A Monumental Critique of Empire, from Napoleonic to Corporate Times
PARIS — Scattered throughout the cavernous nave of the Grand Palaisare mountains of shipping containers. Green, blue, and brown, corporate logos and serial numbers stamped on their sides, they reach up to the resplendent glass ceiling of the Palais, like mounds of oversized Legos.
Snaking through this landscape is a giant sea serpent, its chrome ribs playing off the painted steel tendrils of the columns and vaults of the Palais’s Beaux-Arts interior. In the center of the nave, a gantry crane hoists the monster into the air above a huge bicorne hat, modeled off the one Napoleon Bonaparte wears in Antoine Jean Gros’s painting “Napoléon I on the Battlefield of Eylau” (1808).
