In the poems he uses recurring themes: melancholy, passage of time, the desire of the infinite, the critique of religion and morality, the mockery of the ideals that drive modern man and especially a bourgeoisie dominated by looks, money and power.

Baudelaire is certain that “paradise”, the ideal, which so often takes refuge, fleeing from the harsh reality, are simply fugitive lies, ephemeral as the beauty and pleasure. But the lie is better than l’Ennui (boredom, tedium). From this thought comes the Paris Spleen.

Paris since the late eighteenth century onwards undergoes large changes due to the rise of capitalist economy which, in turn, would bring changes to the infrastructure of the city. Spaces for consumption and entertainment, leisure and sleep would emerge: the passages, department stores, the “crystal palace”. In this regard, Amendola says:

“The great nineteenth-century metropolis is declared able to summarize the world and offer it to consumer and curiosity of its inhabitants. Passages, the department stores, universal exhibitions are the places where, at different scales, the whole world and history is offered for consumption and admiration”.

In this Paris, Baudelaire is seen by Benjamin as the model of the flaneur, the man who walks the streets in search of the debris of the modern city. He is the new hero of the modern city, one among the crowd, watching as a spectator what the crowd can not see.

This lack of communication with the environment, resulting from the daily routine is one that induces the spleen. A state of melancholy without definite cause of vital angst when extinctinguishin the novelty of what’s real. In The Flowers of Evil he describes Paris as a grey, heavy city:

“When the low, heavy sky weighs like a lid
On the groaning spirit, victim of long ennui,
And from the all-encircling horizon
Spreads over us a day gloomier than the night; (…)”

Facing this situation, we ask: What about Beauty? With great ingenuity, Baudelaire always identifies the enemy. So, all this sadness and melancholy the poet suffers, boredom, big city life that infects those souls in exile and with no light always go hand in hand with beauty. The Beauty, the most beautiful is always tinged with a subtle and profound sorrow. The saddest, the most beautiful it is.

In Spleen and Ideal (firt part of The Flowers of Evil), we find 1862 Paris Spleen’s antecedent, because of his character and thematic. That semper eadem (always the same) is understood as the experience that enables man to recognize his temporality and transcendence.

One of the poems in prose that best describes the human impulse to experience new sensations when he is immersed in a contemplative life without action is: “The poor glazier (http://divinapoesia.blogspot.com/2009/02/ el-mal-glazier-charles-baudelaire.html). An amazing story told in first person about how one day, the spleen was awakened by an irresistible force that led him to make a totally unexpected and absurd act, but enjoyable at the same time. Who has not ever felt that euphoria, that desire to do something crazy?

Cinta Blanch

If you go to Paris, become a flaneur, wander the streets aimlessly watching everything around you. To relax rent apartments in Paris to sleep with Baudelarie’s poems.?

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In the first part of this article we talked about how the issue of the beheading of John the Baptist at the instigation of Herodias’s daughter. This issue became a real obsession for Oscar Wilde in his second Parisian season.

Despite the implicit rivalry with Stéphane Mallarmé, who had not yet managed to finish his poem Hérodiade, the young writers of his circle at once showed their commitment to Wilde in this matter. Specifically Marcel Schwob, Adolphe Rett and Piere Louÿs, who the work is dedicated to, collaborated with the Irish writer in the correction of several drafts -remember that Wilde had decided to write the play in a vaguely archaic French- which began as a narrative prose to then metamorphose into a poem and finally into its final theatre piece.

Although Wilde’s knowledge of the iconography of Salome was immense, the only pictorial representation that seemed to entirely satisfy him was that by Gustave Moreau, with which he began to be familiar through Huysmans’ seductive depiction of his paintings on the subject in the famous fifth chapter of his novel À Rebours, since Moreau would have been able to convey the idea that Salome was not just a dancer but the symbolic embodiment of an immortal lust.

Wilde’s obsession not only took him to constantly talk about it, but even to pursue women he chase down the street in whom he saw the perfect image of Salome. He also examined the jewellery stores on the Rue de la Paix in search of ornaments that could serve her often imagining her naked except for the most extraordinary ornaments, precious stones and pearls, which were to give the sensation of breathing out of his flesh.

He once asked to see a bust of a decapitated woman with blood painted on her neck that was in the home of Symbolist writer Jean Lorrain and he immediately identified it with the head of Salome “which had been decapitated” as he said, “fruit of desperation. This is the revenge of the Baptist”.

In another occasion, when seeing in the Moulin Rouge a Romanian acrobat dancing on her hands, as in Flaubert’s novel, he offered her, without success, the role of Salome.

But perhaps the most memorable story refers to the night having dinner at poet Stuart Merrill’s home, when Rémy de Gourmount told him that he invariably confused and mixed up two different Salomes, Herodes’ daughter and the dancer who appears in the Bible. Wilde later said: “That poor Gourmont thinks he knows more than anyone. What they told us was a true of a school teacher. I prefer the other truth, my own, which is a dream. Between two truths, the falsest is the truest”.

Paul Oilzum

A pure genius. Perhaps you would like to remember these things the next time you rent one of the apartments in Paris?

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From March 1 to May 8, the National Gallery of Jeu de Paume presents an interesting and entertaining interactive work, Communitas, by Dutch artist Aernout Mik. The installation is a perpetual conceptual game between architecture and captivating, almost hypnotic images.

Aernout Mik was born in Groningen, Holland in 1962. He studied at the Minerva Academy and Fie Wekman. His artwork includes film, architecture and sculpture he makes a game with, that involves the audience, subverting the relationship between work and viewer. Images float, showing images in a repetitive sequence and multiple projections that produce the sensation of being in a maze.

What is interesting it’s his focus of the storytelling that plays with irony, ambiguity, the ritualization of space and the absurd. It takes the human nonsense and develops it in a few images that are repeated in loops of minutes.

His videos in short sequences, without context, have no narrative or sound and are repeated in endless overwhelming ways, although it makes some brief changes, difficult to perceive. Without meaning to or with clear awareness of what he is seeking to cause in the viewer, Mik uses the effect of sweeping the image to cause hypnotic feeling that numbs the response, the same effect as the mass media generates with dozens of images per second of advertising, which prevent reflection on the actual messages that are created.

The game between the work and the viewer that Mik presents in this installation goes beyond itself, adding movement to the walls that enhance stimuli, altering the perception. We could say he has studied the psychological effect produced by the “house of distorting mirror” of the old fairs to suit his installations, where the repetitive images, the light and the slight movement of the walls are disfiguring and disturbing images in the psyche of the viewer, making them look grotesque or humorous, depending on the viewer’s emotion.

Mik and his video installations provoke deep feelings about reality and human condition, which allude to the fragility caused by the indifference that created extreme individualism and bolstered by media images that feed on the misery and pain. No one is unscathed after seeing these video installations. That’s this conceptual artist’s bet, to move through what traps us, because we live in a world of images and are trapped by them.

Aernout Mik has also made performances at the public space, generating interesting behavior and emotional microclimates among the spectators. That’s why the tour through the conceptual work by this artist is wonderful, it leads us to investigate the interplay of emotions and social behavior in a world where they are increasingly influenced and often driven by media communication and images.

For further info: http://www.jeudepaume.org/index.php?page=article&idArt=1368&lieu=1&PHPSESSID=17b4c6f1cf4ee9264bedf977eac439d4

Nancy Guzman

If you are in Paris be sure to go through National Gallery of Jeu de Paume and enter this labyrinth of images and sensations. And remember that the best feelings are found in apartments in Paris?

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The National Library of France is putting on a retrospective exhibition of painter and photographer Richard Prince from 29th of March until the 26th of June. The title “Richard Prince: An American Prayer” is a reference to the book of poems written by Jim Morrison, which were later performed by his band The Doors in 1978.

Richard Prince was born near the North American territory of the Panama canal in 1949. Prince was an exponent of the “appropriationism” movement of the early 1980s art scene, which sought to transcend the limits of the theories of Modernism by returning to painting, and paying special attention to the image, and its powers of narrative.

Prince started working on photographic collages in 1975, in which he repeatedly photographed the same place at different moments. Photographic collage “Untitled Cowboy” was sold for around $1 million at a Christie’s auction in 2005.

Prince’s use of publicity images, and newspaper photos has caused him some problems though – in 1977 he created a piece using images published in the New York Times, which caused controversy from the art world, as many questioned the artistic authenticity of a work made from somebody else’s.

The biggest attack on his work came in 1983, with “Spiritual American,” a piece based on Garry Gross’ photographs of a ten year old Brooke Shields posing naked in a bath. Prince’s work, which places at the foot of the child an image of a downcast female sculpture, questioned the exploitation of the woman’s body, and the growth of sexual precocity.

Prince preoccupies himself with the sexuality of the North American middle classes, and how it is influenced by the stereotypes of advertising. His “Cowboy” series uses the icon of the Marlboro man, expressing his virile, heroic image – whilst “Girlfriends” is a humorous reflection of the misogyny of the American Dream, which promoted the “modern and ideal” woman as innocent and brave.

The catalogue of the show is published by Gagosian Gallery, in association with the National Library of France, includes essays by exhibition commissioners Bob Rubin and Marie Minssieux Chamonard – as well as excerpts from Prince’s own book collection – a personal library which also contains rare Kerouac editions.

For more information:
http.//www.bnf.fr/en/cultural_events/anx_exhibitions/f.richard_prince_eng.html

Nancy Guzman

The extensive canon of Richard Prince takes an ironic look at the complexities of post-modern society – so if you are in Paris, “An American Prayer” is not one to be missed. And if you rent one of the apartments in Paris you’ll have everything you need for a perfect stay.

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French painter Bernard Frize has opened a brilliant new exhibition at prestigious Paris gallery Perrotin, which is on until 30th April.

Bernard Frize is without a doubt one of the most sought after painters in France. With his expressive, abstract style, he has established himself as a key figure in contemporary painting, and has inspired hundreds of budding young artists to take up the artform. For Frize, technique and material are of tantamount importance. He favours bright, vibrant colour and his canvasses carry a strong sense of experimentalism, captivating the spectator in an almost visceral way. Frize is particularly interested in the act of painting itself, and how it’s a creative process which can be physically gruelling. Many critics have compared Frize’s work with the American abstract expressionism of the 1960s – whilst others identify the influence of artists such as Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevitch in his abstract simplicity.

Frize’s experimental work is direct, and effective – it gets right to heart of the essence of the painting and the materials used. Interestingly, he rarely paints alone – more often than not, his creations are the result of a group effort; a collaboration with a number of assistants. This is not however a technique to speed up the production of the piece – but rather an extension of his experimental spirit; to see what happens when there is more than just one pair of hands and eyes in the creative process.

Heloise Battista

Rent apartments in Paris and enjoy Bernard Frize’s expressive paintings in one the best cities to be during the Spring.

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The International Exhibition of Modern and Contemporary Art, ART Paris, will open its doors on March 31 and runs until April 3 at the Grand Palais. The Fair is one of the events of Parisian spring that brings emerging and established artists in painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, installations and new technologies, and the great showcase of the most important galleries in France and the world.

The 2011 version of ART Paris reflects the vitality of the art market by bringing together over 120 international galleries devoted to promote modern art and design, promoting and marketing the work of young artists. This year they will be represented in 17 countries and it is expected to draw over 48,000 visitors from around the world.

Lorenzo Rudlf, initiator of this kind of art fair and director of ART Paris, conceived this space as an opportunity to expand the boundaries of traditional markets, adapting the style to the new practices of contemporary art lovers.

For this reason, the fair is considered to be an opportunity for gallery owners, collectors, curators, art lovers and for the artists to meet, learn and see the new proposals these new artists have to show.

The directors of galleries will have the opportunity to co-produce the exhibition project with other international galleries, collectors, art foundations, museums and curators. These projects will enable them to demonstrate their creative abilities, creating synergies in the art world.

Among these proposals, we highlight the involvement of the Mayoral Gallery of Barcelona which is exhibiting works by Delaunay, Sam Francis, Picasso, Miró, Salvador Dalí and Wesselmann, along with works by contemporary artists like Barceló, Fontcuberta, Sixeart, Abally, Andrew Bush and Cindy Sherman, whose work denounces Western cultural stereotyping and its use in the subjugation of women.

Espace Meyer Zafra of Paris in conjunction with the Foundation Atlas Sztuki of Poland will go through kinetic art. For the occasion it brought together several international artists, including the work of the father of this artistic current, Nicholas Schöffer. Along with his work there will be those of Ludwig Wilding, Jesus Soto, Yaacov Agam, Assisi and Antonio Carlos Cruz Diez. Atlas Sztuki Foundation for its part will present the kinetic work of Polish artist Roman Lipski.

The Ceysson gallery did not want to leave out of art the fashion design, inviting the Italian designer of luxury shoes, Sergio Rossi, with his collection of boots painted by him.

The French gallery Lahumière will be responsible for showing the path of abstract art in sculpture from 1937 to today. Lahumière has compiled the work of Jean Arp, who was a member of Cercle Carré; of Beoty Etienne, Denis Pondruel, Perrot Antoine, and a representative of geometric abstraction, Francois Morellet, to show the influence this movement had in the scene world art.

Nancy Guzman

ArtParis 2011 is a good opportunity to visit Paris and entertaining looking good exhibitions and, if you can, buy some artwork at reasonable prices. But the best thing you can do is enjoying good times in one of the apartments in Paris?

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Until April 30 the Museum of Modern Art of Paris presents a magnificent retrospective of one of the most emblematic of Canadian political art, General Idea.

Composed by Felix Partz (Ronald Gabe), Jorge Zontal (Slobodan Sala-Levy) and AA Bronson (Michael Tims), their activity starts in 1967 to continue unabated until 1994.

As pioneers of the use of principles based on media as new device of conceptual art remains as undisputed model for new generations of artists.

Thus, their work done for over 25 years, critically explored the mechanisms and strategies that constitute the cultural industry, capturing each of the elements and resources generated from this and popular culture and mass media, for the development of anti-systemic discourse.

For this, they used various artistic formats and experiences through performance, photography, video, video art, publications, graphics and series of works. Their collective work also responded to a new form of artistic activity giving raise to the “individuality” and prominence of the “artist” and joining forces in anonymity and challenging the mechanisms that form the art market.

All their work is also central in understanding the pop culture and how the artist’s creative processes, institutions, media and the public were able to interact to form the so-called “culture”.

For the whole process of research and development created during the 80′s a fictional narrative labyrinth called “Miss General Idea”, which in 1984 would be called “Miss General Idea Pavilion”.

During the life of General Idea they came to made 123 solo exhibitions and were included in 149 group exhibitions and international biennials such as Paris, Sydney, Sao Paulo and Venice and the Documenta in Kassel.

Since 1987 General Idea began focusing their work on the AIDS pandemic. AIDS seen as a “crisis”, in a study that included more than 75 art projects in public and ephemeral spaces. One of their major works of this phase was the installation “One Year of AZT / One Day of AZT”, presented as a project for a museum and is now part of the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

In 2006, during the Nuit Blanche in Toronto the three giant inflatable pads work “EPL 1991 © las EBO” were shown.

Between 1972 and 1989, General Idea published 26 issues of “FILE Megazine” as part of their work of writing and dissemination of artists. In 1974 they founded “Art Metropolem” a space for contemporary art, non-profit and dissemination of materials in various formats such as artists’ books, video, audio and electronic media.

In 1994, both Felix and Jorge Zontal Partz die of AIDS and this way the working group ended. AA Bronson is now working solo, and continues to exhibit internationally and is director of Printed Matter, Inc.” in New York.

For further info on this exhibition: http://www.absolut-paris.com/una-retrospectiva-del-general-idea/

Nancy Guzman

If you’re spending a few days of relaxation and fun in apartments in Paris you cannot miss this wonderful retrospective of General Idea.?

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At present there are very few people who do not have to be a minimum knowledge of what is sadism, yet, not many know exactly what it matches, much less the origin of the term.

The sadist is someone who delights in the pain of others or whose behavior meets pleasure in the pain of others, sadism is a way to get excitation and sexual pleasure, causing pain or humiliation to a partner.

The term derives from Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (better known as Marquis de Sade), French born writer who we can admit about that there is no literature of any time where we can find a work as outrageous as his, especially because no other author has wounded so deeply human thought and feelings.

Today, two hundred years later, it seems unlikely that anyone could write something that competes with his works. Maybe we can find similar images through film (Pasolini aspired him with The 120 Days of Sodom), but this does not overcome the hell created by the author.

Sade was an extremely prolific writer and playwright, to the point that he was banned access to paper and pen in the last years of his life, with the sole purpose of not being able to write his controversial novels, he was even imprisoned in the fortress of Vincennes in Paris. And, as not having access to anything to write, he began to do it with his own blood on the walls of his cell.

Much of his work was burned because of its controversial content, however, it concludes that the censors (of that time and the following) have been at Sade’s service and trying to silence him, they achieved nothing but becoming complicit in his immorality.

He died in 1814, having spent thirty years of his life between prison and a madhouse, knowing perfectly well all the prisons of ancient Paris.

He step into history as a brilliant writer for some, while for others he was a madman who developed his philosophy to justify unholy aberrations committed, however his work has become an absolute and unsurpassed reference.

Judeclash

Why don’t you rent one of the apartments in Paris and visit the various locations where this writer spent much of his life?

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In fall 1905, Picasso went for the first time to Gertrude Stein’s study in Paris. Like all artists who came to Mrs. Gertrude, Picasso sought the support of the famous patrons. In her study, which was in the rue de Fleurus in Paris, Picasso met painter Matisse, who had already Mrs. Gertrude’s patronage and some of his paintings hanging on her walls.

Taking advantage of that meeting, Mrs. Gertrude Stein introduced Picasso to Matisse. For a start they fell badly for various reasons: firstly because both were fighting for Ms. Stein’s favor, secondly because Matisse was a 36-year-old accomplished painter and Picasso was a boy of 24, and thirdly, Picasso was shocked by the facility Matisse unfolded with and the eloquence in which he expressed; Picasso did not speak good French and wasn’t a handsome gay.

That day, Mrs. Gertrude asked Picasso, as a passport to enter her protection circle, to make her a portrait. Picasso, a few days later, arrived with the portrait of his guard finished. Mrs. Stein, half-pleased, blame him because she said it didn’t look like her. Picasso, using that art and magic he not only possessed with in his hands, replied: “Do not worry, you’ll see that little by little you are going to look like it”.

In that little by little, Picasso was gaining a spot in the circle and the walls of Gertrude Stein’s study, but the relationship with Matisse wasn’t cold but frozen. One day Matisse himself committed the too generous act of introducing him to Sergei Shchukin, Russian collector who thereafter preferred Picasso’s works instead of Matisse’s to expand his collection. Besides Mrs. Stein and the Russian, Picasso was stealing his circle of friends too, among whom there were the French artists Andre Derain and Georges Braque.

By then the group was known as “Picasso’s band”, which was essentially devoted to speaking ill of Matisse’s work and person, in front the presence and pleasure of their new friend, Picasso.

Picasso and Matisse came to hate each other so much that after 25 years of bickering, in 1930 they were already great friends, according to a statement of Francoise Gilot, a lover of the painter from Malaga. From that year on, the two artists began such a deep friendship that there are even some testimonies: a pair of documentary films, conversations endless they held while walking through the countryside of southern France, a series of mutual influences in their paintings and a pair of very intimate declarations: Matisse said, “We must talk as much as we can, because when one of us dies, there are several things that the other won’t be able to talk to anyone else”. Picasso, meanwhile, said “Nobody has observed Matisse painting better than me, and nobody has observed my painting better than him”.

?If it were about endless conversations, rent apartments in Paris, nothing better than the

Carlos Rosas

If it were about endless conversations, rent apartments in Paris nothing better than the Seine River to intimidate with good friends and remember the old disputes between Picasso and Matisse.

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On April 5 the British group Morcheeba will perform live at the Casino de Paris. The classic space opens to present electronic music that arose in the underground to make visible the social discontent of our times.

Located at 16, rue de Clichy, the Casino de Paris is part of the history of the city. The history of France and of humanity has passed through this Casino. It was built in the eighteenth century by the Duc de Richelieu under the concept of a space for fun and entertainment, but the French Revolution became it the Tivoli Garden, a space dedicated to the great popular celebrations with fireworks. In 1880, the place became the Palace Theatre, and different shows, including the popular wrestling that emptied the box office, started to be held. Only at the beginning of World War I the casino starts operating in a structured way, but the bombings and the horrors of war again and again interrupted its activities. After the war it restarted activities with musical revues and vaudeville, a very popular entertainment in those days that became it a symbol of Paris.

Today, catching up with the show times, the Casino de Paris brings the music that had its origins in the mid-80′s in Bristol, England, when the American hip hop music expanded and its urban sound with Jamaican reminiscent, started to disappear. However, in the port of Bristol, the musical memory of Jamaican immigrants did not stop to sample their ancestral sounds and the DJs, MCs, b-boys and graffiti artists came together around the informal sound system to express their counterculture through trip hop.

In the 90′s, after the success of Massive Atack, trip hop generation emerges, whose characteristic sound is more standardized. Morcheeba is integrated into the mainstream music in the mid-90’s and its peculiarity is the combination of sounds with other musical genres, including blues, pop, ambient, R & B, Breakbeat, drum and bass, acid jazz and new age. Its founders, DJ Paul Godfrey and his brother, multi-instrumentalist Ross Godfrey, integrated the vocalist Skye Edwards to the group, who left the band in 2003 after five successful albums.

The band Morcheeba has faced hard times after Edwards’ leaving. His album “The Antidote” recorded in 2005, with the participation of Daisy Martey as a vocalist (member of the band Noonday Underground), was severely questioned by the critics, impacting the support of their fans. Nowadays Sky Edwards has returned to the head of the band and last year they released their album “Blood Like Lemonade“.

Its permanent transformation has made of Morcheeba one of the groups of post trip hop, a term coined by the leading newspaper The Independent, more varied, eclectic and interesting.
Today both Morcheeba and post trip hop are no longer marginal. Their records produce large profits and the influence of their music reaches more than a generation.

For further info http://www.casinodeparis.fr/#more

Nancy Guzman

For these reasons, you can’t miss Morcheeba if you are spending a few days in one of the apartments in Paris?

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