“Helmut Newton and Paul Verhoeven contrast with dominant music in today’s culture”

MWe have in the same bag the photographer Helmut Newton and the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven. The first is dead, the second alive. Both, as we will see, are projected in the news. Above all, they come together to hold up the incorrectness of their work. They transgress, go against conventions, upset our certainties, blur the line between good people and bastards. They have this rare profile of riding in the wrong direction.

Newton and Verhoeven contrast with a dominant music in culture today: art must stick to the societal climate in vogue so as not to miss the wagon of modernity. We must not offend anyone, especially minorities, establish informal quotas, count women on the stage or blacks in museums – the elected ecologist at the City of Paris, Alice Coffin, wants to allocate the subsidies according to the number of women in shows – sweeping away hierarchies, censoring an artist if the man is not pure, inciting creators to go to confession for bad thinking.

Good feelings

Creators dig this furrow when others reread the works of the past in the light of today’s standards. Thus the Festival of lyric art of Aix-en-Provence offers, until July 16, a feminist reinterpretation of Marriage of Figaro, by Mozart, where we discover a householder “Libidinous and brash, ideal prey for #metoo”, writes our colleague Marie-Aude Roux (The world from 1er July).

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Museums and contemporary art centers are the champions, in the United States especially, in France less, of a progressivism tackling a new academism, which allows them to show that they are in the game and to forget their flirtation. supported with the world, not always clear, of globalized companies and finance.

In a landscape of good feelings, you have to have strong backs, be famous (or dead), accept ignorance, expect turbulence, to explore another path. We rarely come out unscathed.

A documentary film is released at the cinema, Wednesday July 14, with the aptly named title, Helmut Newton: the cheeky, by Gero von Boehm. The latter, born in 1920 and died in 2004, a great fashion photographer and more than that, was the bête noire of feminists, who accused him of reducing women to their sexual burden. The more he was attacked, the more he added to the provocation, trusting in 1979 in the review Selfish : “There is a category of women that annoys me to the highest point, the race of women say released and pseudo-activists. ” He loved to play the indefensible.

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