All images courtesy of Quai Branly Museum

If you're lucky enough to have spent a few months bouncing among the 7000 islands that make up the vast oceanic territory we call the Philippines, you'll have doubtless noticed something extraordinary about this civilization whose...

Paris -- For tourists with college degrees visiting here there are two sites on the Must Do list: the Eiffel Tower that twinkles top to toe every hour after sundown and THE LOUVRE, the most visited, the most monumental, and very possibly...

When I discovered that Anselm Reyle regarded Jeff Koons--he of the $33 million steel tulips in Las Vegas and the grotesque Puppy topiary at Bilbao--as one of the masters of contemporary realism, I thought about canceling the trip to Grenoble to see Reyle's latest installation of neon tube sculpture and...

First Question: Who is the figure above and where does s/he come from?

Answer: S/he has no name but is sacred to thousands across Mali and West Africa.

Second Question: Tell yourself exactly where Mali is. If you can't put your thumb...

Outsider Art was born in London, at least officially, in 1972 when the critic Roger Cardinal characterized the movement labeled by French artist Jean Dubuffet as art brut: art generated "outside" traditional circles, often by self-trained artists and sculptors snubbed and snickered at by uptown galleries and museums. The problem...

That's the line: bring in one of Frank Gehry's (self-described) paper wads turned titanium, hire the Japanese wunderkind team Sanaa for $200 million to transform a dead mining pit (Lens, France, outside Little) or engage the brilliant naughty boy of...

The stereotypes are global. France's Second City, like America's Second City, is the nation's murder capital. But Marseille has also been chosen Europe's Culture Capital 2013. What gives?

Aside from Amsterdam, there's nowhere you can go this year on the Continent with such a high concentration of new daring (if...

photo © Patrick Varotto

Clichés abound about the impossibility of making surrealist art in a 21st century world where nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles are called peacekeepers and chickens held in two-foot square cages are labeled free range. That said, where better to fly...

Look at all the European tourist plans that American college kids have studied for the...

GRENOBLE, France -- Single artist exhibits -- or, as we used to say, one-man shows -- are dangerous gambits unless you happen to be dead and very famous, as in the monumental Edward Hopper show at the Grand Palais in Paris. Edgy, not-so-old living artists like Philippe Cognée hardly fit...

Paris -- this city's annual autumn arts festival includes everything from the unparalleled and ubiquitous global Photo Expo to the greatest ever and most complete Edward Hopper show at the Grand Palais to the gaspingly magnificent Setari Collection at

"They make me dizzy. I get overwhelmed. I just wanta get out of there."

That's what my friend Gail of San Francisco says about department stores. I can only add that after 20 minutes inside most department stores I begin to feel suffocated.

Even...

Summer arts festivals have become about as common as sweat bees across Europe and North America, but two stand out above all the others. The Edinburgh Festival in Scotland and the Avignon Festival in Provence, France. Both were born in 1947 in the...

Nantes, France--

The city was in dire straits.

One of the biggest shipyards in the world, where countless ocean liners, including both the SS France and Queen Mary 2 were launched, had shut down. The metal factories lay...

Photo Courtesy 21c

Louisville, Ky. -- It's not every day you can wander into a toney downtown hotel, sidle over to the Gent's room and relieve yourself in a contemporary art cubicle. Or contrariwise, mosey down the hall and count how many pairs...

credit: Palais de Tokyo

Toxic bubbles.

That's what Jean de Loisy wants his visitors to face on April 15 when they first approach the newly restored and re-opened Palais de Tokyo, which he claims will be the largest site...

Paris

When Nicholas Sarkozy came to power five years ago, confirming right-wing control of the government, he made two moves that sharply upstaged and startled his Socialist opponents. Not only did he appoint more women to cabinet posts than ever before, but he also put more Muslims in...

"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."

-- Fredrich Nietsche

If on one side of the Seine this winter we've been forced to look at the dark side of Western man's capacity to reduce everyone unlike ourselves to the...

Masturbation is seldom far from the chatter that bubbles up among devotees and scholars of Marcel Proust. It always seems to swell just beneath the finery of the master's fictionalized memories in A La Recherche du Temp Perdu (lately known in English as In Search of Lost Time, formerly Remembrance...