Re-Branding Post 1945 Paris: Exhibiting Powers and Contemporary Art

This paper will examine the expanded role Contemporary art has assumed in rebranding Paris, France’s flagship capital, as a cutting edge, technological, innovative and competitive global city. Paris has effectively incorporated contemporary art into the fabric of the whole city with exhibitions such as those originating at the Grand Palais spreading to venues throughout the inner and outer ‘quartier’. France has used arts and culture to claim supremacy in the world whether colonial or local for centuries with Paris the ultimate ‘brand’. Post WWII Paris however, saw this brand diminished and claims to artistic supremacy replaced by New York. In an effort to regain some relevancy Paris, and by extension France, began the process of re-branding concordant with political, economic and technological advancement through the fervent promotion of contemporary art. Contemporary Paris through contemporary art aspires to a transnational and post-national site of spectacle; a leading locus for art to be consumed. Paris’s mass contemporary art consumption era began in 1972 with De Gaulle’s efforts to replace military and imperial power with cultural dominance (though the recent concurrent inaugurations of outposts for the French military and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi may suggest a ‘rapprochement’ of the domains), inaugurating a litany of new contemporary exhibitions, art fairs, monuments and museums. Furthermore, with the redefinition of contemporary French art from an art produced by French artists to art produced in the “territory of France”, this universalizing re-branding of contemporary art attempts to validate Paris’s claim to global cultural supremacy. I discuss particular events such as the art fair FIAC, La Force de L’ Art and Monumenta to illustrate the use of Contemporary art to shape and brand contemporary Paris