Lecture by Morgan Labar: ‘As dumb as a painter’
On 16 December 2025, Villa Arson will host a lecture by Morgan Labar, historian and art critic.
This lecture offers a reinterpretation of the episode sometimes referred to as the ‘return of painting’ in the 1980s, which should really be written in the plural – returns of painting. Duchamp’s adage ‘stupid as a painter’, hastily reduced to an anathema on the painting of his time, served as a rallying cry for artists who held sway and filled the columns of Artforum in the 1970s and considered the death of painting – or at least its dialectical surpassing – a foregone conclusion.
The art of the 1980s emerged as a violent reaction to this scholarly narrative of modernity. Painting returned to the forefront after a decade of (relative) purgatory. Anti-intellectualism was asserted as a joyful and pleasurable antidote to conceptual austerity.
In this talk, Morgan Labar will look back on this decade in painting, discussing the history of exhibitions (Venice Biennale, Documenta) and delving into a few movements that cultivated stupidity in painting (Figuration Libre, Bad Painting, Mülheimer Freiheit).
Morgan Labar
Morgan Labar is a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, with a degree in philosophy and a PhD in art history from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. For several years, he has been interested in how aesthetic categories, canons and hegemonic discourses are constructed within the worlds of contemporary art. He is an associate member of the SACRe laboratory (EA 7410, PSL University) and the THALIM joint research unit (UMR 7172, ENS – Sorbonne Nouvelle – CNRS) and is developing a research activity that has been supported in particular by the annual postdoctoral fellowship from the Terra Foundation for American Art at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA). He has recently published La Gloire de la Bêtise. Régression et superficialité dans les arts depuis la fin des années 1980 (The Glory of Stupidity: Regression and Superficiality in the Arts since the Late 1980s) with Les presses du réel.
Morgan Labar has taught at several higher education institutions, including the École du Louvre and the Arts Department of the ENS, where he is an associate lecturer and has been running the seminar ‘Autochtony, Hybridity, Anthropophagy’ with Daria de Beauvais since 2020.
He is also involved, as an administrator, in the activities of several cultural associations and institutions (ANdEA, FRAC Sud – Cité de l’art contemporain, Festival Actoral, Atelier des Artistes en Exil).
After serving as artistic director at the École nationale d’art d’Avignon from 2021 to 2024, he is now director of the École nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon.
Practical information
Tuesday 16 December at 6.30pm
Free admission
Grand Amphitheatre, Villa Arson
Address: Villa Arson, 20 Av. Stephen Liegeard, 06100 Nice