Lecture by Ondine Bréaud-Holland

Lecture in French

What happens when we cross the threshold of a museum or gallery? What is the first thing we notice? There's no reason why it shouldn't be the atmosphere, before anything else. And what happens when the exhibition, where we have gone in the first place to appreciate the works of art, is set up and ‘atmospherised’ to such an extent that it ends up looking like a luxury boutique or a beauty salon?

Unlike some of today's thinkers, I'm going to take a stand in favour of atmospheres and their creation. On the one hand, because they testify to a revival of phenomenology, as a branch of aesthetic philosophy, with the introduction of new concepts and old questions about our presence in the world; on the other hand, because, behind this frantic need to fabricate particular affective tones, synesthesias and ecstasies (as Gernot Böhme puts it), lies perhaps an unsuspected force of resistance against what tends to dumb us down, to control our emotions. Finally, because I don't believe that artistic production is threatened by the slightest atmosphere, the making of which requires, if we are to forget it, unheard-of skills and genuine know-how.  
 

Ondine Bréaud-Holland holds a doctorate in art and art sciences and teaches aesthetic philosophy and art theory at the École supérieure d'Arts plastiques in Monaco. She has been in charge of the scientific coordination of several conferences on art and scenography (Pavillon magazine) and has edited an issue of the new Revue d'Esthétique (n° 20, PUF, 2017) devoted entirely to this subject. Interested in the relationship between art and life, she has published in Figures de l'art, Noesis and other research media.
She is also a full member of the Centre de Recherches en Histoire des Idées (CRHI) at the Université Côte d'Azur, where she has organised a conference on Clément Rosset (2019). Finally, as a close friend of contemporary artists (Frédérique Nalbandian, Daphné Corregan, Amandine Maillot, etc.), she regularly produces critical texts on their work.  
 

This programme of lectures is a co-production of UCArts - Direction de la Culture d'Université Côte d'Azur and the National Museums of the 20th Century in the Alpes-Maritimes. The six conferences are organised in partnership with the Association of the Friends of the Marc Chagall national Museum.  

To find out more about our conferences programme for the 2024-25 season
 

Ondine Bréaud-Holland. Photo : © DR, 2024