The Art Lawyer's Diary by Barbara Hoffman: A Movable Feast for a Troubled Time

Nov 4, 2025

How the Paris Art Scene Responds When Democracy Falters

I have returned to Paris often enough that the city is no longer a destination but a method of thinking. Arrival here is rarely neutral.

As a student in the late 60’s in Paris, I supplemented my undergraduate exposure as an art historian and French major immersed in the literature and philosophy of the past from Racine, Pascal, Voltaire, Moliere, Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Proust, Camus and Sartre, with the French philosopher and thinkers of the time, several of whose classes I was privileged to attend. Claude Levi Straus, Jean Piaget, and Frantz Fanonproceeded Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, and later Lacan - French anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, and poets - were radically changing how we understood the world, knowledge and humanism. Thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jacques Derrida asserted that the meaning of a text or work is not limited to the author’s intention. On thecontrary, it is multiple, shifting, nourished by the interpretations of readers/viewers

 Structuralism and post – structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction provided the philosophical underpinnings and tools for dealing with the traumas caused by colonialism, racism, homophobia, misogyny.

The 60’s and early 70’s were years of political trauma and uprising in France and the United States .For those who know the history, this is not the first time Paris has hosted the collision of art, law, and political upheaval. The spring of 1968 turned the Latin Quarter into a rehearsal studio for new forms of public life — not just protests, but posters, slogans, manifestos, improvised cinemas, print shops, and collective seeing.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated while I was in Paris during the events of 1968. Protests against racism, the war in Vietnam, attacks on homosexuals, and discrimination in employment and voting continued unabated.

These French writers offered and urged acceptance of the challenge to denaturalize social, aesthetic andlinguistic norms and open up new ways of seeing and acting upon the world. The lesson is not that 1968 can be repeated. The lesson is that culture becomes political not when it demands agreement, but when it demands attention.

Paris in 2025 is not Paris in 1968. But the echo remains: art once again asks not what we think, but how we see.

Paris in October: The Movable Feast and the Work of Seeing

Paris has always been a stage for art, politics, memory, and spectacle, a city where institutions narrate history and the streets rehearse its future. To come in late October or November is to enter a season when the art world contracts and intensifies at once. Museums unveil their major shows, fairs garner their markets and their rituals. Even ordinary looking may be reframed and charged with consequence.

Last year’s highlights were the successful recapture of the Grand Palais by Art Basel Paris and my restoration to the status of Vip d’Honneur 10 am, with access en principe to a BMW), Mark Rothko, at The FoundationLouis Vuitton, and the 100th anniversary celebrating the birth of Surrealism at the Centre Pompidou. This year, the question was not whether Paris might offer escape from the attacks on democracy and the rule of law occurring elsewhere. The city of light does not promise refuge. A magnet, it draws us to the site of that vibrant feast which nourished us in our youth. A place of theory and action where questions of power, public speech, institutional responsibility, and the role of art in a destabilized civic order could be seen, tested, and absorbed.

To write from Paris in November 2025 is to write from a place where the spectacle of culture meets the machinery of law, where museums defend their relevance while markets define value faster than criticism can keep pace, and where the line between political event and cultural gesture grows thinner each season. It is also inevitable as a lawyer/observer to write through the lens as someone trained to unearth facts and observe process, watch where power collects, and how it is justified, resisted, or manipulated.

The notes that follow are not a travelogue. They are a working record of how Paris stages the relationship between art and democracy at a time when both are under strain.

Paris has never been a neutral ground for culture. Its institution, Louvre, Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne, Palais de Tokyo—were built not just to preserve art, but to define what counts as art, what counts as history, and who is authorized to speak. But in November 2025, the city felt less like an ideal and more like a mirror: a place where the same pressures facing cultural institutions elsewhere—censorship, market capture, donor influence, political oversight, public exhaustion—are not avoided but exposed.

In this season, the work of seeing is not passive. It is a civic act.

The Fair Circuit: Can or Does the Marketplace Becomes a Forum?

Every October, Paris becomes the temporary capital of the global art market. What has come to be known as Paris Art Week is a choreography of VIP previews, tiered access, speculative buying, institutional courting, and rapid valuation. Access is currency here, and status appears not as taste but as architecture suspended on the cliff of theater.

Art Basel Paris (formerly FIAC) takes over the Grand Palais, and there are a host of satellite fairs: Paris Internationale and Asia Now in their tenth edition, as well as Offscreen in its fourth edition, are amongst my favorites. The most politically resonant site this season was not Basel Paris at the Grand Palais. It was Offscreen at the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, the former hospital and asylum where the history of control over bodies, women, labor, and illness is embedded in the stone. Offscreen, which highlights installations, still and moving images, was founded by Julien Freydman, the former Magnum, then Paris Photo director.  The late Shigeko Kubota, pioneering Korean video artist was honored with an exhibition of video works, largely unknown in France.

Offscreen offered many installations overtly or conceptually distinctly political charged.  The installation of Quentin Le Franc questions how art responds when democratic space contracts. Designed as a “place of study”, the architecture serves as a framework, territory, and playground for the works to create a dialogue between the site and installation. He experiments with its permeability, hierarchies, and history, inviting us to reflect on our existence and the act of creating a place.

The Art Basel brand is unapologetically and successfully associated with quality and commerce. Lost for me is any sense of community and collegiality. To the extent the VIP program of FIAC promoted this community and salon of ideas, it is lost in this art world dominated by mega-fairs and mega-sales, largely, one might imagine, for investments (perhaps it was my demotion from VIP d’honneur this year, but I found a VIP program in time,access and name only, and an Art Basel staff with attitude and condescension). Paris’ satellites thrive on something else: intimacy, inclusivity, experimentation, and belief. In the potential and message of the artists represented.

Museums, Memory and the Politics of Exhibition

If fairs are where value is made, museums are where meaning is negotiated. This season, several major Paris institutions mounted exhibitions that engage directly—sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely—with the question of historical memory and democratic fragility.

Paris has never been a neutral ground for culture. Its institution, Louvre, Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne, Palais de Tokyo—were built not just to preserve art, but to define what counts as art, what counts as history, and who is authorized to speak. But in November 2025, the city felt less like an ideal and more like a mirror: a place where the same pressures facing cultural institutions elsewhere—censorship, market capture, donor influence, political oversight, public exhaustion—are not avoided but exposed. Whether by coincidence or confluence, I noted a synergy amongst the various exhibitions selected for this article. Perhaps it is the convergence of the 100^th of Surrealism and the 100^th of Art Deco. In 1925, the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris marked the peak of Art Deco. Decorators, manufacturers, magazines, department stores, artists, and even foreign nations competed fiercely to occupy Parisian buildings or erect temporary structures to display their latest creations.

The destabilization of the world order, attacks on the rule of law, the rise of fascism, conflicts, and genocide and the disappearance of facts as we know them, have provoked responses of the art world and the broader question of the role of the artist and art in these times. Many of the exhibitions have been planned before the current threats to democracy and the fact that the world is increasingly divided into camps and an alternative universe. Yet, the artists and exhibitions on view provide remarkable and appropriate models for hope and transformation to a more equitable and harmonious world, whether such art is influenced and  fueled by poetry, imagination, Surrealism, French theory, Buddhism or variants thereupon.

Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes were significantly influenced by Surrealism, particularly in its challenge to rational thought and traditional structures of meaning. Surrealism, through its emphasis on the unconscious, dreams, and "pure psychic automatism," sought to bypass conscious, rational control to access a deeper reality. This devaluation of the rational mind resonated with post-structuralist thinkers who critiqued the dominance of reason and objective truth in Western thought.

Palais de Tokyo — Echo, Delay, Reverb: American Art and Francophone Thought
22 October 2025 – 15 February 2026

Curated as dialogue rather than thesis, it questions what happens when cultural history is not linear but recursive—when images return but are altered by power. Even though I participated as a law professor in a group of critical legal theory of which critical race theory was a derivative, I was not aware of the profound influence of French  Theory on artistic practice. Or the number of artists with whom I am familiar that  have been influenced either in

imagery, content or activism in French Theory. I was also unaware of the role played in the dissemination of French Theory by the Whitney Independent Study (ISP) Program. The program has been suspended by the chilling effect of President Trump’s attacks on wokeism and freedom of speech.The exhibition shows how artists in the United States catalyzed the revolutionary energies of thinkers whowere by turn activists and poets – from Simon de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to Frantz Fanon, Jean Genet, Aimé Césaire, Monique Wittig, Pierre Bourdieu and Edouard Glissant – to transgress genres and shift perspectives on the world today. Reading the work of these authors helped artists in the United States totranslate their ideas into unexpected forms and to forge tools with which critique institutions of the art world and ofsociety as a whole. For them, theory has not been a gloss but a powerful impetus for denaturalizing social,aesthetic and linguistic norms and opening up new ways of seeing and acting upon the world. The book pays homage to Palestine and its flag in the colors red, black, white and green and in memory of Felix Gonzalez Torres an alumna of ISP who created an artwork on this theme.

This work of Allora & Calzadilla with an audience member is an important documentation. Interestingly, Coco Fusco, an artist whose works are influenced by Edward Saed said and is poetic in its charged politic, recreates or is inspired by a meeting years later by the next generation of a Cuban poet.

Melvin Edwards — Palais de Tokyo
Part of the “Echo, Delay, Reverb” season

After Nazism, the Eurocentric conception of the human as a central value was challenged by many postwar philosophers.

At the same time, Frantz Fanon, as well as the poets of Négritude—such as Aimé Césaire, with his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Suzanne Césaire, and Léon-Gontran Damas—contributed to this critique of humanism by highlighting the dehumanizing character of the colonial and racist project that structures Western societies. Homage to his friend Damas is below. Mel Edwards was a close friend of the Négritude co-founder, the poet Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana, and dedicated a major five-part work, Homage to the Poet Léon-Gontran Damas (1978-1981), to him. This connection highlights the influence of Négritude's ideas, which centered on affirming Black identity and culture against the backdrop of French colonialism and universalism, on Edwards' practice. Edwards’ long-standing sculptural language—barbed wire, welded steel, forms evoking captivity and resistance—reads differently in 2025, when the question is no longer how violence is remembered, but how it is normalized.

The Poetics of Resistance: Beyond Identity, Beyond Didacticism

If the Palais de Tokyo tends toward theory—structural, academic, curatorial—another artistic response has emerged in Paris this season: a poetics rather than a manifesto. A turn toward imagination rather than argument. Not post-political, but post-didactic. Artists who refuse to reduce themselves to representation yetrefuse to abandon the political stakes of the moment.

This is visible across several exhibitions, but most clearly in three figures whose work moves past identity categories into something speculative, visionary or poetic.

• Stephanie Jemison — artist-in-residence, Galeries Lafayette Anticipation
• Gerhard Richter — retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton
• George Condo — retrospective at Musée d’Art Moderne

Each confronts history without merely illustrating it; each invites viewers into a mode of attention that is not instructional but transformative.

Stephanie Jemison — Galeries Lafayette Anticipation (2025–26 season)

Jemison’s work treats language, gesture, and futurity as forms of refusal. Her films, texts, and performances engage Afrofuturism not as fantasy but as method: a way to make space where dominant narratives refuse it.

Rather than depict identity, she disassembles it—turning the viewer from spectator into decoder. Jemison is one of the clearest reminders that art does not need to choose between politics and poetry; it can make politics legible only through poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gerhard Richter — Foundation Louis Vuitton

17 October 2025 – 2 March 2026

A six-decade retrospective, including the politically loaded 18 October 1977 cycle—Richter’s blurred images of the Red Army Faction suicides in German prison. Once controversial, now newly resonant in an age when state violence is both hyper-visible and structurally denied.

Richter famously said:

“Art is the highest form of hope.”

These are not contradictions. They are twin recognitions: that truth is fugitive, and hope requires form. Richter’s abstractions do not resolve history—they hold it in

suspension.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

George Condo — Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris

10 October 2025 – 8 February 2026

Condo’s Black Series—Expressionism twisted into psychological architecture—returns at a moment when fracture has become a global norm. His figures, distorted but unmistakably human, resemble not political portraits but the emotional ruins politics leaves behind.

If democracy is faltering, Condo’s paintings show the internal weather of that collapse. Not critique, but aftermath.

 

 

Philip Guston — Musée Picasso

14 October 2025 – 1 March 2026

Once delayed for fear of public controversy, the Guston exhibition now lands in a world where controversy is constant, and

avoidance looks like complicity. The hooded figures return—not as symbols of race alone, but as warnings about what happens when violence goes unexamined long enough to become cartoon.

The museum now asks viewers not whether the work is offensive, but whether our unoffendedness has made us politically numb.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Architecture, Memory and the City as Argument

Paris is not just a city of exhibitions but of enacted arguments. Architecture functions here as a legal brief in stone—declaring what is private, what is public, what is preserved, and what is permitted to disappear.

Cité de l’Architecture — Paris 1925: Art Deco and Its Architects

22 October 2025 – 29 March 2026

A centenary exhibition marking Art Deco not as nostalgia but as a reminder that style is never apolitical. Art Deco was the aesthetic of interwar optimism—and of rising authoritarianism. The show includes works by Le Corbusier and others whose visions of order now appear double-edged: utopian, and disciplining.

Elsewhere, institutions reshape themselves to meet a new public condition.

 

 

 

 

 

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

This is now relocated to 2 Place du Palais-Royal, in a newly adapted Jean Nouvel–designed space from the original galleries of the Louvre.

Nouvel’s design, once dismissed as spectacle, now reads as a proposition: museums must be legible from the outside, or risk becoming citadels: glass, permeability, and civic transparency as architectural thesis.

What is remarkably interesting in the Cartier Collection, which exhibits commissions over the years, is its diversity in the selection of artists from around the world, diversity in medium and out-of-the-box thinking of contemporary art. This is not market-driven art. The collection is forward looking, inclusive and prescient of the direction of art to come in a world of technology, AI and globalism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pinault Collection — Bourse de Commerce

Minimal — 8 October 2025 – 19 January 2026

A counterweight to the spectacle of the fair, Minimal stages quietness as resistance: works by Judd, Kawara, Ryman, LeWitt, Dorthea Roclbourne, Maran Hassinger and Howardena Pindell— pieces that refuse narrative, refuse speed, refuse distraction. In a season of overstimulated publics, the exhibition proposes attention as a political ace. As with Cartier, the exhibition, which is composed largely of Pinault’s collection, is avant-garde in the number of women artists over 50 who only recently have gained the prominence and market deserved.

It is not the art that is minimal, but the argument: If democracy depends on attention, then attention must be trained — slowly, deliberately, against the market’s velocity.

 

 

The American Parallel: 2024 and the Shrinking Democratic Imagination

Across the Atlantic, the 2024 U.S. election showed what happens when democracy is treated as spectacle instead of structure. Legal systems bent, norms disappeared, fiction and fantasy replaced facts, and institutions once thought stable became stage sets for power.

Since Trump’s Executive Orders, multiple American museums were attacked — not with fire, but with funding withdrawals, board interventions, legislative threats, and demands for “neutrality” that were anything but neutral. The cancellation of several Smithsonian exhibitions and the performance by ISP are only a few examples.

Paris is not the escape from this condition. It is its reflection.

The Politics of Attendance

To attend an exhibition now is not a cultural act alone. It is a civic one. Showing up to the museum, the fair, the talk, the archive is a declaration that public space still matters, that meaning is not fully privatized, that art still functions as more than asset class or décor.

Absence, too, is political and institutions feel it.

In a world where attention is monetized, the decision to give it freely is a form of rebellion.

Conclusion — The Lawyer-Observer Writes from Paris

If critique is the labor of attention, hope is its companion. Not naïve hope, but procedural hope. Thekind that knows democracy is not guaranteed, that the law is not self-enforcing, that culture is not automatically public, but must be defended every season, every exhibition, every time we choose to look rather than scroll past.

Paris does not offer answers, only rehearsals.

It teaches us that art is not evidence, but inquiry. That museums are not mausoleums, but arguments. That fairs are not just markets, but weather reports for the emotional economy of a civilization under stress. That architecture remembers what politics forgets. That the work of seeing is still a public duty. That the poetry, meditation and imagination of artists like Coco Fusco, Jen de  Nike, Stepfani Jemison can take us to another exterior level where alternative universes created by different facts transform at a level where the universe begins to acknowledge the oneness of all living beings and that we are all part of a giant ecosystem of life in the universe.

And so, the phrase returns, not as nostalgia but as instruction:

A movable feast.

Not a celebration, but a practice.
Not a refuge, but a rehearsal.
Not an escape from history, but a way of looking at it without surrender.

Art is the highest form of hope.
— Gerhard Richter, Documenta 7 in Kassel, 1982.