Contemporary art in France

I know next to nothing about contemporary French literature, other than a little Michel Houellebecq, but I know all writers here are fed up with everything, that's just the way writers are.

Knowing Paul and Antoine–two painters in France–I know a little more about contemporary French art than I do its literature; that it's similar to contemporary American art: you either do the things they want you to do, or throw your work on the dustheap, or continue to make the art you want to make whether they care if you make it or not. And if they do care about your art you complain, and if they don't care you complain about them not caring, or something along these lines, the same as it is in America.

Somehow the treaty first negotiated by Marcel Duchamp–that the viewer of a work of art is as much the maker as the maker is–has been broken, and I was surprised to hear Paul and Antoine–Paul more than Antoine–complain yesterday about the system of exclusion that exists in the contemporary art world, a system that favors conceptual and experimental art over painting, to the exclusion of their own art, having heard many times the same complaint made by painters in America.

Well you guys started it, I wanted to say, with Duchamp, and Duchamp's other grand notion that a work of art is a work of art because the artist says it is. Apres Duchamp, anyone can be an artist, and if anyone can be an artist there will, quite naturally, be more and more artists, including those painters whose work is excluded because they are painters who chose to paint in a way all painters have painted before.