Paris With a Parisian

A keep-art-weird manifesto: Hey!

An alternative voice is slowly, yet surely, stepping out of the contemporary art chaos. Hey! Magazine forces France to contemplate the other side of art.

I know I am often complaining about the official art scene, but that is because I usually fail to feel emotions in front of it. Not that I don’t like art. Just that I have a hard time taking art installations and concepts seriously, while I am craving for a more creative, hard-working, surprising art scene. An art scene that would fight with our world instead of addressing the fake interest of a financial élite.

And then I went to the Hey! Exhibition, at la Halle Saint-Pierre in Montmartre. And I had a revelation. This exhibitions is le salon des refusés of the impressionists, but in the 21st century. Here, pop culture and genre are in the center of the scope. Comics, tattoos, street art and TV shows occupy in Art the place they have in our lives. Here, a huge and beautiful freak show is vibrating, provoking massive questionning of our society while displaying some extremely well-done art pieces.

Hey! is first a magazine that specializes in alternative arts and designs. Its two founders, Anne and Julien, act as the curators of a monthly exhibition, where they gather the best of what they see worldwide. And it is really up to them. As Anne said: “we noticed there are a lot of people like us. People who don’t like labels, and who don’t want to be stuck with the art market diktats. That’s how Hey! is born: to satisfy these people.”

I am one of this people. And I will think of Hey! and the Hey! exhibition that they are a major event in Paris, as finally, it puts the spotlight on the art I like. An art that is the link of the past and the future, which recreates the feeling of the Renaissance wunderkammers with a naughty contemporary twist.

If you are to visit Paris before August, you must go to see Hey! and discover that other vision on Art.