Caring for our Brains
Conversation with Professor Lionel Naccache (part one)
What is the brain, if not an exceptional organ, a machine of fascinating performance, I asked Professor Lionel Naccache of Paris Brain Institute?
“What is the brain in 2024?” as Naccache rephrased my question.
Last March 5th, Naccache, a neurologist/neuroscientist/thinker/author, was the guest of a fundraising, intimate dinner hosted by Le Bilboquet Palm Beach and Paris Brain Institute America, the philanthropic arm of Paris Brain Institute in the United States, which Martine Assouline—of the eponymous publishing house—chairs.
So, based on what we know, what is the brain today?
Category: Fire Chat With
Make Art, not War
Make Art, Not War
A conversation with New York artist Dove Bradshaw
Exhibition at ARTe VallARTa Museo, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico | Zero Time, Zero Space, Infinite Heat
February 2nd – May 5th, 2024
Meet with Dove Bradshaw at ARTe VallARTa Museo on February 3rd, 2024
The first time I visited the apartment of conceptual and minimalist artist Dove Bradshaw, I barely let my eyes wander around the living room, busy with paintings and books everywhere, a piano in a corner, and an old chess table. Two friends had asked me to join them for an intimate dinner at Dove and her husband’s, artist William Anastasi (also known as Bill), Upper West Side home, blocks away from Morningside Heights and the Hudson River. I vividly recalled this evening when, years after, Dove invited me back, this time to show a few people some of the artwork soon to be exhibited in Puerto Vallarta at ARTe VallARTa Museo. “A first for this museum, which had presented only Mexican artists before,” and a premiere in Mexico for this artist, whose work is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum and MoMA in New York.
As I was riding the Broadway-Seventh Avenue 1 train to 103rd Street, I remembered how her husband—who passed away just a few weeks ago—had described his famous Subway Drawings. Every time Bill Anastasi would sit in a subway, he would balance a piece of paper on a board on his knees, close his eyes, and let a pencil or felt-tip pens draw lines as the train would vibrate, and lurch when it stopped at a station, and depart again until he reached his chosen destination. During my only dinner with him, his wife, and our shared friends, Bill told endless stories of his daily chess games with composer John Cage. Dove Bradshaw, Anastasi, Cage, and his companion, choreographer Merce Cunningham, formed a band of artistry and friendship for years, all dedicated to conceptual art, along with Carl André, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Ryman.
WAR AND PEACE, WHAT CAN WE DO? Conversation with Bernard-Henri Lévy
WAR AND PEACE, WHAT CAN WE DO?
Questions to Bernard-Henri Lévy, director of the film Glory to The Heroes
During the summer of 2023, Bernard-Henri Lévy co-directed a new documentary film, Glory to The Heroes, with Marc Roussel in Ukraine. Lévy and Roussel spent weeks on the frontline to “capture the horrors of war, the hopefulness of the Ukrainian citizens and their optimism in the face of senseless destruction,” wrote the film’s producer, Emily Hamilton.
Click here or See below link for all screenings and tickets in the United States
Biased? Certainly. But Working on It
Biased? Certainly. But I’m Working on It
A conversation with Dr. Violetta Zujovic, Neuroscientist at the Paris Brain Institute
Talk at FIAF and meeting with Violetta Zujovic and Alyse Nelson
New York | March 15th | Decoding Gender Bias | Register Here
Everything that follows in this post is biased.
I would like to write you the opposite, to reassure you, even to convince you of the authenticity of my words. But in the interests of sincerest dishonesty, and according to Violetta Zujovic, a doctor in neuroscience and team leader at the Paris Brain Institute, I am biased.
I might as well accept it. Besides, I am not the only one. “We all are,” Violetta explains.
“Everything around us is a reproduction that our brain creates to simplify our lives,” Violetta tells me. “Our brain spends its time storing information and sometimes reconstructing a reality that is sometimes an illusion.”
By simplifying, taking shortcuts, analyzing, and judging the other as quickly as possible, our conclusions are not based on the reality of a person or a situation. Instead they are the result of a narrowed perception influenced by our experiences, our culture, and our education.
I believe that I should also share here the motivation and context of this paper.
REVELATIONS
Revelations (in French: here)
New York Exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Jean-Pierre Formica
The face’s wrinkles of painter and sculptor Jean-Pierre Formica, his eyes too, the iconic choice of words and his unexpected way of linking them together let a colorful and poetic universe surface. A desire to make the invisible visible. If his artworks were argentic photographs, Jean-Pierre Formica would be the developer, the essential chemical agent that converts the latent image into one that the eye can see.
Also inscribed on Formica’s face is the force of Camargue’s salty sun, the insatiable curiosity of a man driven by uncertainty, an almost detached look, perhaps surprised by the interest his work arouses, and a polite recognition.
A selection of Jean-Pierre Formica’s artworks will, at last, be on view in New York from September 6 to 30, 2022. Titled ‘Revelations,’ this exhibition juxtaposes recent paintings and sculptures whose teared papers for the former and accumulations for the latter give “form to the formless.”
They “reveal” to paraphrase the artist.