It was the work of an American sculptor, Paul McCarthy, and designed as part of a contemporary arts festival. McCarthy has form in this regard; last year, he created a giant sculpture for Hong Kong that depicted a huge pile of dog poo. Anyway, the inflatable green coloured butt plug in Paris was, some claimed, a Christmas tree by any other name, an unlikely story. But the 25 metre high sculpture proved immensely controversial and was widely disliked. Anal sex play has never had so much publicity before, but many Parisians thought they were the butt of an eccentric American artist’s joke.
Come last Saturday and someone cut the wires holding the sculpture in place and the art object promptly deflated, spread out over the place Vendome. It wasn’t re-inflated.
More artistic controversy came from the other side of the River Seine, the Musée d’Orsay in the seventh. It’s running an exhibition about the notorious Marquis de Sade who while in prison in Paris in the late 18th century wrote his master work linking sexual licence with sadism and murder. Much of the work is absolutely nauseating. The museum made a video to promote the show. The video showed several dozen naked people groping each other and it was supposed to be a high point in artistic titillation, whereas in reality, it was nothing of the sort, just rather boring and banal. But the people involved in its production must have had a lot of fun!
Paris has been doing well on the artistic front this week. First of all, the new Vuitton museum of contemporary art has opened in the Bois de Boulogne. It’s an extraordinary structure, designed to look like the sails of a dozen boats, all fashioned mainly from glass; the architect behind the museum is the legendary 85 year Frank Gehry, whose other creations have included the equally striking Guggenheim museum in Bilbao in northern Spain. This week finally sees the Picasso museum reopening after a five year refit during which costs did what they usually do-soar.
Exhibition space has been more than doubled to 3,800 square metres and this means that the googling public can now see for themselves more than 5,000 Picasso items, from paintings and drawings to photographs and drawings. In a visit to the old Picasso museum, I was amused to see some of the great artist’s laundry lists on display. Anyone want to see a collection of old Tesco receipts?
Down south, in Marseilles, there’s also been a big opening, of the dramatic new Vélodrome stadium for the Olympic football team in the city. The new stadium is certainly impressive and it can seat something like 67,000 spectators, whereas the old stadium, built in 1937, could only hold 37,000.
This week has also brought great tragedy, the death of Christophe de Margerie, the president and chief executive of Total, the French oil company that is the third largest of its kind in Europe and fourth in the world. It’s also the second largest public company in France.
After a series of meetings in Moscow, he had been leaving Vnukovu airport in Moscow about 10pm on Monday night, French time, in his corporate jet. The drunken driver of a snowplough collided with the plane as it was taking off; the snowplough driver escaped unhurt, but de Margerie and the three crew on his plane were killed. De Margerie had parents who were diplomats, while his grandfather was Pierre Taittinger, founder of the eponymous Champagne house. While de Margerie was known as a grand capitane of French industry, he was often blunt, outspoken and truculent, but he was someone with strategic vision for his company. He was also known as ‘big moustache’ for his facial appendage. He was also strongly opposed to EU sanctions on Russia, but of course, Russia being Russia, some commentators in France are now beginning to wonder whether there was a plot or conspiracy involved, rather than a mere runway accident, handily attributed to a drunken snowplough driver.
The other day, a four year old boy in Saint-Étienne in central France had a miraculous escape. His mother had left him watching television while she went shopping. The child managed to crawl out onto the 9th floor balcony and fall over the edge. His 25 metre fall was broken by a bush and even though he had serious head injuries and some broken bones, he wasn’t in a critical condition in hospital and the medics say he’ll be able to walk again.
But these days, there also seems a hex on France; everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Socialist rebels won’t back the 2015 budget in parliament and the split in Hollande’s socialist party grows wider by the day. Former labour minister Martine Aubry, who was responsible for bringing in the famous 35 hour week, said this week that the current government had brought the country to a standstill. The best that Segolene Royale, a former presidential candidate, could come up with was suggesting a lifting of motorway charges at the weekend. But at least a start is being made on trying to curb binge drinking, seen as a nasty Anglo-Saxon import, and to bring in 50 key healthcare reforms. One of these will mean that patients will no longer have to pay their GP and then get a refund.
Still, things in France aren’t quite as bad as in Italy, where the Rome opera house has laid off 180 people from its orchestra and chorus. Even so, a survey this week found that the average French person was short of €578 a week needed to have a comfortable, worry-free life style.
Meanwhile, a new book by a right wing polemical writer, Eric Zemmour, on why France has gone so off track during the past 40 years, Le suicide Francais - les quarantes années qu’ont défait la France, is selling like the proverbial hot cakes. The book has been selling 15,000 copies a day since it was launched on October 1 and looks likely to top the half million mark.
Marine Le Pen continues to battle it out with her dad; she and Jean-Marie have been involved in numerous clashes recently as she has modernised the Front National party that her father founded. In his latest outburst, he said that the Vichy collaborationist government in France during the second world war wasn’t so bad after all. Marine Le Pen took over the running of the party from her ageing father, who is now 86, in 2011, and has since made many changes to make it more electable. The split has become so profound that until recently, Marine Le Pen was living on the estate owned by her father, but has now moved out.
Then there’s the small matter of Bono and U2 being so nice to the mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi. On the group’s new album, he gets a big thank you; all four members of the band spend their summer holidays on the Cote d’Azur and when the group is in Europe, it’s their base. The mayor gets a big thank you because it seems he does so much to make the band feel at home in Nice, while Bono says that the French respect their privacy and just let them get on with their holidays or work.
Also on the Cote d’Azur, two top hotels are very much in the news. The Eden Roc hotel on the Cap d’Antibes, has just been voted the best hotel complex in the world, by 25 journalists from around the world who write about the hospitality industry. It also looks as if the fate of the five star Vista Palace Hotel at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, which went into administration last February, will very soon be decided, as five bids to buy it out have now been received. While all this has been going on, one of the lesser known railway lines in Provence, the line from Nice to Cuneo on the frontier with Italy, is under threat of closure because of its losses. But last weekend, a festival was going on at a village on the route and people going there largely depended on the train service, which embarrassingly broke down. A replacement bus service proved very inefficient and people were waiting for up to three hours to make their exits from the festival site.
But a discovery deep underground, close to the famous Mont Saint-Victoire, the symbolic mountain in the north of Provence, could prove very useful. A huge underground reservoir has been discovered, at a depth of 400 metres. The reservoir measures 15 by 10km and is up to 1,000 metres deep. This so-called blue gold could make a big difference for wine growers and many others in the region.
Talking of wine, France won a world blind tasting competition for wines, staged in the Champagne town of Ay, in eastern France. Teams of four, from 18 wine countries around the world, including Argentina, China, Russia and Spain, had to blind taste wines, identifying country of origin, the grapes used, the appellation involved and the year of the wine. The French team did so well that they sailed home and the organisers announced that the next such tasting will be staged in October next year in Chateauneuf du Pape, near Avignon.
Rather sadly, though, we’ve seen the last of the Indian summer in southern Europe. Last Sunday, Geneva was enjoying 24 degrees C, while at Juan les Pins on the Cote d’Azur, an amazing number of people were swimming in the sea. Other hot spots along the coast included Marseilles and all this good weather brought some welcome relief for the hospitality industry in the south-east of France, for which 2014 has been a very poor year. But now, it looks as typical winter weather has set in.
Here in Ireland, the main topic of everyone’s anger is the newly setup Irish Water company, which is going to try and start charging everyone from water from the start of 2015. There’s so much anger out there that it threatens to collapse the present government. What they can do to rectify an already bad situation, without pulling the plug on the whole enterprise, is a good question. One astute media commentator, in describing the total disaster that the government has brought on itself, said, very succinctly, ‘You can’t polish shit, all you can do is roll it in glitter’.
The latest government fiasco concerns the supplementary rent allowance paid to poor families. Housing rents in the Dublin area have gone up so much this year that 400 families have been made homeless this year, 40 of them in the last month alone. The government’s reaction to all this? There’s no way they’re going to increase rent supplements so that people can stay in their homes. It’s all a typical reaction from a right-wing government that’s become totally out of touch.
It’s just like the situation in Barcelona; the equally right-wing government in Spain has abolished rent controls for commercial property, although there was 20 years advance warning of it happening. But the end result in Barcelona is that many traditional artisan shops in historic quarters of the city can no longer afford to pay the massive rent hikes. So they are moving out and a whole lot of often bland multinational retailing brands are moving in, in their place, in the process helping destroy the whole historic atmosphere in the city.
Sometimes, one wonders can governments do anything right, or is the whole traditional system of government fatally flawed? Just look to the mid-term elections in the US at the moment and the rage that the mere mention of President Obama elicits. Maybe that American artist who created the giant butt plug for the centre of Paris had the right idea after all.