If you want to be quiet (and rich), keep it simple. This is the moral of the cultural week that has passed. Big winner, Maurizio Cattelan sold a work on Wednesday… 6.2 million euros. You think of an admirable picture, painted for days. Limit, you have in mind an aging Renoir, a poncho on his shoulders, straining with his fingers crippled by arthritis. You are wrong. Cattelan did not push himself hard. He bought some adhesive and a banana, taped the fruit to a wall: it’s worth 6.2 million. According to him, this work is supposed to question the value of art. We wonder Maurizio! But unless we believe that we all have to start growing bananas to become rich (in Bercy, it’s a way to pay off our debt), we don’t see the point. If not to create a buzz, at a lower cost.
Because for the artists who decided to rack their brains a little more, the week was less fun. Kamel Daoud and Boualem Sansal, two Franco-Algerian writers published in the Blanche de Gallimard collection, excuse me, have indisputable talent. Or rather yes, debatable, because that’s normally what we do about critically acclaimed books. We admire the style, we sometimes get upset over what is said between the lines, but we rejoice that literature elevates us. Except in countries where a feather is seen as a weapon to be defused. Algeria thus banned the first’s book and undermined its reputation. She went further with the second, who has been missing since he was arrested in Algiers.
Forget the story of the banana, it is this art, which is worth threats to its authors, that we must be interested in. The banana will end up in the trash anyway. While we must hope that the books of the two writers end up in many hands, a story that obscurantism does not win.
