From violence to nuance
Beaux-Arts is definitely on a roll this month. And the comments in each polemical, philosophical or critical article are all deliciously sharp, well-founded and methodical. This surge of energy leads us to report today on these new and emerging thoughts. Rather than presenting works that are fresh but less immediately telling about the new issues facing our beloved art.
We did not necessarily expect Beaux-Arts to be the most virulent of the French art press this spring. For here we denounce without mask or glove the "concert of the deaf and the stereotypes", the "ambient hubbub" and its "barking". Camus, Hannah Arendt and Barthes are quoted. About the "duty to hesitate", the "dialogues of friendship" and the "suction cup thinking of ideologists".
And all this in the midst of the latest silver sneakers and the very concrete 80s design chairs that are typical of this title! Because we are in Beaux-Arts. But Beaux-Arts clearly feels an urgent need to report on the subject developed by the journalist Jean Birnbaum in his book "Le courage de la nuance".
This book is a key to the blind rage of social networks that are necessarily Manichean because they are binary in their very structure. A chronicle of clashes and subjective and hateful debates programmed by the machine. You say something. If I reply, it's to argue the opposite. If I agree with you, I don't exist. But is the cause of intellectual regression in verbal wrestling technological? Birnbaum reminds us that in the days before phallus versus phallus, George Orwell could be seen on a TV set congratulating a critic who had just shot him down in flames. Something to think about.
Of course, the exchanges would be less violent, less vulgar and less idiotic because they would be more nuanced if all the protagonists had the modesty to think that it was their ideas and not their persons that were being put forward. Real thoughts are more flexible than the positioning a priori of the personalities displayed to look good on the agora. The relentless struggle to impose oneself as the only reading of reality is not written into their DNA. There is a difference.
Photo: Jean Birnbaum - Le courage de la nuance - Seuil