Last week I attended a lecture on rhetoric at the Sorbonne where the invited guest said “beauty plus history equals art”. This passé notion made me flinch. I wondered what he would do with all of the artists of the 1970s who self-mutilated on film or in live performance pieces. More importantly, when I reflect on the current art focus of Paris, how would he see the use of objects as art? Not pretty, ornamental things from some other era, but gigantic colorful cows, a rumpled, worn-out dress tossed on a museum floor, or Paris artists Olivier Babin, with his bronze, painted watermelon(photo above) entitled “Art for the very last people”, 2005, and Boris Achour, with his “Actions Few” (1993-97) a kind of “soft guerilla warfare.” Achour, unlike Babin, does not make an object, but used objects found on the spot in unusual “public interventions” which he then photographed and filmed—as in his hanging baguette (see photo, from his site).

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