Wider, higher, heavier: A taste for oversized art is spreading around the world, among artists, collectors and the public (at large).
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Is Bigger Beautiful? The Rise Of XXL Art
Tag: france
PARIS — With all due respect to the Cassandras of national decline and lovers of French bashing — the cherished pastime of denigrating all things French at every turn — Patrick Modiano’s Nobel Prize for Literature win is excellent news. Lovers of French literature will be the first to rejoice, but the prize is also […]
Claire, who raised her daughter near Paris as an atheist, has seen the teen fall in love with a deeply conservative young man from Egypt. The dream is to escape to live under Sharia law.
Follow the money, which travels beyond borders more than ever before. But a new paradigm should be about more than just cracking down on evaders.
The sense of unraveling across the globe is the result of a power vacuum. After the post-Cold War end of U.S. hegemony, no one is ready to impose order. And, no, economics can’t fix it.
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My Grandson’s Honeymoon
This is just a brief note to say that our journey is taking a momentary hiatus, but for a very good reason: My collaborator in this project, le petit-fils (the grandson), Bertrand, and his beautiful new bride Amandine have set off on their honeymoon — in Brazil! Wishing them much happiness together, and of course, […]
PARIS — After changing the way we listen to music with the iPod and kickstarting the smartphone era with the iPhone, is Apple Pay going to revolutionize how we pay? The least we can say is that the Cupertino giant has done everything to maximize its chances of succeeding in its objective: to relegate wallets […]
What do a Pretty Woman, Charlie’s Angel And Smurfette have in common? They all have the voice of actress Celine Monsarrat, who finally drops the mask on a 30-year career of finding the perfect pitch for incarnating other people’s roles. PARIS — I started in this field a bit by accident thanks to an aunt […]
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Budding Traveler
This is probably one of the oldest pictures you will see here. I was 5 when we drove to Villersexel in eastern France, in my dad’s brand new Peugeot 201. We visited the city’s famous château, which you can see in the background and which is said to have been partly built by both Charles […]
-OpEd- PARIS — We French love our rentrée littéraire. But with the launch of this year’s new literary season, dedicated in part to the memory of our American World War II allies, a new war is erupting. And the alliances seem to be changing. U.S.-based Trojan horse Amazon started the fight by targeting major French […]
A German series imagines the unlikely passion between the heads of state of Europe’s two continental powers. No, no: That’s not Merkel or Hollande … and certainly not Sarkozy.
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Apollo On Fire
Who’s this good-looking fellow dressed as Apollo and followed by his court of Muses, you ask? I told you before I used to take Carnival costumes pretty seriously.
Defying U.S. and NATO pressure to cancel its $1.6 billion sale of two Mistral warships to Russia, French President François Hollande has said that the first will be delivered in October, while the delivery of the second would “depend on Russia’s attitude.” -OpEd- PARIS — France simply cannot deliver two Mistral warships to Russia. Doing […]
PARIS — The figures are dizzying. According to the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, 1.3 billion tons of food — one-third of the world’s total food products — are thrown away or wasted each year. Among the food we needlessly toss are yogurt pots that have passed their “best before” date and potatoes that aren’t […]
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C’est Ca La France!
Can you spot the Citroën deux chevaux parked next to that boat in the port of la Rochelle? Built from 1948 to 1990, the iconic “deuche,” as it is known here, leaves no room for doubt: It really is “la France.”
-OpEd- PARIS — Here we are amid a global rise in military conflicts and political tensions — wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, the exclusion of Russia from the G8, conflicts in the South China Sea, Argentina’s debt default, among others. A century after the start of World War I, the planet seems to have […]
The less-than-helpful attitude of post office clerks in France (and elsewhere) has been known to get a rise out of customers. Well this French woman takes it to a whole other level. Her rage toward the ever so blasé postal staff appeared to start after she was denied a transaction because she’d arrived too late […]
In a gloomy new book, two French economists argue that the current state of global finance make conditions ripe not just for regional conflicts, but for a new world war.
Blaming French Jews for Israel’s actions in Gaza is just the latest vile expression of a rising wave of anti-Semitism that has resurfaced in the heart of Europe.
Photo: Mathi et Mathi. No one quite masters the art of whining and complaining like the French, which means the world’s ultimate râleurs and blasés find the deepest kind of pleasure in cursing. Some French musicians have now taken it to the next level, singing songs essentially based around the use of the word “merde”, […]
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Proud Brittany Beats With Ethiopian Flavor
Photo: Brethoniques France’s annual Vieilles Charrues festival is on in the northwestern region of Brittany. The country’s largest music festival, which ends Sunday and is set to host around 200,000, will feature top international headliners such as the Arctic Monkeys and the Black Keys. But the Bretons are famously proud of their region (even sometimes […]
The beverage company’s Christmas 2012 advertisement features a gigantic Santa Claus that was inspired by famous French giant characters. The theater company says it’s fighting for its soul.
After students were hospitalized in the Bordeaux winegrowing region, pesticides were blamed. Parents calling for new rules near schools face a “code of silence” protecting the wine sector.
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Hearts Of Snow
I used to be a philosophy teacher, with a penchant for Spinoza — meaning my mind tends to be of the logical and down-to-earth kind. But sometimes you’ve just got to wonder: Last year, looking out the window of my living-room, I saw these tire tracks left after a light snowfall. I grabbed my camera […]
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Welcome To Hit It!
“Hit It!” is Worldcrunch’s music blog, your global source of anything music-related: news and novelties, albums and songs, videos, charts, events, you name it. While we’ll leave most of the mainstream London and L.A.-generated news to the various Rolling Stones and NMEs, our focus will be what’s happening everywhere else. The name of this blog […]
It may be billions and billions of years away, but right now the annihilation of the Universe is a foregone conclusion. Should scientists try to do something to change that?
Cyberpirates engage in extortion on individuals as well as companies, through data kidnapping and threats to reveal sensitive information. Red Alert for the accounting department.
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Le Grand Charles
In 1950, Charles de Gaulle, head of the Free French Forces during World War II and for a brief period provisional president of France, was still trying to figure out how to transform himself from military leader to peacetime politician. He made this speech in Sochaux near my hometown. And though “le Grand Charles,” by […]
Compared to ancient times, the world is a relatively peaceful place right now. Strangely, this has begun to push economists to study the historical costs and returns of war.
PARIS — To the chagrin of many a Parisian poet, more and more English words are making it into the French language. The latest to get official entry into the Petit Robert dictionary include a batch straight from Silicon Valley: selfie, MOOC, hashtag, and the continued trend of the internationalization of the digital world — […]
France and the entire European continent, but also the U.S. and Russia, all look very different than they did at the last commemoration 10 years ago. Ghosts of the past indeed.
AUNAY-SUR-ODON — Will there ever be a place for the civilian victims in the commemoration of French liberation and of the air raids that helped hasten the end of Nazi occupation? On June 6, France, along with other European and North American countries, will celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings, and will rightly […]
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They Name Horses, Don’t They?
Let me introduce Bébert, my uncle and godfather, back from plowing his field in my ancestors’ village of Chaignay — just north of Dijon in eastern France. Let me also introduce Bayard and Marceau, the two draft horses. Back then, it was customary to name horses after legendary figures such as Napoleonic commanders Kléber or […]
A reported multi-billion-dollar U.S. fine against BNP Paribas, the eurozone’s biggest bank, puts the very heart of transatlantic relations at risk, writes France’s leading business daily.
Like the Toulouse shootings two years ago, the cold-blooded killings at Brussels’ Jewish Museum show radical Islam mixing with anti-Semitism to target Jews 70 years after the Nazis’ demise.
Tan Dinh is the oldest Vietnamese restaurant in the French capital, and may still be the best. Lately, the focus is on matching the perfect bottle of Burgundy with a spring roll or bowl of pho.
PARIS — Bad news for the tobacco industry and smokers in France. Health Minister Marisol Touraine will announce strict new tobacco control measure next month that are expected to ban any branding on cigarette packs. The French daily Le Figaro reports that the overall effect of the new measures will be as radical as the […]
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Something Is Rotten In Europe
The European establishment has a decade-long listening problem, and it won’t be solved by shaming the anti-EU populist parties that scored big in this week’s election.
PARIS — France, the sick man of Europe… Until now, we have been using this old phrase as a provocative way to characterize this country’s current economic situation. But after the results of Sunday’s European elections, this phrase now can be used to refer to something broken in French politics. With the victory of the […]