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From another article: > That Paris’s Pompidou Centre is to close for four years from 2023 for yet more maintenance comes as no surprise. Weeds have long sprout

From another article: > That Paris’s Pompidou Centre is to close for four years from 2023 for yet more maintenance comes as no surprise. Weeds have long sprouted from its ultra-finicky superstructure, while the job of keeping it scraped free of pigeon poo and painted in the prescribed infrastructural colour palette – red for people, blue for air, yellow for electricity and green for water – rivals the Forth Bridge for unrelenting laboriousness. It sounds like the Centre has maintenance problems nearing the coastline-paradox variety... > ‘There were two options,’ France’s culture minister Roselyne Bachelot told Le Figaro. ‘One involved renovating the centre while keeping it open, the other was closing it completely. I chose the second because it should be shorter and a little bit less expensive.’ It's interesting that this logic somehow misses or skips the weighty symbolic aspect of shutting down a cultural landmark. Presumably this is most of why the news is newsworthy. Maybe everybody hates the place, but still. Closing down completely sends a pretty big message in the primal sense in which things are alive or dead, usable or not, up or down, and what you typically aim for at worst is a set of circumstances that strike a balance between those aspects. It's also going to be a slower option in terms of visitor access, which is kind of funny in that it's a near-reversal of the logical benefit one would rationally want. This makes me wonder if the budget gets any benefit at all from visitor payments...(I've worked with cultural sites that flat out told me: We don't want more guests here, and we definitely don't want more membership-holding guests) https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/outrage/outrage-the-cost-of-caring-for-the-pompidou https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/outrage/outrage-...

agumonkey 3y ago
There's also a massive generalist library.. I wonder if it will be closed to. Lots of people and students go there to work...
- telesilla 3y ago
  Yes I was wondering the same, probably they'll relocate what they can to another facility but haven't found it yet, for an announcement.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    It's really large (and on two stories IIRC). Not sure if there are buildings with that kind of free surface ready to host all that.
dtagames 3y ago
Definitely not everybody hates the place. It's one of the most visited attractions in France and is considered an architectural and cultural icon of the city. It also has a terrific permanent collection, hosts amazing world-class exhibitions, and features an enormous art resource library for research as well as a huge art bookstore. It will be a real loss to Paris and to the world to have this closed for any period of time.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Part of the collection is great (the modern art part, with their beautiful Kandinsky, Mondrian, Brîncuși etc collections), while most of the rest is contemporary drivel (oh look, a huge room filled with felt which mostly dampens sound, with a piano in the middle! Amazing!). The building itself is extremely divisive, but I think most tend to hate it - I certainly did.
  - deanCommie 3y ago
    You're probably thinking of the rotating exhibition hall. I didn't see the piece you describe while I was there. I found it exhilarating and the first time I understood the journey of art from impressionism to today, when artists realized that "Most perfect/accurate representations of reality" (the high water mark reached during of the renaissance) was no longer the way to move art forward. And with the imminent arrival of photography, they were right. I myself spent 3 decades of my life thumbing my nose at "modern art" with the typical criticisms ("If i can't tell if an artist or a toddler did it, is it art"?) This museum was the first to show me the evolution of art and I got "it".
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      I was referring to an installation by Joseph Beuys [1] that is part of the permanent collection. I do know exactly the journey that you're talking about in art. It actually clicked for me after visiting Florence and seeing the Uffizi museum's collection of Renaissance art - that's when I realized that there was really nothing more to add in terms of faithful representations of humans and nature after the masters of that time. The increasing levels of abstraction in later movements, from impressionism through cubism to things like Pollock or Mondrian or Chagall - those make sense to me and generate similar feelings as the great Renaissance masters. When I visited a few weeks ago, this was mostly the uppermost floor of the Pompidou, which I loved. I was explicitly refering to this when I said modern art - to Modernism, the artistic current. However, it's the art that comes after that which I think turned more to grift and self-importance - like most other aspects of post-modernism. Large installations, larger than most paintings or sculptures you'd get in any previous eras, with mostly simple ideas to tell (the whole point of that felt room is the warmth and sound dampening, and it only takes ~50m² to tell its point). Repurposing everyday objects, as if the Dadaists haven't done everything that could be done on this. Lots of self-referential questioning of what is art, or shallow shock value references to topics of the day. The contemporary collection (mostly on the 4th floor in my visit) reinforced my opinion that the plastic arts are almost entirely a grift today. I'm still hopeful some new artistic current will rise again in the future and come back to creating esthetically pleasing art, even while keeping away from simple representations of nature. I don't think everything that could be said in those styles has been said, but sadly attempts to improve on the works of the 1920s have mostly been abandoned. [1] https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/RqhG4ed https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/RqhG4ed
atkailash 3y ago
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yunohn 3y ago
> the weighty symbolic aspect of shutting down a cultural landmark I’ve been travelling quite a bit in Europe over the past 5yrs; you’d be surprised how many cultural centres are in a continuous status of renovation. It seems to take forever for any of them to be “done”.

agumonkey 3y ago

There's also a massive generalist library.. I wonder if it will be closed to. Lots of people and students go there to work...

telesilla 3y ago
Yes I was wondering the same, probably they'll relocate what they can to another facility but haven't found it yet, for an announcement.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  It's really large (and on two stories IIRC). Not sure if there are buildings with that kind of free surface ready to host all that.

dtagames 3y ago

Definitely not everybody hates the place. It's one of the most visited attractions in France and is considered an architectural and cultural icon of the city. It also has a terrific permanent collection, hosts amazing world-class exhibitions, and features an enormous art resource library for research as well as a huge art bookstore. It will be a real loss to Paris and to the world to have this closed for any period of time.

tsimionescu 3y ago
Part of the collection is great (the modern art part, with their beautiful Kandinsky, Mondrian, Brîncuși etc collections), while most of the rest is contemporary drivel (oh look, a huge room filled with felt which mostly dampens sound, with a piano in the middle! Amazing!). The building itself is extremely divisive, but I think most tend to hate it - I certainly did.
- deanCommie 3y ago
  You're probably thinking of the rotating exhibition hall. I didn't see the piece you describe while I was there. I found it exhilarating and the first time I understood the journey of art from impressionism to today, when artists realized that "Most perfect/accurate representations of reality" (the high water mark reached during of the renaissance) was no longer the way to move art forward. And with the imminent arrival of photography, they were right. I myself spent 3 decades of my life thumbing my nose at "modern art" with the typical criticisms ("If i can't tell if an artist or a toddler did it, is it art"?) This museum was the first to show me the evolution of art and I got "it".
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    I was referring to an installation by Joseph Beuys [1] that is part of the permanent collection. I do know exactly the journey that you're talking about in art. It actually clicked for me after visiting Florence and seeing the Uffizi museum's collection of Renaissance art - that's when I realized that there was really nothing more to add in terms of faithful representations of humans and nature after the masters of that time. The increasing levels of abstraction in later movements, from impressionism through cubism to things like Pollock or Mondrian or Chagall - those make sense to me and generate similar feelings as the great Renaissance masters. When I visited a few weeks ago, this was mostly the uppermost floor of the Pompidou, which I loved. I was explicitly refering to this when I said modern art - to Modernism, the artistic current. However, it's the art that comes after that which I think turned more to grift and self-importance - like most other aspects of post-modernism. Large installations, larger than most paintings or sculptures you'd get in any previous eras, with mostly simple ideas to tell (the whole point of that felt room is the warmth and sound dampening, and it only takes ~50m² to tell its point). Repurposing everyday objects, as if the Dadaists haven't done everything that could be done on this. Lots of self-referential questioning of what is art, or shallow shock value references to topics of the day. The contemporary collection (mostly on the 4th floor in my visit) reinforced my opinion that the plastic arts are almost entirely a grift today. I'm still hopeful some new artistic current will rise again in the future and come back to creating esthetically pleasing art, even while keeping away from simple representations of nature. I don't think everything that could be said in those styles has been said, but sadly attempts to improve on the works of the 1920s have mostly been abandoned. [1] https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/RqhG4ed https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/RqhG4ed

atkailash 3y ago

[dead]

yunohn 3y ago

> the weighty symbolic aspect of shutting down a cultural landmark I’ve been travelling quite a bit in Europe over the past 5yrs; you’d be surprised how many cultural centres are in a continuous status of renovation. It seems to take forever for any of them to be “done”.