Shane Wombat's Droppings: being seen, being seen.

Shane at Versailles

G'day Petals,

It seems a long time between drinks but that's only because we've been flat-out like the proverbial Lizard and buzzing around Paris like blue-arsed Flies.

Versaille, The Marmottan, Dorsay, Louvre/Arts Decoratif, Magnum show at Hotel de Ville, Concergerie, St Chapelle, Orangerie, a belt up the Tour Montparnasse for some panoramas across the city at dusk with the added spice of a day of death at Montparnasse cemetery followed by the completely "over-the-top" brilliance of Opera Garnier... and all after Cluny, Ateliers' Zadkine and Delacroix and the Jardin de Plantes in the Luxembourg Gardens. All possible only by the brilliance of the Paris metro and rail system....... and when you hear Rabid-the-Hun is spitefully holding back monies for the extension of Melbourne's underground you really have to consider that the ruling rabble's leader is not competent....in any capacity!
Some of the Paris transport has good entertainment, too....

These fellows were hopping between trains busking and making a fine noise....

...as were these classical types..

...and these two were bopping along in Bv St. Michel this afternoon.. which sort of ties with this posts theme of being seen.... being seen.

So many of the "Big Venues", D' Orsay, Versailles, Opera etc are very crowded.... not just with the most wonderful art, architecture, history and collections of talent but also with people; people who are there to tell every one else that they are there and will have a "selfie" to prove it. One for every minute, in front of every art work, pillar, sculpture, tapestry, vase, ring, building, landscape, tree, blade of grass that is there to justify their existence.

Opera Garnier selfies

It strikes me that so much time is spent preening for the position, look, pose and pout that there mustn't be a lot of brain left over for the "thing"they are using as a vanity prop.

Versailles selfie

The picture above has around 60 people crowded into this not overly large room in Versailles.. I counted about 12 looking at something and not through a camera... but perhaps the best was seen at the Orangerie where three young women whose quality of dress, attitude and looks could only be described as indifferent, took turns in pressing Monet's Water Lilies into service as wallpaper for their ego boosting face-book updates.

Orangerie

The democratisation of access to media and ability to proliferate it has meant that all the visual and conceptual lessons learned from advertising have been put into play.

There was, when old advertising appropriated "art" as a status vehicle on which to drive its product, a diminution of the apparent value of the art happened through over-use but now the massive amount of media we are subjected to with its hyperbole necessarily ramped up to maintain a presence has completely obliterated the core value of the object and replaced that with a concept of its "thingness."

St Chapelle

It seems that the "selfie," in the art gallery context and quite apart from its extreme narcissism, has developed from a genuflection to art as a thing of wonder to a genuflection to a self who admits no possibility of creating anything except an ongoing self referential dialogue. The identification with self is so strong that that it precludes anything (or one) equivalent or better because that would destroy the primacy of self.

It's a scary thought that society, for a narcissistic selfie-producer begins and ends with them and that collective action on anything is not possible without a loss of self.

The Fascists dream.... but oddly enough, not much in the way of selfies being taken in the Concergerie.... a trifle too macabre I dare say.

The Concergerie

Then there were other people on the street and here they are....

Effigy

"Effigy" a 3D portrait outfit by Vincent Haeffner and his assistant Max working in St Germain..... a really interesting concept... check them out on face-book.