of pseudo-antiracist militants to block the performance
of Aeschylus’ The Suppliants on the
grounds that “white” actors had been made up
to play “black” characters. Welcome to our twenty
fi rst century! The entire work was thus thwarted
and crushed in the name of convictions that, while
fundamentally respectable, are nonetheless intellectually
completely unfounded, misplaced, and
unsupportable.
You may recall that in 2014, a group petitioned
the administrative court in Paris to block the performance
of Exhibit B, which a pop singer on a
ART + law
Confutatis maledictis,
fl ammis acribus addictis ...
126
or an Eternal Flame?
By Yves-Bernard Debie
French TV show had compared to Mein Kampf.
The attempt to ban Brett Bailey’s piece was rightfully
rejected, and it went on as planned. However,
neither the affi rmation of its legality nor the support
expressed by the French Minister of Culture at
the time, as well as that of the mayor of Paris condemning
“all attempts at intimidation and censorship,”
were enough to prevent the cancellation of
the scheduled performances at the Gérard Philipe
theater in Saint-Denis.
London, Berlin, and other European cities have
been subject to the same dictates. Accused of being
guilty of blackface or, if the actors are not made up,
of whitewashing or colorblindness, theater pieces
have been cancelled or denied public funding. This
was the case for a play in Canada called Kanata,
which came under pressure from autochthonous
minorities, even though it pointedly evokes the persecutions
endured by the Native Americans, who
have been denied their own culture.
Unfortunately, the visual arts have fared similarly.
The somewhat greater distance between Notre
Dame and the Assemblée Nationale building
was not enough to keep a completely unjustifi ed
polemic from rising up in the world’s capital of
On the summit of the highest gallery,
further up than the central rose window,
there was a great fl ame that rose between
the two bell towers amid whirlwinds of
sparks, a great, furious, and wild fl ame,
a tongue of which the wind at times
blew up into the smoke.
(Victor Hugo - Notre-Dame de Paris - 1831)
The night of April 15, 2019,
will be remembered with sadness for the fi re at
the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. More than
eight hundred years of history and culture were
consumed by fl ames on account of the negligence
of those responsible for a renovation project that
ironically was undertaken to preserve the structure.
Building the future while preserving what the
past has given us, and especially the universal treasures
produced through art, is another project, and
one that is ongoing, permanent, and much more
complex.
Around the world, self-righteous militants are
busy relighting the embers of censorship and are
fanning and feeding them with big chunks of history,
culture, and the arts. It is a kind of fervor that
grafts itself onto the legitimate desire to purge our
societies of the evils that have always corrupted
them. In the name of the necessary struggles against
racism, xenophobia, and sexism, these fraudulent
ayatollahs want to control cultural expression and
pass judgment on the conformity of art.
It takes less than ten minutes to get from the cathedral
of Notre Dame de Paris to the Sorbonne,
and on March 25, 2019, it took only a handful