Beaubourg: The Pompidou Center, Paris

Beaubourg: The Pompidou Center, Paris is a television program written and presented by Michael Baldwin of Art & Language and directed by Nick Levinson. It was created for the Open University's "A315: Modern Art and Modernism; Manet to Pollock" course which was taught from 1983 to 1992.

Synopsis

Can one control art which criticizes 'the system' by absorbing it into the system, and elevating it to the status of the official avant-garde? And is that what the authorities were trying to do in Paris when they built the Centre Georges Pompidou after the upheavals of 1968? The students on the streets of Paris were demanding a social and cultural revolution; their ideas were apparently expressed in the founding of 'Beaubourg,' but at the same time its collections and exhibitions showcase French culture and France's importance as the perennial home of modern, and post-modern, art. So is Beaubourg an expression of cultural and political freedom, or is it really a symbol of central control?

Release

VHS released by the Roland Collection in the mid 1990s. $49 for individuals, $99 for institutions. Out of print by 2000.

Discussion

A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture Since 1965

1987

Charles Harrison

[...] In the later 1950s and 1950s, Modernism was reexported from New York to Europe "like a slow-release Marshall Plan,"[27] transformed, metropolitanized, and - at least as regards the functions of criticism - substantially professionalized. [...]

[27] The phrase is Michael Baldwin's from his script for "Beaubourg" a television program for the Open University "A315: Modern Art and Modernism; Manet to Pollock," TV 32. (The Open University, Milton Keynes, 1983.)