PARIS: Nearly a year into his term, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has hardly mentioned the arts or culture. In late February, he said that French cuisine should be added to the Unesco World Heritage list. De Gaulle had André Malraux at his elbow. François Mitterrand renovated the Louvre. Just before he left office, Jacques Chirac inaugurated an immense museum for non-Western cultures, designed by Jean Nouvel, which in its confusing, heart-of-darkness, overwrought layout, epitomizes a certain kind of French arrogance. Naturally, millions of tourists now flock to it. Every French president since the Liberation has cooked up some such pharaonic new museum or opera house or library or initiated some legacy-minded cultural program, until now. Sarkozy's taste is said to be for Lionel Ritchie and Céline Dion. (Mitterrand mulled over Dostoevsky; de Gaulle consumed Chateaubriand - the writer.) The current president's fondness for showbiz pals, his marriage to the Italian former model and singer Carla Bruni, and the appointment of a culture minister, Christine Albanel, who is intelligent but widely regarded as weak among Sarkozy's ministers, have combined to produce something of a culture shock. "A rupture," is what the political scientist Pascal Perrineau calls it.
PARIS: Nearly a year into his term, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has hardly mentioned the arts or culture. In late February, he said that French cuisine should be added to the Unesco World Heritage list.
De Gaulle had André Malraux at his elbow. François Mitterrand renovated the Louvre. Just before he left office, Jacques Chirac inaugurated an immense museum for non-Western cultures, designed by Jean Nouvel, which in its confusing, heart-of-darkness, overwrought layout, epitomizes a certain kind of French arrogance. Naturally, millions of tourists now flock to it.
Every French president since the Liberation has cooked up some such pharaonic new museum or opera house or library or initiated some legacy-minded cultural program, until now.
Sarkozy's taste is said to be for Lionel Ritchie and Céline Dion. (Mitterrand mulled over Dostoevsky; de Gaulle consumed Chateaubriand - the writer.) The current president's fondness for showbiz pals, his marriage to the Italian former model and singer Carla Bruni, and the appointment of a culture minister, Christine Albanel, who is intelligent but widely regarded as weak among Sarkozy's ministers, have combined to produce something of a culture shock.
"A rupture," is what the political scientist Pascal Perrineau calls it.
in its confusing, heart-of-darkness, overwrought layout, epitomizes a certain kind of French arrogance. Naturally, millions of tourists now flock to it.
Strange how masochistic "millions of tourists" are, flocking to displays of French arrogance.
