Salons

Description

From 1759 to 1781, Diderot, the philosopher and man of letters, played the role of art critic by hosting nine Salons for a literary review. The aim was to offer subscribers who were not in Paris a literary equivalent of the works they would not be able to see: even today, readers can enjoy these texts without having the paintings or sculptures before their eyes.

Diderot's Salon is not just art criticism: it contains dialogues, musings, theories and philosophy. It oscillates between novel and essay, between story and criticism. It is not a question of establishing a conceptual aesthetic, but of exploring the space of a question: each Salon is an opportunity for a new essay of reflection, where the duty of philosophical abstraction never neglects the abundance of reality. Perhaps Diderot does not know how to explain an art that is totally foreign to any narrative. It does not matter: he knows how to talk about it like no other.