Paris Calling

Koxie

Wow. This is the number one song in France this week, but it could leave cultural theorists busy for decades.

Michel Polnareff

Charles Bremner is so right.

The Michel Polnareff comeback here is totally huge. Mythic, and yet another example of how the babyboomers (and their nostalgia in this case) still run the show.

France/Italy: Pinault's death in Venice?

In May 2005, French businessman (and best friend of Chirac), Francois Pinault, aborted a long gestating plan to house his contemporary art collection in a new museum in Boulogne Billancourt, on the former site of the Renault factories.

Scolding bureaucrats for drowning his ambition in red tape (a local politician blogged about it here back then), Pinault moved his project to Venice, with a section to be housed in the Custom's Point, pictured right (from Le Monde).

Today, the Venetian version looks like it might be sinking in red tape, too, or at least a bureaucrat's battle for the right to the Customs's Point. Le Monde interviews Italian banker Alberto Rigotti whose has planned a Venice collaboration with the Guggenheim to be housed in the same location.

Rigotti describes Pinault's project as the meddling of a simple private collector, "like there are thousands in the world".

Rigotti, on the other hand, is a world player who, he claims, will make Venice "a real cultural destination".

Ouch.