Reflections on Art and Culture: From Diderot’s Salons to Panodyssey and Art Explora offers a series of art reviews of some of the most exciting and artistically diverse trends in contemporary painting, sculpture and photography, presented in light of art history, aesthetics and intellectual history. It also introduces two of the most promising cultural ventures that build upon the Enlightenment tradition of the salons: Panodyssey (founded by French entrepreneur and music executive Alexandre Leforestier) and Art Explora (founded by two of the leaders of Paris’s top museums, Frédéric Jousset and Bruno Julliard). In emphasizing a wide range of styles of art, this book also covers a critical blind spot, by including contemporary artists influenced by Realism and Romanticism, who are extremely popular with galleries, buyers and the general public but tend not to get the attention they deserve from art critics and museums of contemporary art. At the same time, in the spirit of promoting artistic pluralism, Reflections on Art and Culture also presents much-discussed trends, such as Damien Hirst’s neoconceptual art, as well as some of the most popular artistic photographers in the world, who successfully straddle the domains of marketing and art.
