Defining contemporary art, or more precisely trying to define the notion of contemporaneity in art, seems all the less like an easy task because it must guard against any normative temptation. It is nevertheless to this exercise that Renaud Camus engages himself in this small work, which is in fact the text of the speech given at the Flaran Abbey, chosen place to temporarily host the collection of the Château de Plieux. For Renaud Camus, the art of the second half of the twentieth century is “the most deeply tragic in the history of humanity”, and not only in the plastic arts, but also in music and literature.

Taking up the question of Adorno and extending it to any artistic creation, Renaud Camus wonders about the possibility of making work when “every sense is compromised, every image is soiled, every beauty is dirty, every being is ashamed to show himself”.
The text of Flaran’s Discours is a scholarly text interspersed with multiple pictorial, literary, and philosophical references that, in each of these areas, have tried to define what this “Scripture of disaster” can be.
Renaud Camus considers that the Plieux collection, described and commented on in this speech, provides an answer to this question.

Renaud Camus, Le Discours de Flaran, Paris, P.O.L, 1997