For the debut show at the Palais de Tokyo and the premiere of SUPER(M)ART, Old Navin, a poor retired artist has travelled to Paris in 2052 after winning the lottery, where he plans to visit the famous art establishments only to find them all closed down. Instead he meets Curatorman, a slick and youthful entrepreneur dedicated to the commercialisation of art, and an angry debate over art ensues. At the exhibition site, the installation included a life-size figure of poor Old Navin and Curatorman carrying a briefcase and mobile phone. Behind the Perspex figures is a huge remodelled painting of Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana (1563), with the original wedding guests supplanted by more than 150 influential figures from the modern art world’s cognoscenti, from Van Gogh and Pollock to Duchamp, Koons, and beyond. To the side of the installation was a notice board for ‘idea-donations’, a forum for visitors to contribute their notions on art’s present and future, and a large wall with a comic mural at the entrance. A table mirroring that in the centre of the Veronese classic was placed in front of the painting, around which discussions and lecture series on related topics took place with academics and curators. A Curatorman’s campaign tent was also erected on one side, in which a Japanese scholar Sen Uesaki played the role of Curatorman inviting people to discuss ideas on the future of art. Fifty thousand copies of a free tabloid paper the Point d’ Ironie was published for the event, which included a Navin Production comic and a blank tear-off page requesting the donation of ideas upon the future of art by posing the open-ended question art or (m)art?

Gallery

Art or (M)art?