Beaux Arts Magazine
Related: fine arts - high culture - high art
Their Site
http://www.french-art.com/livres-revues/revues/beauxarts/
Fabrice Bousteau
Fabrice Bousteau, editor of Beaux Arts Magazine since 1996
Cultural manager, journalist and professor, Fabrice Bousteau has made Beaux Arts Magazine the leading art publication in France and Europe. Under his direction, the magazine has undergone significant changes:
- a wider editorial range covering not only ancient and contemporary art in the field of painting, sculpture and architecture but also design, fashion, film, new technologies and even...culinary art!
- More in-depth analysis of how the art and cultural world functions, through a series of stories: what is the role of the cultural ministry, provocation in art, reproduction rights and the use of image.
Beaux Arts Magazine also aims to be a critical publication, by acting as a forum for key figures in the cultural sphere. It also initiated a number of international events like "Art in the World " 1998 and 2000, exhibitions created in conjunction with leading contemporary art magazines throughout the world.
Special Issue on Comics
Qu'est-ce que la BD aujourd'hui?
A friend visiting Paris recently returned with a gift for me: a special issue of the Beaux Arts Magazine devoted to the current state of comics - a big smart square-bound volume, with a preamble consisting of a set of essays on contemporary comics, profiles of some 37 creators, and a suggested reading list of 37 volumes which would make up "la bédéthèque idéale". It was fascinating to read, both for the actual content, and because it sparked so many reflections on the perception of comics in France, and how radically that differs from how they are perceived in Britain (and no doubt the US as well).
Might as well start with the obvious: I can't imagine a fine art magazine in Britain doing a comics special. For two reasons: first, because comics just don't have the respectability - and since it becomes tedious to complain about that, there's no point in elaborating on it. Second, because when comics are taken seriously in Britain it's not done by assimilating them to the visual "fine arts". Our complaint is that comics are absent from the bookshops, that graphic novels aren't covered by the book reviewers, not that you don't see them in art galleries. The very term "graphic novel" suggests that we see comics as a narrative medium. This is not necessarily a good thing, but it is more than a generalisation based on my own passion for narrative; though it may be even more true of British than of American comics fans. Certainly the stars of the "British invasion" were the writers - Moore, Milligan, Morrison, Gaiman... and I could go on. Back in 1985, Alan Moore put it this way (in a series of essays on Writing for Comics now at last republished by Avatar). --http://www.shadowgallery.co.uk/bam.html
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