i don’t like paris anymore
text by ÉRIC TRONCY
I came to Paris in 1983 to study art history at the Sorbonne and the École du Louvre. I grew up in a provincial city with a population of 50,000, and in those pre-Internet days, that inevitably meant an incredible cultural isolation. This was two years after François Mitterrand was elected, and France had already changed quite a bit. There was a feeling, or an idea, that art production in general and the avant-garde in particular were something to be valued. In fact, in 1989, I saw Jessye Norman sing “La Marseillaise” wrapped in a French flag on the Place de la Concorde during a parade, for the bicentenary of the French revolution, a performance that the president had commissioned from Jean-Paul Goude. It was really another era.
I was very interested in contemporary art, fashion, and music. That eclecticism,…