bullet proof glass, the Venus de Milo, and the Nike of Samothrace.  Some tourists will venture away from the Denon wing of the Louvre where the Italian Renaissance, Greek and Roman antiquities, as well as the relatively newly re-done Islamic Art sections are housed.  But one’s impression is that over 67% of visitors go there, ignore most everything to join the crowds with their back turned away from Veronese’s Marriage of Cana, looted from Venice by Napoleon I, to push their way towards Leonardo’s portrait of that mysterious enigmatic smile that has the unfortunate status of being the image of reproduction of choice of art charlatans, from Duchamp to Koons.

The neo-liberal Thatcherian globalist capitalism espoused by Emmanuel Macron, seen by most mainstream Anglo-saxon media as the savior, the antithesis of the gory spectacle that is Donald Trump, has since his inauguration, brought on waves and waves of protests, demonstrations and general anger in the French population.  The cheminots, employees of the  Société Nationale de Chemin de Fer (SNCF), France’s national railway company, has been on months of scheduled strikes.  Americans may think that it is just lazy “federal” employees unwilling to take a hit for their own long-term financial health.  Well, that is how it is sold by Macron and his minions.  The truth is, the SNCF has been investing a lot of money in upgrading its railway lines to accommodate their high speed trains, the TGV.  And as such, it has taken on a rather large debt, about a smart 50 billion euros.  Well, Macron, ever the friend of the French people, declared that this debt is due to the fat pay checks given to the employees of the SNCF, the “cheminots,” and so the only way to take care of the problem is to cut their guaranteed benefits, things like early retirement, a good middle-income salary, lifetime employment.  All this in the general trend dictated by the European Union’s Commission to privatize nationalized companies to “increase competition”.  

In a rough equivalent, you can say that Macron is demonizing the cheminots in order to get away with his ultimate goal, he wants to Thatcherize France.  Whatever the case, the cheminots are not having it, and not a small minority of the French population support them.  Macron, France’s savior according to some, doesn’t care and is pushing forward with his measures of austerity while at the same time, just like Trump, recently passed a law that cut taxes for his rich friends and benefactors, to the cool tune of 4 billion euros—money the oligarchy obviously doesn’t really need apart from their capitalistic impetus of amassing more and more money, period.

Speaking of capitalism, the merchants of LVMH, the Arnault fortune to be specific, just in case you didn’t know, owns two of the regularly read newspapers in town, Le Parisien, and Les Échos.  The former is sort of like the New York Post, and the latter is like a small version of the Wall Street Journal.  The Pinault fortune, on the other hand, owns Le Point, sort of like France’s Time magazine, but rather crazy conservative.  Get that into your heads and start asking yourself how in the world will any of this so-called free press be free to speak of anything when they are owned by huge industrial fortunes whose interest is not so much journalism or criticism, but making money?  Pinault financed Hirst’s “come-back” in Venice last year.  But all this is just old news and not likely surprising to anyone.  And I only mentioned these two since they are well known to art news readers.  In fact, all the major dailies, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération are owned by large industrial fortunes . . . Free press may be an illusion in France in 2018.

And so, I return to the Carters embracing their billionaire underdog status to make a sort of glamorous protest video in front of the greatest hits of the Louvre.  The local progressives declared that the two are putting back into the “center” the marginalized and unwanted of Western Society.  The conservatives are indignant that their national monument has become the backdrop for imperialist American pop stars.  All this outcry while the ILLEGAL migrants from Africa on a ship named “Aquarius” was chased away by both the Italians and the French and had to find some sympathetic Spanish mayor to let them not drown.  In the US, the outcry over migrant children being separated from their parents by the Trump administration is loud.  In  France, the outcry of the Macron government’s decision to possibly let migrants, 600 plus of them, sail off  and possibly disappear into the beautiful Mediterranean Sea, was not so loud, albeit slightly embarrassing.  But Bruno Le Maire, Macron’s mouthpiece, went out to the press and still declared that France did the right thing.  

Somehow, that illusion of Macron being the savior of the free world may not stick, and perhaps, one day, one will see the neo-liberal Thatcherian near-autocratic capitalism as the “philosophy” behind both Donald Trump and Macron.  Call me an extremist. 

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An addendum: shout out to Helen Molesworth on her commencement speech at UCLA: Brava, Madame !

Capital « has inserted its values of profit and their inherent belief in money and wealth as the ultimate metrics of success into democracy’s most fundamental institutions: the press, scientific research, concert halls, the universities, museums. »