The Thinker | Bernard-Henri Lévy on Art and Philosophy

Bernard-Henri Lévy with ‘‘L’Intouchable,’’ 2007, by Gloria Friedmann, at the Fondation Maeght in St.- Paul-de-Vence, France, where his show on the relationship between art and philosophy opens this month. (Robi Rodriguez)

By KATIE ROIPHE
May 31, 2013, 5:30 pm

It is very likely that if you sit with Bernard-Henri Lévy over green tea in the lobby of the Carlyle hotel and he explains his wildly ambitious new exhibition at the Fondation Maeght in the South of France, you will not entirely understand the concept. You will worry that you are being airheaded for not following all the Kant and Goethe thrown around, but you will nonetheless be entirely persuaded that the exhibit is fascinating and important, because Lévy is nothing if not a truly great talker, a creator of excitement, a seducer of more cautious or less resourceful minds, even in his English, or maybe especially in his English, which he apologizes for with panache.

The exhibit, “Les Aventures de la Vérité,” which will open on June 29, is so grand and sweeping and baroquely complex in its ambitions that it would take an extremely long book to explain what it is trying to do, and in fact the French polemicist has written a 400-page tome, which is actually the catalog.

The show emerges from the fraught, fruitful relationship between art and philosophy; it is a history of ideas, with 170 or so artworks grouped into seven “stations,” with names like “The Fatality of Shadows” and “Philosophy’s Tomb,” which will be accompanied by texts explaining the complex ideas at play. There will also be black-and-white films of artists like Kehinde Wiley, Jeff Koons, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Matthew Day Jackson reading excerpts from works of philosophy, which are, in Lévy’s words, “the beating heart of the exhibit.”

Lévy is trying to document a lively struggle between art and philosophy to illuminate human experience, in which the two are sometimes rivals and sometimes allies. He says, “The exhibit will tell the story of how the idea of truth takes shape, disappears and reappears through the two mediums of art and philosophy, and how the two struggle for control of what truth is.”

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/the-thinker-bernard-henri-lvy-on-art-and-philosophy/