The Arcades Project - Operi

"avenue" illuminated at night by gas lamps, when "the moon (a self-portrait)"
reposes on fashionable velvet cushions instead of on clouds, then history is being
secularized and drawn into a natural context as relentlessly as it was three hundred
years earlier with allegory. [GI6,3]
The planetary fashions of Grandville are so many parodies, drawn by nature, of
human history. Grandville's harlequinades tum into Blanqui's plaintive ballads.
[GI6,4]
"The exhibitions are the only properly modern festivals.? Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmos,
vol. 3 (Leipzig, 1864), p. ? [GI6,S]
The world exhibitions were training schools in which the masses, barred from
consuming, learned empathy with exchange value. "Look at everything; touch
nothing:' [Gl6,6]
The entertairunent industry refines and multiplies the varieties of reactive behav­
ior among the masses. In this way, it makes them ripe for the workings of
advertising. The link between this industry and the world exhihitions is thus well
established. [Gl6,7]
Proposal for urban planning in Paris: "'It would he advisable to vary the forms of
the houses and, as for the districts, to employ different architectural orders, even
those in no way classical-such as the Gothic, Turkish, Chinese, Egyptian, Burmese,
and so forth." Amedee de Tissot, Paris et Londres compar'es (Paris, 1830),
p. lSO.-The architecture of future exhibitions! [G16a)]
"'As long as this unspeakable construction [the Palace of Industry] survives, . .. I
shall take satisfaction in renouncing the title 'man of letters' . ... Art and industry!
Yes, it was in fact for them alone that, in 1855, this impossible tangle of
galleries was reserved, this jumble where the pOOl' writers have not . even been
granted six square feet-the space of a grave! Glory to thee, 0 Stationer . . . .
Mount to the Capitol, 0 Publisher . .. ! Triumph, you artists and industrials, you
who have had the honors and the profit of a world exhibition, whereas poor literature
... '" (pp. v-vi). ""A world exhihition for the man of letters, a Crystal Palace
for the author-modiste!"' Whisperings of a scurrilous demon whom Babou, according
to his '"Lettre it Charles Asselineau," is supposed to have encountered one day
along the Champs-Elysees. Hippolyte Babou, Les Payens innocents (Paris, 1858),
p. xiv. [Gl6a,2]
Exhibitions. '(,Such transitory installations, as a l'ule, have had no influence on the
configuration of cities . ... It is otherwise . .. in Paris . Precisely in the fact that
here giant exhilJitions could be set up in the middle of town, and that nearly always
they would leave hehind a monument well suited to the city's general aspect-pre-