Serge Bard at the Kitchen is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik
In 1968, filmmaker Serge Bard gave the art world a high-contrast buzz.
(Courtesy The Kitchen)
Groovy, baby. This is a frame from a high-contrast film called “Fun and Games for Everyone,” shot by Serge Bard in Paris in 1968 and showing the opening of the first exhibition of the French avant-gardist Olivier Mosset. (Click here to watch a clip, complete with fuzz-guitar soundtrack.) Mosset’s got an installation of new conceptual paintings on view now at the The Kitchen in New York, and it includes a back room with Bard’s vintage film. Despite the changes that were supposed to have been ushered in by mai ‘68, Mosset’s opening feels like art-world business as usual. Except that the energy of that scene in 1968 seems to totally eclipse what’s up today: It could be that the vigor in the art world and the vigor in the streets were just subsets of a larger will for change that we’ve lost.
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