Editorial
Yes we care!
Jean de Loisy
(p. 18)
Art engages us. Meeting artists, the altitude at which they set their
research, their rigor, their determination, the invention of new signs
that widen our understanding, their words and the persuasive intensity of
their approach lead those who encounter them to attest the importance, for
all of us, of this creation that steers us towards what we couldn't have
guessed beforehand. Curators, the people who take care of artworks, convey
the importance that this encounter has had for them. To convince us of
this, sometimes even before any critical expression, their primary
language is the exhibition. Conceiving, structuring, organizing the
visible, putting works into relation with one another, associating them
with objects or with those of other artists, in short, shaping the
exhibition until it appears to do justice to their admiration. This
magnificent enterprise is not new, but perhaps what is new is the
evolution of the language and the change in attitude. While artists have
always had theorists or committed writers alongside them, from
Félix
Fénéon to Pierre Restany for example, for a long time it was
dealers, museums or institutions that were entrusted with this role.
Today, this work of a different nature—initiated by
Harald Szeemann,
Hans
Ulrich Obrist and a few others, freer and more creative than any
institution could ever be in the past—has yielded an increase in
numbers of this particular character known in French as a curateur
[freelance exhibition curator], a hazy name for a player who is more
independent and subjective than the curators or exhibition organizers of
the past. For them, it is not a matter of reporting on how a work fits
into a legitimate history, but on the contrary of loving it because it
brims over any story. The Palais de Tokyo and the magazine
Palais, working
with the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d'Art [French Art
Dealers Association] and the journal
The Exhibitionist, with the support
of accomplices
(1) who helped us choose amongst more than five hundred
international projects, are leading along more than thirty galleries and
art spaces in Paris to focus on this topic and give unparalleled
visibility to this phenomenon: the appearance of new companions of
artists, who have chosen the exhibition as a medium to acclaim them. Jean
de Loisy
The jury is composed of
Hans
Ulrich Obrist (Co-director of the
Serpentine Gallery, London), Massimiliano Gioni (Associate Director and
Curator, New Museum, New York),
Jens Hoffmann (Deputy Director, Jewish
Museum, New York), Jean-Hubert Martin (independent curator), Xavier
Franceschi (Director, FRAC Île-de-France, Paris), Colette Barbier
(Director, Fondation d'entreprise Ricard, Paris), Fabienne Leclerc
(Comité Professionnel des Galeries d'Art), Alain
Reinaudo (Institut Français), Jean de Loisy (President of the
Palais de Tokyo), and the curators of the Palais de Tokyo: Daria de
Beauvais, Marc Bembekoff, Julien Fronsacq, Katell Jaffrès, Rebecca
Lamarche-Vadel, Mouna Mekouar, and Akiko Miki.
