When President Macron attended the last night of Celine Dion’s run of concerts in Paris on Friday 16th October, he wasn’t expecting that the following day would bring the worst scenes of public disorder France has seen in years. Macron’s concert-going may, of course, be a case of je ne regrette rien for a lameduck presidency that is getting lamer by the day – although perhaps it would have been wiser to see the great Celine next year. She returns to Paris on 8 May, nearly a week after the second round of the French presidential election will decide who Macron’s successor will be.
Just as one cultural luminary bid au revoir to Paris, another arrived to light up the capital. Literally so, as Jenny Holzer’s new exhibition, ‘J’ai Vu’, at the Musée d’Orsay began its run on 18 October with a week of projections on the facade of the building. Like the works inside, the writing draws on the artists’ letter and notebooks in the museum’s archives: Charles Baudelaire, Rosa Bonheur, Van Gogh, Zola – everyone who was anyone interesting in 19th-century France seems to be included in a list of credits that runs to 31 pages.
London couldn’t compete with Paris in either civil disorder or star power last weekend, but there was the matter of the second British Museum Ball. The theme for the inaugural event in 2025 was ‘pink’ and this year’s theme was ‘red’ – who knows what 2027 will bring. The ball’s artistic director was the celebrated designer Es Devlin, but the most enterprising dressing of the museum was an unplanned one – unplanned by the museum, that is. Energy Embargo for Palestine, a group that objects to the British Museum’s £50m sponsorship deal with BP, among other things, and regularly makes its feelings known, projected slogans across the facade during the evening. Since the pediment of the BM offers considerably less surface area than the riverside frontage of the Musée d’Orsay, the slogans were necessarily brief. ‘Drop BP’ was an obvious message, but your roving correspondent was surprised by the personal nature of some of the others beamed up before they were quickly taken down. The protestors may not have taken the time to delve into the British Museum’s extensive archives in the manner of Jenny Holzer, but what Rakewell has seen suggests that they took maximum advantage of the curtness of good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon (possibly Norse) invective.
