Art is about snooping around the making of a process, not something to glance at while standing in line, struggling to direct your gaze at it. As you make your way through the crowd to stand in front of that famous painting, you see a group of people from behind; you need to surpass their heads to enjoy your right to that single look.
For instance, think back to when you were at MoMA just to see Picasso’s most popular work, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Do you remember anything else besides the chaos surrounding you? And what about Klimt’s Kiss or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa? A long journey brought you all the way there, just to look at it for a few minutes, trying to take it all in and hold space for it despite the loud chaos of rude consumers… and you, among them, struggling for a souvenir picture.
In our lives, we are used to standing in line to get the privilege of accessing art, just a little piece of it. It is fair: invaluable works of art are destined to be collected in museums, sheltered in safe places where professionals (curators, renovators, experts, etc.) can take care of them. That’s why, on my last trip to Paris, I wanted to visit the Musée de l’Orangerie to see and behold Monet’s Water Lilies. The painter conceived them by adapting his work to the museum’s structure with the intention of creating a space for meditation.
It’s known that Monet painted over 250 water lily subjects from 1890 until his death in 1926 at the age of 86. Over time, water lilies became the sole filter through which he viewed reality, capturing his attention to such an extent that he started to study them in various conditions, at different times of day and under different natural light. Thus, Monet made nature his en plein air atelier, giving us a glimpse of the landscape of his home garden in Giverny.
Nowadays, however, meditation has given way to the alienated consumption of artistic products. I still don’t know if we—as cultural consumers—have a real thirst for art, but we are definitely always thrilled to capture it. This reminded me of a sentence by Feuerbach quoted in The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, published in 1967: “[…] the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence… truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred.”
What was conceived by the artist as a space for meditation and contemplation has turned into a rather chaotic experience for tourists who are only focused on looking at the painting through the pictures they’ve taken of it or feeling compelled to speak about what they’re looking at, filling the room with an annoying buzz. The museum-going experience itself has become exhausting, a loud illusion (as Feuerbach underlined): just like attending a concert and being bothered by people constantly filming every second of the performance, we have to acknowledge that works of art have become like rock stars, making art itself another form of current entertainment.
If it’s true that we go to museums to learn about art in the past, where do we go now to know more about art in the present? If, as Susan Sontag wrote in the late 60s in As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, a collection of her diaries, “works of art become, definitively, art as they belong to the past,” where can we go to see art in its present? In nature, as Monet taught us, or in ateliers.
From what I gathered, there’s a place in Paris where you can have the authentic experience of witnessing the process of art being made, and it’s located at 59, Rue de Rivoli. There, in a six-storey atelier, a self-managed collective welcomes around 30 artists, including permanent exhibitions and creative workshops. The idea was born in 1999 when Gaspard Delanoë, Kalex, and Bruno Dumont, along with a few other artists, decided to occupy the building until Berand Delanoë took over in 2009. Today, 59 Rivoli is the third Parisian center for contemporary art, following the Centre Pompidou and the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume.
Here, art is unframed, and what is exhibited is alive. Visitors have the chance to peek at the artist’s work as it’s being made. The artists are, for all intents and purposes, present; as you become a spectator, you can talk to them, discover their sources of inspiration, or look around at their tools without there being a barrier between your body and the work of art, because you’re witnessing and experiencing the process of making it first-hand. There’s no barrier between you and the artist’s truth.
As a final point, 59 Rivoli stands as a powerful antidote to the sterile, commodified experiences that often dominate traditional museum spaces, which often relegate art to an object of consumption rather than a living experience, as it is encased in glass and distanced from the present. By offering a platform where art is not just observed but actively created and shared, 59 Rivoli reintroduces the human element of creativity that can be lost in the spectacle-driven world of mainstream galleries.
In doing so, it challenges the dominant narrative of art consumption, inviting visitors to engage with the very essence of ongoing artistic expression. In a time when art is increasingly reduced to a consumer good, defending the democratic space it deserves reaffirms that art, in its truest form, is alive, dynamic, and meant to be experienced in all its raw and transformative power.
Written and photo credits by Sabrina Sabatino