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Dear reader,
September is rarely a quiet month in the cultural world. It is the moment when institutions unveil their ambitions for the season ahead, audiences return, and cities begin to reveal what they want us to pay attention to. This year, Paris, Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas offer three very different and revealing versions of that cultural rentrée.
In Paris, the calendar is particularly rich. Céline Dion’s much-anticipated return to the stage arrives amid Paris Design Week, the Journées Européennes du Patrimoine, a new season of exhibitions and, before the month is over, Paris Fashion Week. Taken together, they remind us of something Paris has always understood particularly well: heritage and reinvention are not opposites. The city remains culturally relevant precisely because it continually finds new ways to place one in conversation with the other.
In Washington, D.C., the conversation is different. As America marks its 250th anniversary, museums and cultural institutions are reconsidering how history is presented, preserved and understood. Later this month, masterpieces from the Louvre arrive at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. It is a particularly meaningful encounter for FQM: Paris and Washington meeting through art, scholarship and cultural exchange. Cultural diplomacy does not always happen around a negotiating table. Sometimes it begins with an object crossing a border and inviting us to see another culture differently.
Las Vegas, meanwhile, continues to reveal a cultural identity far more interesting than the image the world already knows. Beyond the Strip are artists, galleries, museums, performing-arts institutions and communities steadily contributing to the cultural life of the city. That spirit of discovery will also bring us together in October, when FQM joins the William Carr Gallery for an intimate gathering celebrating William Carr’s new mural connecting the worlds of Paris Las Vegas and Horseshoe Las Vegas.
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