January 2009

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Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, along with eight other of his manuscripts sold for €3.2m at Sotheby’s in Paris last night. Commentators have turned decidedly lyrical describing the ghost of Breton floating around the auction room and having the last laugh at the huge sum that his anti-bourgeois text fetched. Also noted was the relief that will be felt by critics of the sale who were concerned that the documents would be split up and headed out of France – in fact they have been acquired by Gérard Lhéritier, founder of the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, a private institution in Paris.

Along with the Futurist, Vorticist and Dada Manifestos, Breton and the Surrealists are the most well-known of art movements that produced these artist statements and artists’ manifestos ever since have, if not explicitly, acknowledged their cultural debt to them if only by the very fact that they are manifestos. In 2006, Lee Scrivner wrote ‘How to write an Avant-Garde Manifesto (A Manifesto)’. At a cursory glance it looks like a critique of artists’ radical pamphlets of the 20th century. Closer inspection reveals ‘Rule One: Do drink coffee’ and a photograph of Futurist founder Filippo Marinetti with his hand on his hip with a slight reworking of children’s rhyme ‘I’m a little teapot’ written over it in bright blue text. In other words, he’s having a laugh. Then again, wouldn’t that mean he was embodying the very anti-art, anti-establishment values espoused in the original manifestos themselves?

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