International News Digest
TATI AND CHANEL GET TO SMOKE IN THE PARIS MÉTRO
Two censored advertising posters—one featuring the French filmmaker Jacques Tati smoking a pipe and another featuring an actress playing the French designer Coco Chanel smoking a cigarette—will be allowed to be displayed in their original versions in the Paris public-transportation system. As Le Monde and Agence France-Presse report, last month both posters went afoul of Metrobus, which manages advertising in the public-transportation system and which bans advertisements that portray smoking in accordance with the national “Evin Law.” But now a decision by the French authority for the professional regulation of advertising has reversed the original decision by allowing products linked to tobacco—pipes, cigars, and cigarettes—to appear in public advertising under certain conditions. First, the advertising campaign must come from advertisers who have no link to the tobacco industry or its distribution system. Second, the people represented in the ads must be dead or appear in artworks that are integral for the promotion of an artistic event. Finally, smoking must be inseparable from the character or the dead person appearing in the advertisement, examples being Georges Brassens, André Malraux, and, of course, Jacques Tati.
In the Tati ad—created for the current retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française—the character Monsieur Hulot’s pipe was transformed into a pinwheel to respect the Evin Law. In the case of the Coco Chanel poster—created to promote the film Coco avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel)—the film distributors preferred to ax the campaign in the Métro instead of doctoring Chanel’s cigarette to meet the terms of the law. Many were displeased with Métrobus’s initial decision, including the Société des Réalisateurs Français (Society of French Filmmakers) and the Syndicat de la Critique de Cinéma (Union of Cinema Criticism). Both these groups invoked another law—author copyright—and argued that the transformation of Tati’s pipe into a pinwheel was a breach of intellectual property. No word whether the Paris public-transport system has agreed to redo the posters and pick up the cost of the correction.
CECI N’EST PAS UN MUSÉE?
Brussels has welcomed a new museum dedicated entirely to the Surrealist world of René Magritte. As Agence France-Presse reports, King Albert II of Belgium inaugurated the museum in the capital city where the artist died and lived much of his life. The museum could have come much sooner for some Magritte fans, who cite the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Paul Klee Center in Bern as examples of cities that have honored their artistic own with a proper institution. Situated between the Grand-Place and the royal palace, the new Magritte museum is expected to attract six hundred thousand visitors per year with 250 works as well as archival materials from the master, which are displayed throughout approximately twenty-seven thousand square feet of exhibition space. The public opening takes place on June 2.
ORHAN PAMUK’S MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE
The Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Kai Strittmatter checks out the progress of Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk's museum of innocence in Istanbul. Inspired by his latest book of the same name, Masumiyet Müzesi, the museum is located in a narrow three-story house on Dalgic Street in the Cukurcuma sector. Although the windows and the doors are still nailed shut, the interior is to echo each of the eighty-three chapters in the book, starting with the earring described on page 1. At about twenty-seven hundred square feet, the museum may well be larger than an average book, but it’s not obvious how the building will hold its displays. After trying several curators, Pamuk hired the German architectural team of Brigitte and Gregor Sunder-Plassmann. “In the end, it should be a museum about the innocence and naïveté in each of us,” Pamuk told the newspaper. Objects will not be the center of the displays. “The sound of city should come in (the museum), the city’s sensations,” said Pamuk, citing as an example the sound of viewers crunching sunflower seeds during screenings at the movies. “We want to exhibit feelings, not things. . . . The most important exhibited piece here will be the impression that one picks up.” Although Pamuk published the novel last summer, the museum took longer. The opening is planned for 2010, the year when Istanbul will carry the title of a European Cultural Capital.
SIBERIAN ARTIST ARRESTED
The Siberian artist Artjom Loskutov has been arrested in Novosibirsk, the third-largest city in Russia. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Sonja Zekri reports, Loskutov was arrested for possession of marijuana, but some are speculating that an event the artist has been planning, Monstration, is the real reason he still remains behind bars. After Loskutov spent five days in solitary confinement, a court in Dzerzhinsky, Novosibirsk, ruled that he must stay in detention because the court alleges that he might disappear or commit more crimes. Monstration (a play on the word demonstration) is a parody parade Loskutov created in 2004 in Novosibirsk to celebrate May 1—Labor Day across Europe. But instead of waving flags, young Monstration participants brandish absurdist slogans, such as WHERE AM I? This year, Loskutov canceled the parade and warned students through his blog that police were planning “measures against extremism” at academies. But his message did not reach everyone; when some showed up to “monstrate,” Loskutov found himself getting a lecture at the anti-extremism office. Two weeks later, he was arrested for possessing eleven grams of marijuana in what friends and colleagues have described as a police check marred by irregularities.
As Zekri writes, the case—the first of its kind in the city—has left artists shocked. “We don’t know how to handle the situation,” said Konstantin Skotnikov, an artist who works at the architectural academy. Skotnikov also belongs to the artist group “Blue Noses,” whose photograph of two soldiers kissing in the snow irked officials. “One must probably assume that the public authorities feared some form of unrest,” said Skotnikov, who believes that the Monstration parade is the real reason for Loskutov’s continued detainment.