There are few francophile Americans – you could probably fit them on a bus – who know exactly what they’re celebrating on “Bastille Day.”
Tag: Paris
A mysterious veil of gold and glass now floats permanently over a courtyard in the Louvre. Beneath it are priceless works of Islamic art, many of them now revealed for the first time to the public gaze. The Louvre’s Islamic collection is one of the world’s richest, with pieces created over 13 centuries on three continents.
The French banker Albert Kahn was a financial genius whose high-risk investments made him one of the richest men in Europe by the turn of the century. A lifelong pacifist, Kahn became convinced that a new technology – color photography – could contribute to cross-cultural understanding and world peace. He invested heavily in his dream, sending photographers around the globe between 1909 and 1929 to create an “archive of the planet.”
The Palais de Tokyo in Paris has reopened to the public with a vast triennial exhibition of contemporary art and the ambition to be an “anti-museum.” More than an art space, the new Palais is a vortex dug deep into the haut heart of right bank Paris. Without warning, it funnels the visitor deep underground all the way to Avenue President Wilson on the river Seine. Inside it is unplastered and unpainted, half concrete cathedral, half construction site.
The plays may have been more scandalous than the author’s sex life, but visitors still plant sexy kisses on his grave.
TOPICS: FICTION, LGBT, LOVE AND SEX, SEX, THEATER, LIFE NEWS
Oscar Wilde, the 20th century’s most famous sexual dissident, has been dead 100 years to the day. From his deathbed in a seedy Paris hotel, he has seeped into our collective consciousness and become a contemporary celebrity almost as popular as Lady Di. More than just a gay martyr, Wilde was a subversive Superman willing to hazard everything. His lectures were camp performance art and his plays celebrated decadence, gender swapping and the “cult of the clitoris.” He seems to have been the First Modern Man to emerge from the moralizing slime of the Victorian age.