Word: caf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What do artists want? To live and work cheaply in a free-and-easy atmosphere. At the dawn of the 20th century Paris was the place for them. It was fun: it had cabarets, cafés, dance halls, bars, brothels, an underground railway, even neon lights. The artists gathered in steep and semi-rural Montmartre and later in Montparnasse, St. Germain des Près and the Latin Quarter. Groups of friends evolved into artistic movements, each with an "-ism" of its own. Even World War I couldn't cramp the city's style. "Paris, Capital of the Arts...
...that learner artists were set to copy. They broke apart these simple solids to construct ambiguous images that appear to emerge from the canvas or flatten out like a collapsing card-house. Their rather dry theories were gleefully hijacked by others and transformed into still lives, portraits, street and café scenes. Cubist angles form the background to Russian Marc Chagall's Paris through the Window of 1913 and even become a pair of frilly panties in Italian Gino Severini's Dancer...
...Palais de Tokyo building into an exact replica of a derelict warehouse - spending $3.3 million of French taxpayers' money in the process. Exposed electrical cabling runs along the ceiling's chipped I beams. The plaster walls of the main exhibition space are randomly gashed and pockmarked. The café's price list is scrawled onto sheets of brown paper and stuck to untreated concrete pillars with gaffer tape. Using public money and private contributions from sponsors like Pioneer and Bloomberg, Bourriaud and Sans recreated the atmosphere of a seedy Berlin squat in the heart of Paris' opulent 16th arrondissement...
...good. The Great Before, goes the myth, was a time of peace, plenty and triviality, when we coasted in blissful self-absorption, drunk on day trading, egged on by a selfish, amoral popular culture. The period has become as instantly stereotyped as the '60s: just replace acid with half-caf lattes, Charles Manson with Gary Condit, and Woodstock with Survivor. It's a response that is both self-loathing (smacking of the Falwellian idea that we somehow brought disaster on our frivolous selves) and comforting (if so much was taken from us, shouldn't we get a sense of moral...
...Rainbow Caf: Good, all-natural American food. You do the seating, the ordering and the clearing. $9-$12. M-Th 11am-8pm; F-Sat 11am-9pm; Sun 11am-7pm. 1022 Chapel St, Downstairs...