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Once home to Paris' first modern art gallery, the Palais de Tokyo will again house contemporary art in the autumn of 2001
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For the urban traveler in the year 2000, Paris is the land that time forgot. The city still trades on an image of Art Nouveau Métro signs, old-fashioned brasseries and high-kicking cancan girls at the Moulin Rouge. Fur-coated women still trail poodles past picturesque tramps on the sidewalks of its better neighborhoods. Its signature boulevards avoided the destruction of World War II, leaving a cityscape where — a few set pieces aside — there is little to remind you that the 20th century ever happened.
And yet, from the first Impressionist show in 1874 through to France's collapse in the face of the Blitzkrieg of 1940, Paris was synonymous with everything that counted as avant-garde in art. Its Montparnasse clique defined the cliché of the hell-raising artist on the margins of society, living — and occasionally dying — for his art. But Paris' sun set. Throughout the last half of the 20th century, New York towered over its Old World predecessor both as the world's leading art market and as the petri dish in which the spores of new art movements could grow. To add insult to injury, even the old enemy from across the Channel has effortlessly eclipsed Paris in recent years, as British artists like Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and the Chapman brothers send shockwaves rumbling across the Atlantic from London to Brooklyn.
The French state — still omnipresent in the country's cultural sphere — has finally woken up to the situation. Although younger artists like Fabrice Hybert and Pierre Huyghe have been building international reputations, the lack of any Paris venue specifically dedicated to contemporary art has left them all but homeless in the nation's capital. Last year, the Culture Ministry announced its decision to create a new exhibition center for young contemporary artists in Paris' Palais de Tokyo — site of the city's first modern art museum — that would be "capable of rivaling those on offer in other great capitals of art like London, Berlin, Amsterdam and New York."
This self-styled "site for contemporary creation" will open to the public in autumn 2001. Work is under way to transform the Palais de Tokyo's cavernous ground floor into 3,000 sq m of exhibition space on a shoestring budget of $2.2 million. And in a marked break with tradition, responsibility for the new venue has been given not to some dyed-in-the-wool product of France's governing élite, but to a pair of thirty-something outsiders named Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans.
Both men made names for themselves during the '90s as independent art critics and exhibition curators. "We're not civil servants," says Sans. "It's a historic phenomenon for two free electrons like Nicolas and me to be named to head an institution like this."
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