Recent stories of note:
“An Afternoon with Michel Houellebecq”
David Engels, The European Conservative
Michel Houellebecq, in addition to being one of the greatest living writers, is weird. This is by his own admission: he once lamented that he was permitted to read Graziella as a ten-year-old, and “in short, things started to get pretty screwed up for me. . . I still think a bit it’s partly Lamartine’s fault.” Despite the three decades he’s been in the public eye, despite the success of his novels and poetry, and despite the many lawsuits he’s been involved in, he remains an enigma. And as this interview with David Engels in European Conservative brings to the fore, his politics have only grown increasingly enigmatic. Ostracized by much of the Left (for his aversion to immigration, among other things) and the Right (for his sexual libertinism, among other things), the writer is politically homeless. Yet he remains impossible to ignore, perhaps for the same reason: his work remains elusive, and more than that, resists reduction to mere political cudgel.
“The arts in Paris are booming—and trying to nip at London’s heels”
The Economist
In Goodbye to All That (1929), the Englishman Robert Graves recalls a recurring joke among his trench mates: “No more wars for me at any price! Except against the French. If ever there is a war against them, I’ll go like a shot.” The antagonism is not one-sided, of course: Napoleon is supposed to have said that England is nothing more than “a nation of shopkeepers.” This rivalry—now almost a millennium old—is seemingly renewed with every generation, and has recently found revived footing in the art world. Prior to the twentieth century, Paris had long been the center of the art trade. But the transatlantic migration of artists to America during the war years and the French introduction of new taxes on art transactions shifted the balance of power toward New York and London. Now, however, it is London that is introducing costly taxes and bureaucratic obstacles and Paris that is shedding them. Though America remains the undisputed financial king of the trade, a reversal of fortunes seems to be looming between the European rivals.
“‘You cannot begin by calling me France’s most famous living artist!’: Sophie Calle interviewed”
Adrian Dannatt, The Spectator
In a year in which every museum capable is running some sort of Picasso retrospective, the Musée National Picasso-Paris is doing something unexpected: turning the galleries over not to the Spaniard, but to Sophie Calle, the French conceptual artist. Sophie Calle, in turn, is trying to do something equally unexpected. She has designed a show that doubles as a sort of retrospective on not just her work, but her life as well—many of the artifacts are simply items from her home. This conspicuous blurring of the lines between work and life is what has made Calle such a mainstay in conceptual art for the better part of the last half century. Whether such blurring is actually meritorious is another question. But with four floors of her work now on display, now is the time for that question to be answered.