Disintegrated art. At the corner of his lips, a shadow appears on his enigmatic smile. Then the spot enlarges, contaminates the right eye, and the most famous painting in the world crumbles into dust. The Mona Lisa is no more. Astonishment is followed by the search for those responsible. The ruling family of Saudi Arabia is accused of having plotted a bacteriological attack, a commando of having fled with Husband Lisaand globalized tourism. A video becomes the most shared audiovisual document in the world: eighty-eight seconds during which a retired Chinese schoolteacher filmed the disintegration of The Mona Lisa. Soon, other masterpieces met the same fate: The girl with the pearl earring, The birth of Venus… If museums try to stop the phenomenon, the law of the market quickly takes over and the public demands “see the place where the Mona Lisa disappeared” pour “take a photo of yourself in front of the empty and gaping cabin”. The buildings, deprived of Van Gogh and Gainsborough, were transformed into offices and luxury hotels. In the story of the “Catastrophe”, the narrator of The future interweaves that of his own journey and the trajectories impacted by this artistic erasure which, under the pen of Stéphane Audeguy, seems an ultimate performance. In our era saturated with images, what place does art occupy, beyond the picture rails in front of which crowds parade? An essential if not existential place, suggests Audeguy, if we trust the evil which contaminates, in return, the living gallery of its characters.
Stéphane Audeguy
The future
Threshold
Edition: 4,000 copies.
Price: €21; 272 pp.
ISBN: 9782021583250
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