Bernard Lamarche-Vadel's lectures on modern art published posthumously with CD

A posthumous publication transcribes lectures given by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel at the Institut français de la mode between 1991 and 1999. The book includes a CD that captures his voice, rhythm, and student reactions, bringing his analytical and creative thinking to life. Lamarche-Vadel, a major art critic who died in 2000, is known for monographs on Erik Dietman and Roman Opalka, theoretical essays, and exhibition catalogues such as "Qu'est-ce que l'art français ?". The lectures cover Malevich, Mondrian, the Impressionists, the Fauves, and post-war art through the 1980s. He approaches artworks from philosophical and aesthetic perspectives, identifying axioms and theorems behind artists' signifying systems. Lamarche-Vadel argues that approaching art requires work: accepting the necessity of understanding the artist's own prescription, with the critic providing conceptual keys for the receiver to become co-producer of the work. He critiques the ideology of co-naturality underlying a certain idea of art ("bourgeois hardware") and exposes the process of dematerialization and invisibilization of art, a logic that ultimately tends toward the absence of art as art.