Magiciens de la terre

French text.
Magiciens de la terre ushers in a far-reaching international exhibition style, which really came into its own in the context of the neo-liberal globalization of capitalism. Prior to 1989, "an 'international exhibition' meant US artists and a handful of Germans".3 Paris was probably keen to take up the torch of modern art, "stolen" as it had been by New York after the Second World War, and so decided to invest in an ambitious exhibition divided between two venues: the Halle de la Villette, and the Centre Pompidou. Lucy Steeds tells us how the exhibition was funded, with one of its major patrons being the television channel Canal Plus. As surprising as this may seem, the channel's involvement was not limited just to money: it also helped in the acquisition of some of the works on view, after the show--because where France's national institutions were concerned, their reception of the works was muted, not to say non-existent. Not only did the MNAM acquire just a very few works, but it also made a permanent loan of them to the National Museum of African and Western Arts (Musée National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie, the MNAO) when Jean-Hubert Martin became its director in 1994. As if the breach opened up by the exhibition had no good reason to be at the Museum of Modern Art, and the works should be returned to their colonial origins, in the grand edifice built for them in 1931.4 This aspect of the history of collections, as underscored by Lucy Steeds, is little known, but it says a whole lot about the relation between French institutions and non-western contemporary art.