Jean-Claude Bélégou Diversions :FARCES AND ANTICS 2026

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The representation, and most often the self-portrait, of the artist as a clown, or a jester, is a recent tradition since it can be traced back essentially to the end of the eighteenth century.

This date is obviously not a coincidence, since it is the date of the disillusionment brought about by a French revolution which, in terms of freedom, brought the Terror, equality, new forms of exploitation, fraternity, the domination of the bourgeois class coming to power and colonialism, and peace, the Napoleonic wars and their litters of corpses. It is profitable to reread Musset's The Confession of a Child of the Century on this subject...

Mockery and self-mockery, the artist is no longer just Chardin's monkey, but as Georges Rouault notes in a letter to Edouard Schuré "I saw clearly that the 'Clown' was me, it was us"
The poet, the painter, and all other solitary artists in their creations suddenly find themselves confronted with a market on which reigns a taste that is at the very least miserable, and moralizing (although emanating from a libertine class willingly) which is that of the mercantile and fairly uncultured bourgeoisie. We remember Napoleon the little guy scrambling Manet's Olympia or the trials brought against Baudelaire and Flaubert, the misery of a Gérard de Nerval or a Van Gogh driving them to suicide.

What is the situation today? The art market seems to be flourishing and breaks records every year, international fairs abound, aren't museums full houses?
This is to forget that the Ministry of Culture's policy for the visual arts is a drop in the ocean (the money goes mainly to heritage and the performing arts), that the flourishing market mainly concerns dead artists on whom the bourgeois speculates, that 95% (joint Ministry/Beaux-Arts Magazine survey) of French visual artists do not make a living from their work but have to finance it through an outside activity, omitting that heritage works are not only the subject of financial (or even diplomatic) speculation but have also become one of the driving forces of the Tourism Industry (reread Jean Clair and Mémoire d'un Atrabilaire about the lack of consideration of the major museums in relation to the protection of heritage that is being sold off).

Van Gogh would probably commit suicide a second time if he saw the attitude of the waves and hordes of tourists riveted behind their phones or tablets in front of his paintings. Or Vinci in front of the Mona Lisa...

So let's buffoon, yes of course always! Jesters of the culture industry (reread Adorno and Horkheimer) itself subservient to industrial tourism. The Normandy Impressionist festival, to take this example, will have brought more money to sausage merchants and hoteliers than to artists, even in its contemporary component for the survivors...

Pigment inkjet prints 60 x 75 cm made by the artist from digital plates.

 

Colors digital, print with archival inks 60 x 75 cm printed by the artist, limited editions, delivered matted, numbered and signed.