Arts visuels
H.R. Giger and Alien: How Biomechanical Art Redefined Science-Fiction Horror
The dark imagination of a Swiss artist When the film Alien by Ridley Scott came out in 1979, people came across a kind of creature entirely new to them. The creature’s long skull, mechanical look, skeletal structure and unpleasant biological features established a completely new conception of the science-fiction monster. The Swiss artist H.R. Giger Read more
From Objects to Narratives : The Political Power of Museums
The museums, between procedees, tools and places of power, who gets to tell History ? Are museums really just places of culture? When you think of museums, what comes to your mind? Most of the time, we generally imagine a place dedicated to preserving and transmitting culture. Whatever the nature of the objects on Read more
Understanding art and emotion: does understanding art explain away its magic?
What do you feel when you look at this painting? Anxiety? Melancholy? Admiration? These feelings can come out of nowhere as if a single brushstroke could transport us without explaining anything. This whole chemical cocktail can kick in before we understand that the painting probably evokes the passage from life to death. Our first emotion therefore arrives Read more
The 57th Rencontres d’Arles: Rereading the World and History
I. Introduction Every summer, the ancient city of Arles becomes the international epicenter of photography. Founded in 1970 by Lucien Clergue, Michel Tournier, and Jean-Maurice Rouquette, the Rencontres take over various venues throughout the city. Balancing exhibitions by the most prestigious photographers with the discovery of emerging artists, the festival aims to provide the general public with Read more
“Sorcières”: a new lecture of History at the Château des Ducs
If you thought witches are only good for scaring children in Grimm tales or making brooms fly in Harry Potter, it is time to review your classics. Until June 28, 2026, the Château des Ducs de Bretagne in Nantes invites us to a dizzying dive into one of the darkest and most fascinating periods of Read more
Sovereign Women in History and Art: An Eternal Ideological Stake
From Cleopatra to Elizabeth I, from Mary Stuart to Marie Antoinette, the names of great sovereign women evoke powerful myths of grandeur, beauty, and tragedy that nourish our imagination. But what remains of reality behind these narratives? Did Marie Antoinette really say, “Let them eat cake”? Was Cleopatra truly the most beautiful woman of the Read more
Strike at the Louvre
Strikers protesting for better work conditions, higher wages and more workers, and against the obsolescence of the building and the LNR Project (© LeParisien LP/Ahmed Benazzouz) On Monday, February 16, an assembly of more than 200 employees of the Louvre Museum voted to go on strike, making it impossible to fully open the museum. Launched Read more
European Painting Confronted with the Transition from Polytheism to Monotheism
For centuries, Europe lived surrounded by visible gods. They had bodies, faces, stories, tempers, desires, and a profoundly human dimension. They inhabited the walls of houses, public squares, temples, and frescoes. Then, gradually, this familiarity with the divine faded. Not through an immediate iconoclastic upheaval, but through a slow shift in which images more than Read more
Culture 3.0: Towards a New Financial Structure for Cultural Institutions
Beeple (Mike Winkelmann), Everydays: The First 5000 Days, 2021. NFT. ©Beeple From Speculation to Infrastructure: The Genesis of a Regulated Cultural Web 3.0 The year 2021 was marked by a sudden and unprecedented explosion in the field of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). This period was characterized by a level of speculative euphoria that remains difficult to Read more
Édouard Manet tried to warn us about the male gaze
We often come across the expression male gaze on the internet and in the media. It refers to the act, in arts, of depicting women and the world from a heterosexual male perspective. This perspective represents women as sexual objects, for the pleasure of the heterosexual male audience. The concept of male gaze was first articulated by the British Read more