Édito Soixante — Où est-on ?
The vital forces of French contemporary art beat with an energy that is both exhilarating and critical in their rediscovery of institutions. Parisian galleries oscillate between the euphoria of a regained aura — with Art Basel Paris 2026 poised as a potential high point — and a crisis of trust (if not of conscience) in the face of a market driven into an endless race for investment.
In a time when the collusions between art, business, fashion, marketing, and communication often appear as little more than a survival strategy, the independence of artists, gallerists, thinkers, and publishers continues to nourish a salvaging hope. Public funding, in decline, struggles to answer the alarm cries of art workers, whose questions have themselves become the subject of numerous exhibitions. The younger generations seize the tools at their disposal to make their singularities shine. And all of us, together, take part in constructing a critical awareness that accompanies the act itself. To create is a privilege, yet one bound by necessity: a fertile existential phase, nourished by introspection, offering mirrors to a society polarizing more loudly than ever.
Such is the inescapable consequence of a world whose ongoing atrocities upend even our approach to exchange: they forbid procrastination, sometimes stifle imagination. The daily deaths of some, the impossible justifications of others, feed a dialectic that collapses upon itself. Artists, citizens, thinkers: they neither wield weapons nor decide to sacrifice lives in pursuit of political ends. Yet their voices matter, their responsibilities too. None are guilty. The debate is no longer about belief, but about each person’s capacity to mobilize their means to restore a voice to a justice so simple it has become exceptional in this age of punishment: a life is worth a life. No future will endure the denial of this trust in what is yet to come, wherever it may arise. Creation — political or not, brilliant or not — maintains the fragile thread that connects us to the very possibility of meaning. It must exist, it must resonate. Our challenge, difficult but necessary, is to grant it this echo — and to ensure that authoritarianisms do not sanction the freedoms that remain.
Thus the question “Where are we going?” demands less of an answer than of a stance. A resolve to put aside resentments, to move through dissensions, to encourage thought, position, and remembrance of where we are — so that today’s conflicts might become tomorrow’s instruments of discussion.
