Times are in “the fall” and on a downward spiral. The Berlin Wall, The Twin Towers, bank crashes, multiple crashes, repeated crises, recessions, collapsing dictatorships, and all types of failing fiascos. With this, are the shipwrecked dreams of modern times. This is the “Titanic” of ideals. In these times of high tide objects, disenchantment with the world has brought ideologies and beliefs to deterioration. What to believe and who to trust? Enjoy! The promise of black bubbles sound off like an answer, our word of order. Enjoy, poor fools! The consumerist frenzy turns into organized debauchery. But globalization is accompanied by a globalization of disillusionment and its plummeting and depressed on all levels.

There’s discontent in civilization.

Once upon a time, we had art, which served as a cultural antidepressant. Lift your head and look up at the sky to elevate the soul, delight in the subtle and sublime, move away from here and dive into the celestial heights. Profane temples of grace, the museum was there to make us forget the hardships of existence and renumerate the beauty that compensates our efforts and suffering. Tear away from the weight and severity of the world and take comfort in its peaks, was the promise of art. The museum doors opening for us to climb inside. For some time now, I fear that art is no longer a consolation nor the museum a temple of grace.

When I say “I fear”,  it is a way of speaking, I am not complaining. Art has changed – that of contemporary. This is a fact. Some are reluctant and even indignantly reject this, but will eventually get over it. Rather than taking us to the highest peaks, art now takes us to the heart of reality. Instead, it distracts us and we devise the passage. It reveals what we fail to see or do not necessarily want to see, by stealthy bursts into the pool of reality in which we wade. Shaping the real – what we see and what we do not see, is the task of art today. Expression is the way of thinking of art, touching the truth. The work in place of the concept has again become a serious rival of philosophy.

We could summarize the contemporary shift in simple terms: the works of the great artists today are not sublime, they are symptoms. Not of the artist but of the time and the world; of discomfort.

I propose that that we look at it in this light.

So, in this era of collapse, we see that without prophetic spirit or clairvoyance, artists have led the way to announcing this time of precipitation. Whether it’s the masterful leap into the void of Yves Klein in 1960, To Steep, To Fast, the performance of McCarthy rolling to the bottom of a hill so that “the fall becomes action” or Bas Jan Ader falling from a roof or jumping a bike into a canal in Amsterdam, the art, it falls heavily.

In general, we speak of art to raise the spirits. In a vertical history of culture that still aspires to climb, I invite it down. Lower the eyes for a moment and look down. As the Palais de Tokyo is more than welcoming, the museum will talk about all that falls. There’s plenty to do. Reversal of perspective, it is also the order of the values ​​that can be found head over heels. It unravels from dream to reality, from spirit to matter, from the sublime to the waste, of the soul to the body, speech too hard to say, at the bottom of the beautiful – and beautiful downstairs.

For subjects taken in the vertigo of time – that is to say more or less everyone – this view can provide, I believe, a few lights. It will also be fun on occasion – the fall is an indestructible spring comedy. It is about to go under in this time, but there is no reason that the truth is always sad.