Faced with a “campus” project, the Beaux-Arts of Paris are extremely unhappy – Libération

The Parisian institution is mobilizing against a merger project, designed by Rachida Dati’s ministry, with the neighboring architecture school. Students and teachers fear that this will hide a reform of the educational model of the art school and delay work deemed urgent.

Since mid-October, a petition has been circulating which has already gathered 1,500 signatures, including prestigious names in contemporary art, from Annette Messager to Nina Childress, including Tristan Garcia and Giuseppe Penone, and the entire community teacher of Fine Arts in Paris. On Wednesday, November 13, students and teachers of the school gathered for an extraordinary AGM. The cause? The “art and architecture campus” project of the Ministry of Culture, which provides for the rapprochement of the Beaux-Arts with its neighbor, the National School of Architecture (ENSA) Paris-Malaquais, which hosts on the same site 900 students. “We are talking about relocating collections, reforming the educational model, moving certain workshops to the suburbs, the petition is thus alarmed. It is a real dismantling of the Fine Arts which is underway, against the will of its community and its management. It is part of a policy of standardization and reduction of artistic education which affects all art schools in France.

In focus, the mission letter entrusted on July 5, two days before the second round of early legislative elections, to the art collector and entrepreneur Laurent Dumas, just appointed president of the board of directors of the Beaux-Arts, and to Pierre-Paul Zalio, president of the Condorcet Campus and member of the ENSA board of directors. It is up to them to imagine for mid-December the first outlines of a “campus des arts e