 | One can only be avant garde for so long before one becomes garde. And it looks as if the "art" community has worn out its welcome even in La Belle France. Heh. |
This year's edition of one of Europe's top summer arts events was described as a pretentious catastrophe Thursday after angry audiences booed or walked out of a series of performances. Critics attending the three-week Avignon theatre festival in southern France said it had plumbed new depths of intellectual obscurity and warned that a contempt for the mainstream public was placing the future of a prestigious national institution in jeopardy. "What purgatory!" headlined the news magazine Le Point on its culture pages, "Loyal spectators are sad, disorientated and haggard," while a commentator for the Communist newspaper L'Humanite said this year's offerings were marked by "a triumphant sense of masturbatory autism."But the most searing attack on Europe's most important drama venue after Edinburgh came from the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, which devoted its daily editorial to "the festival's worst crisis since 1968. It is chic, it is hip, it is conceptual. And it is totally cut off from the real country," the paper thundered.| Prolly just mad they didn't have any pink tanks or effigies of GWB, but it is fun to see the paying customer figger out they've been had. |
"Prototypes are being launched for the public to test, but the real audience is a tiny in-crowd, drunk on its own pathetic audacity .... Most spectators are not totally new to the world of the arts and can make up their own minds. Every evening they come out revolted. Does the festival have the right to survive this artistic and moral disaster?" it concluded.| More at the link descibing the "art" that festivalgoers were forced to sit through. |
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