Frog Magazine Founders Debate Avant-Garde vs. Art Contemporain

In a conversation published by artpress, Stéphanie Moisdon and Éric Troncy, co-founders of the magazine Frog (established 2007), critique the state of contemporary art. They distinguish between 'art contemporain' (a market-driven industry) and 'avant-garde' (inventive, experimental). Moisdon criticizes Documenta 13 for incoherence and contempt for thought, while Troncy notes a growing divide between public consensus and private opinion, citing the Gerhard Richter exhibition as an example. They argue that the category 'young artist' emerged in the 1990s as a marketing tool. Troncy calls for rehabilitating values like genius and inspiration. Moisdon points to artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Trisha Donnelly, Rosemarie Trockel, Mathias Faldbakken, and Tino Sehgal as exemplars of avant-garde practice. They discuss the failure of art criticism, the rise of easily describable works, and the need for new forms of description. Moisdon recounts a student project by Christophe Sarlin that would be dismissed if not by a recognized name. Troncy asserts that works reducible to a single sentence are doomed. They see the contemporary art field as a self-sustaining bubble, leaving room for a small number of avant-garde inventors per generation.