Meeting

Famous writer and historian of art, Paul Ardenne is the curator of the exhibition "The Destiny of Man" by Gérard Rancinan in Couvent des Cordeliers. He describes the style of the photographer who chose to bring back the theme of angel as a post-apocalyptic, and the Destiny, luminous as well as dark.
« Religious mythologies always describe angels as divine creatures occupying the first circle of supernatural beings, their job to serve as messengers. The angel’s contact with humans has, above all, a media function. (...) »

People ascribe all kinds of heritage to Mary Ellen Mark, who wears her coal black hair in two long braids down her back, but she prefers to keep them wondering. Faces are supposed to by mysterious, after all. Hers brims with lived lived, friendships sealed, and countries cherished. Mary Ellen has immersed herself in other people’s lives, linked her destiny with theirs. She has loved every one of their stories and been passionate about every one of her subjects. But it was always their faces she was seeking.

Caroline Gaudriault has met the author of The End of History and the Last Man, one of the most important thinkers of today, American political scientist and economist, in Stanford University, California.

What is a Barbarian ? The word has a long history. Originally used to refer simply to a person who spoke an incomprehensible language, it has eventually become synonymous with a person who is culturally or morally “inferior” to the “civilized” society that defines the norms in question. So much, then, for definitions. But what do we feel when we read the word ?

Only a couple of generations ago, the heroisation of women was based on maternity, while the heroisation of men was based on violence. Today, that no longer makes any sense. An attitude that once conformed to the social norm is now obsolete. Gender theory derives from the new condition of women, which has transformed social structures. Legislation reflects the evolution of mentalities, even if it that evolution prioritises, above all, the pursuit of personal pleasure. But what awaits as at the end of the tunnel may not but light, but instead loneliness.

American economist and political scientist, Francis Fukuyama lives and teaches in Stanford University, California. For Zig-Zag, Caroline Gaudriault got an exclusive interview you will discover in September.
The Zigzagors thank you for being more and more to follow us from one opinion to another and wish you a wonderful summer time!

There’s something neurotic about the idea of an art plot. Why don’t people accept artistic creation for what it is, in other words something very varied, in which there are great things, average things and mediocre things? Why see in it a degradation of values? Such forms exist, but there are also others, which are diametrically opposed. 
 But it’s true that democracy poses a problem for art. Art is based on an incompleteness of the world. The nearer a society gets to perfection, the less interesting its art is. It becomes decorative, playful, something designed to entertain. 
 Many people should envisage art not as a work given as a gift to elicit the gratitude of those who gaze upon it, but as an original creation. 
 The idea of the death of art was clearly ridiculous. As long as there are human beings, there will be artistic creation because Man cannot life by material things alone.

The internet is not virtual. In fact, it’s probably more real than reality itself. The relationship between mind and machine suggests that the mind will eventually take over, leaving the body with a merely anecdotal role. The new technologies will push our surveillance society towards the pleasures of self-surveillance. The dictatorship of freedom, a belief in which is encouraged by those technologies, engenders a dictatorship of transparency. It’s the end of modesty.

Aren’t we doomed to become obese as long as we continue to obey the diktats of the food economy? Taking part of the population out of the industrially produced food equation, it raises awareness about what people eat. It’s a useful idiocy! We have to reinvent food today. And perhaps eating better means eating less. Are we capable of producing cheap, high quality food without making people work for low wages or exploiting them? No, not really. And if takes time to achieve that goal, then we will just have to take our time. For time is what the rich buy from the poor; it’s what industrialists buy from the workers. And this life-time is contained in food.

Cultural memory is not the same as personal memory; it’s a kind of collective memory that develops through communication, through language, or, in other words, within a context of socialisation. Our world is socially constructed on the foundations of collective thought; every one of us possesses, on the one hand, an individual memory, and, on the other, a social one.