According to the press release, the ‘universe of the artist’ is connected ‘with the main themes running through the Louvre’s collections’ so that the visitor can ‘rediscover celebrated works by Old Masters through the eyes of this major artist of the contemporary scene’. On a closer look, however, the presumed ‘dialogue’ between the works of Jan Fabre and the Old Masters comes down to a rather fortuitous juxtaposition on mostly superficial grounds. The sheer incongruence between the futility of the presumed ‘rediscovery’ and the megalomania of the enterprise suggests that something else must be at stake here: it is obvious that the declared intention is a mere disguise for something very different. The way that Jan Fabre’s works are confronted - put on a par - with the works of the Old Masters is a single giant non-verbal statement: that Jan Fabre deserves his place among the heroes in the Louvre as a Pantheon of the Arts, if not that his work is worth so much more than all the Old Masters put together. For Jan Fabre is not only the first living artist allowed to stuff 39 galleries in the Louvre: for centuries, the dead masters had to content themselves with far less - although to a painter with the stature of a Jan van Eyck, some square metre on a single wall suffices to do what Jan Fabre will never be able to, even if he could command even more tons of granite in even more galleries. (Fabre has already had a similar show at the Koninklijk in Belgium. See Barbarians in Antwerp)

This formula - the implicit ‘endorsement’ of would-be artworks by recognised masterpieces in art museums - is becoming increasingly popular. Suffice it to refer to Spencer Tunick, who had one of his ‘body sculptures’ emphatically piled up in front of Rubens’ ‘Venus and Adonis’ in Düsseldorf (2006), a gesture that does not suffice, however, to turn his piled up naked bodies into a ‘sculpture’, let alone into a composition that could match the grandeur of say Rubens’ ‘Fall of the Angels’. Let us hope that other respectable museums will not follow suit: bad enough that the museums for modern art have to resort to ‘sculptures’ like the slides of Carsten Höller in the Tate Modern to attract the required number of visitors....