A slow dance

Of the four exhibitions that I randomly chose for myself in Paris, three were strung on an erotic theme — like the sky of Paris itself on the Eiffel Tower. The first exhibition * struck me both in scope (it occupied more than ten halls) and in theme — it seemed to illustrate the works of the Marquis de Sade, that is, it was entirely devoted to passion in its most extreme forms. The exposition was staged intricately and exquisitely and offered the viewer to associate the fatal phenomena of nature with a certain shift in human consciousness. Solar eclipse — and you can no longer control yourself. So to speak, the natural provocation of the base in man. Low and beautiful. Perversions and chaste nudes by different masters merged in an unexpected neighborhood into a powerful hymn to ecstasy. A large audience flowed from one cramped hall to another, just as cramped and half-dark. The meeting with the beautiful began, to put it mildly, to excite.

* SADE exhibition subtitled «Sunstroke» at the Musée d’Orsay.

The collection of Paul Durand-Ruel, an outstanding art dealer and collector of the Impressionists, in the Orangery of the Luxembourg Gardens did not portend anything of the kind — but here, too, a whole corner was set aside for courtly fleur at the turn of the century — from the refined eroticism of Beardsley’s graphics to pornographic stereo pairs.

• When desire disappears

Finally, the Georges Pompidou Center lured me in with a massive retrospective of Jeff Koons, one of the fathers of American neo-pop art. His amusing objects, with their bulges and sizes, parody sensuality, inflating it to sentimental kitsch. So, here everything was quite innocent, while Koons peacefully lowered the consumer society, exaggerating its fetishes. But behind a separate partition, the careless viewer was waiting for close-ups of the author’s intercourse with his ex-wife, porn star Cicciolina, and the employee warned visitors with children about this.

At the end of this marvelous week, my husband and I dined in the company of our young translator Natasha. Natasha has been living in Paris for a long time. It was about the durability of musical hits. Someone remembered what kind of music the slow dancers danced to at school discos. And suddenly Natasha says — do you know that now there are no slow dances at all? At parties and discos, no one dances slow dances. At least here in France.

So how? We did not suspect such a mutation of discos and parties in the land of love and winemaking. And at the same time, they could not imagine a disco without this “where the maple rustles over the river wave”. Yes, Natasha felt sad, now everyone is shaking to techno — and it’s generally not clear how to get to know each other. Then I closed my eyes and saw a girl standing by the wall of the gym (in our school, the gym was the most suitable place for discos). The girl has carefully painted eyelashes and a poorly concealed stupor. Now the electric string will be engaged — and it will be invited to trample along under a piercing third. Or they won’t. Invited! From modest touches shaking at night. We all learned these conventional signs of fate, we had options for their clues and plans B in case of failure. “Where the maple makes noise-and-and-and-t over the river wave-oh-oh-oh-th” … A slow dance decided everything. To live or not to live, literally! And now it’s been cancelled.

• Find yourself in the dance

And suddenly it somehow became clear where this erotic baduzan in Parisian galleries came from — yes, the gene pool is in danger! No one is already turned on by fallen leaves, a thrown back strand, the gentle glow of the Seine. The electrodes disappeared from the air, its conductivity tends to zero. I would suggest that Koons make such a ten-meter sculpture — as he knows how — «Slow Dance». And connect it to electricity, to a turbine, to an internal combustion engine, to transport it around Europe on wheels, and then to give it to Russia, the Tretyakov Gallery, maybe, as an eternal memory.