Time magazine declares French culture dead

[imomus]

Something is happening in France but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones? To the right is the crappy picture Time magazine saw fit to print with their November 21st article The Death of French Culture. Yes, that is a Frenchman with a beret, goatee and easel getting run down midway through painting "The Death of Marat" by a pink 1960s Cadillac marked "Hollywood". And yes, the binaries in the illustration are crashingly clichéd and massively outdated: here we have Europe versus America, with Europe representing moribundity and America vitality. Here's the "new" medium of cinema running down the old medium of painting, and here's brash commercial culture sweeping aside stuffy 19th century salon academicism.

Veteran Time reporter Don Morrison begins his article with a completely ridiculous question. "Quick," the old man asks his American audience, "name a French pop star who isn't Johnny Hallyday". Wow, haven't heard that name in a while! Okay, let's play. How about Daft Punk, Time magazine? You could have started an admittedly totally different article by talking about how the best new Anglosphere bands (MGMT, Klaxons, Hot Chip) are only now getting round to making the kind of harder, better, faster, stronger sounds the Parisian duo -- along with peers like Phoenix and Cassius -- set the basic template for ten years ago. But that's not your agenda, is it?

Let's hear Morrison lay out his thesis -- an argument stinging and polemical enough to have warranted three pages of indignant ripostes in Le Figaro last week. "Once admired for the dominating excellence of its writers, artists and musicians," he writes, "France today is a wilting power in the global cultural marketplace. Only a handful of the season's new novels will find a publisher outside France. Fewer than a dozen make it to the U.S. in a typical year... Only about 1 in 5 French films gets exported to the U.S."

Now wait just one cottonpicking moment! Let's put that the other way around, shall we? The French film industry produces 200 titles a year (compared with only about 120 in the UK). It's a picture of vigour. So the US only manages to distribute five of them. The French publishing industry produced 727 novels last year. Americans got to read fewer than 12 of them. Describing this as a failure of France is back-to-front. Surely it's the American culture industry which isn't exactly in the pink of health? 30% of all fiction sold in France is translated from English, but 0.0000001% of books sold in America originated in France. Someone isn't a good listener, and it's not the French.

One major problem with Time's analysis of the French cultural scene is that it confuses "relevance" with "recognition in America". Calling this a French problem is like telling the world it mumbles when you're deaf. Another is Time's right wing political stance. Basically, Morrison wants badly to prove that cultural protectionism, exceptionalism and subsidy don't work. "The French government spends 1.5% of GDP supporting a wide array of cultural and recreational activities (vs. only 0.7% for Germany, 0.5% for the U.K. and 0.3% for the U.S.)," the article tells us. "The government provides special tax breaks for freelance workers in the performing arts. Painters and sculptors [sic!] can get subsidized studio space." Time doesn't seem to approve of this, and sees it as all part of France's "decline" (pumping more money in, getting less American-pleasing art out). But subsidy is behind the success of all sorts of commercial French culture -- stuff like innovative recycling fashion label Andrea Crews, who work out of La Generale, the trendy, city-subsidised art factory that recently moved from central Paris out to Sevres.

Time wants the private sector more involved and cultural institutions given more autonomy. Time likes Sarkozy. "If the private sector got more involved and cultural institutions got more autonomy, France could undergo a major artistic revival," the magazine preaches. "Sarkozy's appointment of Christine Albanel as Culture Minister looks like a vote for individual initiative: as director of Versailles, she has cultivated private donations and partnerships with businesses." Groan! As Toog put it succinctly when Sarkozy was elected, "it looks like we just got a French version of an ideology even the Anglo-Saxon world is already sick of". "The Louvre has gone one step further by effectively licensing its name to offshoots in Atlanta and Abu Dhabi." Oh for fuck's sake, is that what you call "progress", Mr Jones?

Mr Morrison, though, is a man with a mission. He wants to shrink down the state and set art free through free enterprise. He likes what Sarkozy is doing, but it's not enough; the old man from Time wants to climb into the French skull and change the way French people see, think and feel. "A more difficult task will be to change French thinking. Though it is perilous to generalize about 60 million people [be my guest, Time!], there is a strain in the national mind-set that distrusts commercial success. Opinion polls show that more young French aspire to government jobs than to careers in business. [The horror!] "Americans think that if artists are successful, they must be good," says Quemin. "We think that if they're successful, they're too commercial. Success is considered bad taste."

Time magazine knows that this is an error. And so it draws its judgements about the success of artists not from the art press, but from a magazine called Capital. "In an annual calculation by the German magazine Capital, the U.S. and Germany each have four of the world's 10 most widely exposed artists; France has none." Well, I was just at the Venice Biennale, where the Americans were represented by a dead Cuban and the French pavilion (Sophie Calle) was the most entertaining and universally appealing of all the national pavilions. But, while it does appear true that Paris isn't quite the world art capital it was in the 1940s (and we know it took CIA money to help New York claim its crown), French artists are doing very well just now. The most influential artist of the last century, in terms of what young artists of all nationalities are doing now, is undoubtedly Marcel Duchamp. Paris' contemporary art spaces, the Beaubourg, the Musee d'Art Moderne and the Palais de Tokyo, show a vigour, vitality and suss that make most American art institutions look senile. French artists like Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno pioneered what french curator Nicolas Bourriaud dubbed "relational aesthetics" before the turn of the century; it took until 2006 for American critic Jerry Saltz to explain to his readers in the Village Voice what it was and why it was everywhere. It also took until 2005 (seventeen years!) for the Anglo academic world -- still caught up in PC and post-structuralism -- to translate Alain Badiou's "Being and Event", a book that will no doubt be determining the academic orthodoxies of American humanities departments in about 2020.

Time thinks that national character -- some sort of innate stubbornness -- plays its part in holding France back. The nouvel roman is still making contemporary French literature "suffer" from "introspection", thinks Morrison, and "one of the few contemporary French writers widely published abroad, Michel Houellebecq, is known chiefly for misogyny, misanthropy and an obsession with sex". Gee, well, Time, it happens: isn't the man considered the most eminent living American novelist also the author of Portnoy's Compaint?

The fact that Time's illustration for this attack on France's culture shows an old American artform triumphing over an even older one (Hollywood running over a figurative painter) says it all really -- and of course there's no mention at all of the world of interactive media. American kids are playing video games from French companies like Vivendi, Ubisoft and Infogrames. Watch out, old Hollywood in your old gas-guzzling early 1960s American car! (Are there still American cars? There are still French ones. But they're dead if they don't sell in America, right?)

If Time wants commercial culture, France has it. A store like Colette managed to redefine what a store could be -- and there's still nothing like it in New York. A magazine like Purple changed the face of fashion coverage forever. Time calls France "a nation whose long quest for glory has honed a fine appreciation for the art of borrowing". If anything, the reality is the other way round: Paris is the lab, New York just copies, and sooner or later Madonna calls in a Frenchman to revive her flagging career.

It takes a lot for me to agree with pompous windbag Bernard Henri-Levy, but I think he nailed this article in yesterday's Guardian, calling the Time tirade "this bizarre text, which the more I think about it, seems less and less a survey of France and more and more a savage reflection of the state of American culture itself. Because what really strikes one is the nervousness of the tone. It is this desire to prove too much which inevitably, as Nietzsche said, exhausts truth. It is the whiff of anxiety and, perhaps, of anguish, which emerges from this article. As if it contains an ultimate message, but a secret one, and in code."

"Come on!" continues the usually effusively pro-American Levy, "Let's get to the point! My feeling is that this article would not speak of the decline of French culture if it did not also speak of the fate of all dominant cultures, which at one time or another are condemned to watch their dominance decline. This article speaks truly of America and of what will happen to it on that day when the increasing power of Spanish, Chinese, or perhaps other Asian languages ensure that Anglo-American will no longer be the language of the formula and of universal translation. France as metaphor for America. Anti-French hostility as a displaced form of panic which dare not speak its name. Classic."

Comments

[obliterati.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I had just collected graphics of numerous Time Magazine covers because I was writing something about Richard Prince, who used to work for them.

I can only say I hope there are still only four or five Americans left who actually read this magazine. It's never a magazine I've seen anyone buy on purpose, you always find it in the waiting room at the dentist's office with a bunch of other crap they think is tame enough for the public.

Not to make light of a recent tragedy, I'm almost looking forward to the exporting to the U.S. of French rioting against their conservative government. I think it was the Fronde (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fronde) who invented the idea of shooting clocks, centuries before Big Ben blew up in V for Vendetta, and well before Time was destroyed by bad writing.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

A few observations I've made about America vs. France, using examples of my school situation:
-Barely any French history was taught, and the only time it was was to explain Napoleon Bonaparte.

-High school language program: French had the least amount of people taking it as opposed to Spanish and German (and Korean, which was introduced my sophomore year). My French teacher was once a French diplomat, but decided to move with her husband to America. She said she moved here because "she was stupid!" Funnily enough, she hid wine in a mini fridge under her desk.

-In my Current World Affairs class (freshman year), the teacher outright said "I will answer why France hates America". She never did, but she did bring me up in front of the class and fake accused me of being a Communist because I wore funny clothes.

-Basically my art class was the class that talked about France the most. And that was only for about 2 weeks out of 6 months.

So what I'm saying is is that a lot of what the author of the article is saying is coming from total ignorance of the culture and a sense of nationalism. Simply put, a lot of Americans don't even know what goes on in France, and either are too lazy to explore it, or they go with the whole "French people hate us, but we're better than them" ideal.

I wouldn't expect the author to actually go to France and tell the citizens that their culture is dead and that they should move to America any time soon, or at all.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Yeah--Morrison really shat the bed. Embarrassing.

Fortunately, Time can't even get noticed in the waiting room of the average dentist's office these days.

[(Anonymous)]

haha this made my day

(french) love from Miami

Antonin / Digiki

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

ED Banger records is another example of a French creative source being at the forefront of a movement.

That article says more about Morrison than it does about France. It shows his ethnocentricity as well as his misguided stance that something has to dominate to be relevant which clearly isnt true.

That said, I have to disagree with this comment: "The increasing power of Spanish, Chinese, or perhaps other Asian languages ensure that Anglo-American will no longer be the language of the formula and of universal translation."

Spanish isnt "increasing in power". Just because latinos will one day be the largest minority group in the US doesnt mean Anglo-Americans will stop being the dominant majority.

As for Chinese; A lot of people with qualms against the dominance of English (or rather, the logical reasons why its dominant) like to point out that Chinese is the world's most spoken language. The truth is, theres no such language as "chinese". Chinese is split into many different dialects and they're all mutually unintelligible.

The beauty of modern English is that I can communicate with people who are separated from me by thousands of miles and vast seas. I was born in the United Kingdom, but I could set foot on North American/Australian/South african soil and be able to communicate almost perfectly with any of the people there, not to mention all the other millions of people who speak it as a second language worldwide. With China, it's a country divided by dialects and those dialects are only really spoken in china. How the fuck is chinese going to conquer the world when it cant even get its own countrymen to unify verbally?

English is here to stay for a very long time, and long may it last I say. The world population being able to at very least talk to each other is more important than any argument against the restrictiveness of a dominant world language.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Did you see the police were demonstrating (http://www.lemonde.fr/web/depeches/0,14-0,39-33529451@7-37,0.html) in Paris the other day? I was wondering what that was like -- police marching (because of course Sarkozy is cutting their overtime pay) and police policing the march. I don't think police have ever marched against the government in any English-speaking country.

[ishinagami.livejournal.com]

Don't forget that you too Momus use English, it's your default language.

Assuming that you have any kind of legacy after your death then the only way to understand your music writings, and every other documentation of your self, would be to understand english.

Lastly i do not think time magazine reflects America, or if it indeed did, it stopped doing so LONG ago.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The rhetoric has toned down because Americans love Sarkozy, but it's always struck me as odd that these two nations should get on so badly; their revolutions happened a few years apart, they're both republics, they both defined themselves against the British, and so on.

Actually, most French people love America more than even the British do. Toog (http://toog.blogspot.com/) adores America, and o.lamm's blog (http://goldbugvariations.blogspot.com/) talks of nothing but American literature.

the prison officers went on strike a while back

[pitcherthis.livejournal.com]

somewhere in england

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Well, I declare Time dead.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

yes, i'm with you . english is here to stay as esperanto.
people like you and momus will just have to (learn to) humbly live with the advantage

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

As I walked down Boulevard Raspail (I think) earlier this year during my class' trip to Paris it occured to me that the Parisian bookstores have a better range of books than Swedish bookstores. Literature translated from Spain, Russia, Italy and what have you. In Sweden it is either some classic literature, Swedish authors or Anglo-saxian literature translated.

"Americans think that if artists are successful, they must be good," says Quemin. "We think that if they're successful, they're too commercial. Success is considered bad taste."

Indeed, just hear what Stephen King says about authorship (and talent of writing): "If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented."

[xishimarux.livejournal.com]

".. If anything, the reality is the other way round: Paris is the lab, New York just copies, and sooner or later Madonna calls in a Englishman to revive her flagging career."

I fixed it for you :) . Jacques Lu Cont is Stuart Prince and he grew up in Reading. French House borrows alot from American Funk as well as Chicago House. Newer French House records borrow heavy from Hip Hop (the way Daft Punk does). While I think Time is a crock of shite the French borrow but they also credit there influences as well. Here in America people are afraid to show what influences them the most. It's that whole march forward super independence thing.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, most French people love America more than even the British do. Toog adores America, and o.lamm's blog talks of nothing but American literature.

Yeah and actually, most Chinese people love America more than even the French do. Harry Wu took refuge in the US and one of my Beijingnese web-friend adores McDonald's!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The Madonna-collaborating Frenchman I had in mind was Mirwais (who gave her a big buck circa "Music"), not Jacques Lu Cont.

I think being secondary actually gives a culture a lot of advantages. Primary cultures are never bi-lingual, and lack the kind of distance France or Japan has from the Anglo-Saxon behemoth -- a distance which allows filtration, recycling, recontextualisation, irony, beachcombing, pick-n-mix and, above all, cosmopolitanism.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

Are you not a native English speaker?

[(Anonymous)]

Why do you define people by nation? Nationality has never mattered less. It's the next step up from defining people by race!!!

I think to describe house music as American or French is really missing the point of house music.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't only define people by nation. But I reject the view that the only valuable things to talk about are what individuals do, and what everyone in the world does. That's too specific and too general. The most significant things are done by groups of people. That's the basic sociological unit, and the basic productive unit.

"We tend to assume that only notionally-separate, unique individuals can be "expressive", but why not entire groups (the 3T 3K types milling around Möllevången), classes (the "creative class"), nations (Sweden, Japan) and areas (Scandinavia)?" I wrote the other day (http://imomus.livejournal.com/331691.html).

An anti-collectivist bias -- and a fear of nationalism and war -- makes some of us shy away from looking at things on, for instance, the national level. But nation is not over. Look at the quest for Palestinian nationhood, or the current crisis overtaking Belgium, which looks like it'll split into two nations rather than one. Look at the recent Morrissey controversy (http://imomus.livejournal.com/333144.html), centring around his definition of Britishness. Nation as an organising -- and enabling -- principle isn't going away any time soon. And if you could remove it, what would you be left with? Global capital, labour and goods flows on the one hand, and individuals consumer-citizens on the other. No more states to buffer money logic, no more governments to offset the cruel market. One less level of collectivity in the world.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd like to add an answer to the possible/inevitable follow-up question: "How can you support the nation state and cosmopolitanism?"

My answer is that, as I understand it, cosmopolitanism and nationalism are intimately linked. Think of Caetano Veloso in London in the 70s, adding to the city's cosmopolitan richness precisely by remaining utterly Brazilian, and preparing, with other Brazilians (some of whom would later hold the post of Culture Minister in the nation's government) the cultural future of their country. Think of the Iranian clergy in exile in Paris in the 70s, preparing to retake their nation from an American puppet, the Shah. That's cosmopolitanism.

If cosmopolitanism were the forgetting of national-cultural origins, America would be the most cosmopolitan nation in the world rather than one of its most provincial nations (outside of New York and a couple of other places, anyway). I think the Time article is proof of just how provincial the US has become -- how uncosmopolitan. Not only because of the stats about how few foreign films and books it consumes, but because of the whole attitude that the world should conform to American standards. It's very much the attitude encapsulated in that legendary British Empire newspaper headline: "Fog on the channel, continent isolated".

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

Sly. But Momus is right insofar as the Academie Francaise mindset has not (at least in recent years) really represented the mass of the French people, though it may have done once. There is still more sympathy with it among a greater number and wider range of people in France than there is in Britain ... but beware the Murdochian rewrites.

[violet-hemlock.livejournal.com]

thal illo looks like it should be accompany an article on Wes Anderson's obsession with French New Wave cinema

[(Anonymous)]

To describe me as British is I feel a slightly pathetic exercise and redundant apart from an exercise in controlling and defining what I think and feel, in the broadest stereotyped sense.

I mean the stance that Morrissey takes is hilarious for the sheer hypocrisy. It's a totally dandyish approach to the problem but not a very substantial world view.

I have things in common internationally with various groups of people and my need for a national identity is very limited. I assert that 'nationhood' itself is in decline.

Frenchness. Britishness. Americaness.

Why do you support Morrissey assertion about Britishness being under threat but not Time magazines assertion about Frenchness?

And in a post structuralist sense, what is the value of these assertions?
Nationality to me is a facade that is used to control and divide, but blur culture into broad feeling of meaninglessness. Britpop anyone? No, I didn't think so.

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

And, let us not forget, the Cahiers du Cinema critics embraced the most populist, the most *pulpy*, of US films at a time when British critics were dismissing them as tacky, vulgar rubbish (for the most part: Raymond Durgnat was an important exception, but all 'establishment' Sight and Sound / Monthly Film Bulletin critics took the orthodox 'highbrow' stance). But then British establishment opinion at the time was more Academie Francaise than French establishment opinion is these days (I've just heard Neil Sedaka recalling how, when he played a burst of Chopin on Lew Grade's Palladium show - 1962, I'd guess - a journalist here wrote "isn't it good to see something from the US that isn't rubbish").

Superb piece, incidentally. Everything said that needed to be said.

The reason why the imagery in that dreadful illustration has endured way beyond its natural time is the immense importance of the era it comes from, specifically in British cultural history. Check 'Five Go Mad On Mescalin', check the coming 1957 Week on BBC Four (I would suspect). Hobsbawm was right: if any one event splits 20th Century British history, it's the cross-fertilisation of Suez and rock'n'roll.

But that does not of course justify talking about yesterday's battles, yesterday's polarisations, as if they made any kind of sense today. This false dichotomy of the panicked American orthodoxy also infests much of the British media (as I am sure you will agree): there is a national inability to deal with the complexities of modern Europe without resorting to risible caricature. The fascinating thing to me is that the Murdoch Right and romantics of both Old Left and Old Right (Neil Clark, Michael Henderson) often have the same basic idea of "the continent" - it's just that the former want to destroy it (but nevertheless want to scare people into believing it exists more than it perhaps does today) and the latter want to preserve it.

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe not *all* S&S/MFB critics of the late 50s / early 60s took that very specific Brit-highbrow stance. But certainly the great majority.

[thegooseking.livejournal.com]

Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world, though, even after you accept that Chinese is not unified.

And we're only talking about spoken Chinese, there: Written Chinese dialects are not "mutually unintelligible". There may be some distinctions between say written Mandarin and written Cantonese (specifically for words that historically had no Han character) but on the whole they use the same written language. Given that we are communicating in the written medium right now, I don't think that can necessarily be dismissed out of hand.

It's also simply not true to say it's not used outside of China, though it may be true to say it's not used by non-Chinese people, and that, I suppose, is the crucial factor.