PRESTIGE: PHANTASMAGORIA NOW
The exhibition Prestige: Phantasmagoria Now is an invitation to reflect on the concept of prestige and its importance for visual arts. When an artist can be seen as “prestigious”? When his or her work is displayed in venues recognized by a wide audience or when it becomes a part of an elite collection? In short, is prestige independent of personal preferences, mood, or the times? Would this make prestige only a fragile and subjective concept? At the same time an artist cannot be measured only by his or her
prestige among the contemporaries.
Why then we reflect on the concept in the visual arts context?
In visual arts prestige shows how an artist is perceived by the contemporaries, and also reveals the state of the society as a whole. Artists’ works that became prestigious reveal society’s expectations, phobias, prohibitions, fears, which are thus discovered, sublimated or removed.
The exhibition organized by the Klaipeda Culture Communication Centre presents a comparative study of our two societies – the French and the Lithuanian. It invites us to take a closer look at each other from a new perspective, get to know the other better, and have a more subtle understanding of each other. For this purpose this catalogue will be quite useful – it includes two different interpretations of prestige: one by the Lithuanian Minister of Culture Arūnas Gelūnas, the other by Nicolas Bourriaud, Paris Higher National School of Fine Arts director. Two… prestigious names!
Maryse BERNIAU
French Ambassador to Lithuania