A Brasserie of Artists

Going Through Old Notebooks Part 37: "Artists and writers need a place to discuss things and sometimes to disagree, and that place probably isn’t social media."

From left: Chilean painter Manuel Ortiz de Zarate (age 29), Polish-French painter Moïse Kisling (age 25), model Emilienne “Pâquerette” Geslot, (age 20), and painter Pablo Picasso (age 35), at the Café de la Rotande in Paris, August 1916. Photo by Jean Cocteau.

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For a while now, probably since the heightened isolation of the Covid lockdowns, I have been having fantasies about a raucous Parisian brasserie filled with artists and writers. They—or should I say, we—could meet there, say, every Thursday night. I might turn to a fellow writer and say, hey, have you read the latest essay by ———? And then we could talk about it. Maybe I liked it, maybe they didn’t. Maybe the writer of the essay themselves would walk in, and then we could all discuss it together—agreeing, disagreeing, agreeing to disagree, and all of it relatively amiable.

A brasserie of artists—it sounds like a collective noun, like a murder of crows or a book club of aunts. I think that artists and writers need a place to discuss things and sometimes to disagree, and that place probably isn’t social media. So far, in the fifteen years or so that these virtual spaces have existed and been dominant, social media has had a way of turning any disagreement into something hostile. But disagreement, whether through a difference of taste, or a misunderstanding that could be righted, a point of view that can be changed, is an extremely important part of intellectual life.