Although the threat is clear, the growing fragility of our cultural institutions in the face of organized criminal networks does not provoke any real reaction: the political and judicial authorities remain inert, while museums, insufficiently equipped and protected, remain at the mercy of a booming heritage crime.
In "Bad Genre at the Museum," Didier Rykner denounces the growing intrusion of woke and decolonial ideologies into museums, accused of falsifying history, censoring works, and sacrificing art to militant causes. Through a series of concrete examples, he criticizes the trivialization of vandalism, racial obsession, cancel culture, and the ideological rewriting of works—all serious attacks on memory, universalism, and the mission of cultural institutions.
The example of a trans actress whose career collapsed after the discovery of comments deemed racist and Islamophobic reveals the contradictions of wokeism. Claudio Rubiliani exposes intersectionality, an incoherent and self-destructive ideology, ridiculed by its own excesses.
The exhibition "Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art" at the Brooklyn Museum, curated by Stephanie Sparling Williams, offers a radical rereading of American art history by inverting power relations: works by non-white and women artists are foregrounded, while those by white artists are physically demeaned to force a reckoning with historical inequalities. This approach, hailed by some as a necessary deconstruction of the dominant narrative, is criticized by others as a form of radical activism that transforms the museum experience into an ideological display.
In "The Damned of the Sea," Camille Schmoll analyzes the journey of migrant women in the Mediterranean, highlighting the violence they experience, the obstacles of migration policies, and their quest for autonomy through in-depth field research. She deconstructs preconceived ideas about the feminization of migration and highlights the role of digital technology as a space for resistance and identity reconstruction.
The National Library of France is organizing a major exhibition on the Apocalypse, exploring its original meaning as "revelation" rather than the end of the world. The event, structured in three parts, offers an immersion into John's text, an analysis of the Apocalypse in art, and a contemporary reflection on the post-catastrophe, sparking controversy over an underlying ideology.
Exclusive excerpt from Sabine Prokhoris' book, "Who's Afraid of Roman Polanski?" If there is one thing that Roman Polanski had to deal with, in several forms, the fatal experience, it is the destructive power of falsification erected as a norm.
Have you ever noticed that the world portrayed on screen in advertising, in movies, or on television looks less and less like the world we know? That now, in fiction, white people seem overrepresented among the bad guys? That female characters are often geniuses who face no obstacles, more gifted in every way than their male counterparts? And conversely, that men, especially when they are white and of a certain age, are systematically toxic?
The American and international media have recently echoed a barely conceivable piece of news: the Davis County School District (95 schools for 72000 students, very close to Salt Lake City, Utah) had just announced its decision to ban lower school levels (5-13 years old) from accessing the venerable King James Bible (1611), the very one on which George Washington took the oath on April 30, 1789.
In June, Claude Tremblay published the first gender-neutral version of Recherche au Québec, in his post-binary publishing house, Intersexions. An undertaking that promises to be highly controversial.