Fries with your Fragonard? McDonald’s set to open in the Louvre
November 7, 2009
US fast food giant McDonald’s plans to set up shop in the world’s most famous museum by end of 2009
France symbolizes many things in the world, most of all its elegant cuisine and its fine art. So it’s no wonder that more than a few Parisians are fed up about plans to open a McDonald’s restaurant and McCafé in the Louvre museum in November.
The world’s most-visited museum will soon see France’s 1,142nd McDonald’s restaurant sharing real estate with the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo. The fast food chain, considered by many in France as a symbol of both American culinary crassness and cultural imperialism, is celebrating its 30th anniversary in France this year.
To make matters even worse for lovers of French food and long lunches, traditional brasseries and bistros are in freefall from lack of business, while fast food giant McDonald’s opened 30 new stores last year in France and fed 450 million customers – an 11 percent rise from the previous year.
Museum staff, many already miffed about the Louvre’s plans to lend its name and artwork to a multi-million dollar museum project in Abu Dhabi, are reported to be experiencing indigestion already from the prospect of the golden arches in France’s temple of fine art. Some have been quoted, anonymously, in the press complaining bitterly about the commercialism — and the smells — that the new “McDo” will bring to one of the world’s greatest art meccas.
To be fair, the McDonald’s will not be in the museum itself, but positioned in the underground approach to the Louvre, known as the Carrousel du Louvre. This area is already lined with shops and eateries, though most are admittedly more upscale than McDonald’s. The stone-lined gallery, which is owned and operated separately from the museum, opened in 1993, five years after the famous Louvre pyramid, which also caused a great deal of controversy at first. The Carrousel’s contract with the Louvre Museum states that “commercial activities will be regulated and restricted to cultural or tourist activities”. The Louvre has the right to protest against commercial establishements that it thinks fall short of this standard. However, the museum has agreed to a “quality” McDonald’s that will open by the end of the year, with a look that will be “in line with the museum’s image”. The Louvre envisions the McDonald’s as part of the American section of a new food court in the Carrousel that would feature foods from countries around the world, to be welcoming to visitors of all nationalities. Museum spokespeople also insist that the franchise owner has pledged to make this particular McDonald’s a work of art, with decor and atmosphere worthy of its elegant new home.
Louvre Pour Tous, (Louvre for All) a website whose mission is to “inform and defend” visitors to the Louvre, complained: “Henri Loyrette, president of the Louvre museum, had only to say one word to stop the aroma of French fries from wafting past the Mona Lisa’s nose. He chose otherwise.” The McDonald’s brouhaha follows a similar outcry last year when Starbucks opened a location near the museum’s entrance. At the time, Louvre employees and art lovers sent museum management a petition to try to stop Starbucks from opening there. It opened anyway; in an act of conciliation, Starbucks agreed to provide a cultural corner in the store of brochures and art catalogues as an acknowledgment of its lofty surroundings. But for many, this was not enough to offset the insult of supersized coffee in cardboard cups in close proximity with the gods of fine art.
And now, the ultimate symbol of American dominance and culinary heresy has dealt the French culture police an even crueler blow. “Starbucks was bad enough but McDonald’s is worse,” said an unnamed Louvre art historian. Ten years ago, French hatred of McDonald’s and all it represents made a hero of José Bové, who bulldozed a McDonald’s in 1999 in protest against US imperialism and bad food.
But it seems he bulldozed in vain. Even a last-minute reprieve at the Louvre would not turn the tide in the battle of Le Big Mac. According to the fast-food chain, France has become McDonald’s biggest market in the world outside of the US, and it’s not going anywhere…except to the world’s most famous museum of art.
France wants to create competition for Amazon, Google
November 6, 2009
French publishers and media continue the fight against U.S. cultural onslaught
First the enemy was Hollywood, with the French decrying the “Disneyfication” of Europe and the world (not that this prevented them from opening Euro Disney anyway). Then it was radio and TV stations in France, which were forced to provide a proportional amount of home-grown programming to outweigh the popoular US imports, whether French viewers and listeners wanted it or not. Even advertisers in France were — and are — forced to put French subtitles and translations on commericals and prints ads that use even one English-language word, despite the growing globalization of media and the ubiquity of English as the de facto international language. Some feel the resistance is necessary to preserve French langague and culture from assimilation, while others see it as a futile attempt to deny the inevitability of change, and more evidence of French resentment of the US in general. Even those who agree with the principle of these attempts are dubious about their success.
But now the French are looking to take on the giants of the internet world. At the Frankfurt Book Fair in mid-October, French publisher Editis announced the development of a digital book distribution system, aimed at selling e-books and other digital information products. And France Télécom said it was introducing Web news site that it had been testing for several months with French broadcasters, newspapers and other partners.
The timing was no accident. Google has recently detailed plans for its own online bookstore, scheduled to open next year, and Amazon recently announced it would start selling its Kindle e-book reader outside the US. But French bibliophiles who want to read French language books on the popular electronic device are still out of luck; Kindle readers sold outside the United States will offer only English-language books. That’s because French and other European publishers have so far turned a steadfast cold shoulder to any digital book deals with Amazon.
In the meantime, Google is negotiating in the US with publishers and authors for the right to sell millions of digital books. True to form, publishers in France are crying foul, saying their copyrights and culture are again at risk. By creating their own digital bookstore, French publishers are hoping to fend off the juggernauts of Google and Amazon. But as usual, the French have an enemy in this process: themselves.
The Editis project is at least the third such platform under development in France. Hachette, the biggest French publisher, has already created a separate digital book distribution system; Gallimard, Flammarion and La Martinière are working on their own initiative. Unable to resist competing among themselves, French publishers are scattering the force they would need to combat the marketing muscle and internet reach of the two titans of the online content world.
While French print publishers battle amonst themselves for their slice of the digital gateau, France Télécom’s Orange division has made more progress with its new news aggregator website, called 24/24 Actu — the French nickname for “actualités,” or news. Most leading French newspapers and broadcasters are on board, with the television company TF1 among the only real holdouts.
France Télécom has focused on providing quality content and usability, so it may have a shot in the news competition, even though it is still dwarfed by the wildly popular Google News and Yahoo. 24/24 Actu goes a step further than Google News, gathering audio, video and text-based news reports in one place. A user who clicks on a photo from a story brings up a whole range of coverage on the topic from TV, radio and print outlets, making it a truly useful service that goes deep where Google News goes wide.
24/24 Actu has also taken the step of securing rights agreements from all its news partners, rather than displaying blurbs without copyright permission, as Google News often does. This allows the site to run full-length versions of videos and articles without the fear or infringement or the attending lawsuits, making the site a rich source of information for users. In a true reversal of the usual routine, France Télécom even plans to add English-language news to the service soon, and also hopes to expand it into Spain and the UK.
French publishers looking to compete with Google and Amazon on the book front would do well to follow France Télécom’s model and focus on creating a service valuable enough to French consumer to compete, rather than simply barring US products and services from a public that wants them. In this era of globalization, the ability to lock the gate against the “cultural invader” is diminishing, even if the the stubborn impulse to remain purely French is not.
American group helps the Louvre speak English
November 5, 2009
Tens of thousands of pieces in the Louvre collection are now researchable in English, thanks to the American Friends of the Louvre.
Not being able to read French is no longer an obstacle to poring over the entire collection of the Louvre. English-speaking visitors to Louvre.fr will now be able to do more than just check on current exhibitions. The museum has made an English-language version of its online database, cataloguing the entire collection of Louvre, available on its Web site, louvre.fr. The enormous undertaking was the passion project of the group American Friends of the Louvre, which provided a $380,000 grant for the Anglophone database. The database, called Atlas, will provide information on 22,000 works of art from the Louvre by the end of 2009, as well as high-resolution images and the locations of works and galleries within the museum. These include over 3300 paintings, 4000 Greek and Roman antiquities, 5500 works of decorative art, and much more. The collection of works on the English version representsabout 80 percent of the works available onthe French-language version of Atlas, which catalogs 26,000 of the 35,000 works on permanent display at the Louvre. New images are currently being added to the database, which is constantly updated.
American Friends of the Louvre (AFL),a non-profit, was founded in December 2002 to strengthen ties between the Louvre and its American public. Its primary goals are to support the Louvre in its efforts to improve educational tools and visiting conditions, particularly for American and other English-speaking visitors, which include the translation of labels and Atlas, the online database. AFL also promotes collaborations between the Louvre and American institutions through the development of cultural activities in the U.S., such as exhibitions, educational programs and professional and scholarly exchanges. Lastly, AFL participates in the financing of Louvre projects, such as renovations of galleries, restorations of antiquities, fellowships, and educational programs both in France and the U.S.
France and Egypt find common ground on “stolen” artifacts
November 4, 2009
Louvre to return disputed fragments from 3200-year-old tomb
After Egypt went so far as to break off ties with France in a battle over the legal ownership of Egyptian relics, the relationship was later restored after France agreed to return the pieces that have been part of the Louvre’s collection for almost 20 years. The breach was significant, as the Louvre’s refusal to return fragments of frescoes from a 3,200-year-old tomb near the ancient temple city of Luxor placed the Paris museum’s future excavations in Egypt. In addition, Christiane Ziegler, the former curator of the Louvre’s Egyptology department, was barred from giving a scheduled lecture in Egypt.she is the person who oversaw the museum’s acquisition of the fragments.
Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s vocal chief archaeologist, has been running an aggressive crusade against leading museums around the world thought to be holding contraband artifacts that are part of Egypt’s cultural and archeological heritage and rightly belong there. Thousands of antiquities were spirited out of Egypt during its colonial period and later, by archaeologists, adventurers and thieves. Hawass’ bureau posited that antiquity grave-robbers chipped the disputed fresco fragments from the walls of the tomb near the Valley of the Kings in the 1980s. Based on these assertions, the office cancelled Ms. Ziegler’s trip to Egypt and also suspended the Louvre’s excavation in the massive necropolis of Saqqara, near Cairo.
In a story worthy of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, the artifacts were allegedly stolen from Egypt, smuggled out of the country and sold to the Louvre. The French government had said the Louvre acted in good faith when it purchased the treasures from an unnamed source in 2000 and 2003. For years after Egypt cried foul, the dispute raged on, with France insisting that the relics had been legally and legitimately acquired. However, in November 2008, archaeologists rediscovered a 3,200-year-old tomb near the ancient temple city of Luxor that the relics appear to have come from. The question of whether they had been legally removed from Egypt was re-opened. After reviewing the archaeologists’ findings, an independent commission made up of specialists from France’s museum world and other experts that oversees museums in France voted unanimously to return them. Mr. Hawass is not finished with the Louvre yet. He has presented a list of other items he wants back, including the painted ceiling of the Dendera temple showing the Zodiac.
The Louvre is not the only museum that Hawass has a beef with. The Rosetta Stone, a basalt slab with an inscription that was the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, and is a worldwide symbol of the key to all language, is in the British Museum in London, and a bust of Queen Nefertiti, also in dispute, is held by a museum in Germany. Hawass’ track record is impressive; so far he has recovered 5,000 artifacts for Egypt since becoming antiquities czar in 2002, including hair stolen from the tomb of King Ramses II. He wields a powerful incentive for museums like the Louvre to come clean and return artifacts from Egypt’s past, by withholding access in the future, such as permission for digs and cultural and scholarly exchange.