Paris and Province: Can France Decentralise Its Museums? (Letter from Paris‪)‬

It takes 20 minutes on the metro to get from the heart of Paris to the southern suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine. Add ten minutes on a public bus and the trip to MAC/VAL (Contemporary Art Museum of Val-de-Marne) is the same length as many Parisians' daily commute. The speed at which one is transported from the Latin Quarter, home to the Sorbonne and the Pantheon's imposing facades, to a boxy cityscape of uniform business blocks and cement apartment towers can be jarring. I mentioned this startling transition to a French friend. 'Oh, yes,' she said. 'Somewhere between those last two metro stops you crossed the peripherique.' The peripherique, an eight-lane ring road surrounding the capital, is the physical marker of the divide between Paris and province--'the rest of France'. Deeply ingrained in the French national consciousness, this centre/periphery divide manifests itself in multiple spheres. But nowhere is the phenomenon of 'Paris and the rest' so tangible to the foreign visitor as in the rhetoric and practices of the country's art institutions. According to the local administration, Paris plays host to an impressive number of over 130 museums. But it is not so much the quantity of institutions which divides Paris from province. It is more an issue of geographical distribution--of the country's high-profile art museums in particular. Cultural institutions increase exponentially in urban centres, and capital cities especially. Still, it is rare to be able to say, as we can of France, that all of a country's major art museums are concentrated in one place. Since the 70s a string of museums, anchored by the venerable Louvre, have been added to the relatively small geographic area which is central Paris. They include the Centre Pompidou, the Musee d'Orsay and the Palais de Tokyo, whose significant collections are matched by their architectural grandeur.