«Star of the market», points Clair, that in spite of his image of calm man who finishes off the meal with cheese and wine and to the one that easily raises a healthy red color to the cheeks - opposite to the pale face of such a stuck-up contemporary art - polemiza up to leaving a sauce not even apex in the plate of the discord. In that it is a "gourmet". When they all were giving for dead to the painting, he was defending the European realistic tradition; when the «emergent classes» were adoring the ugliness in the museum, he was looking for the beauty in the melancholy. There his exhibition is «They Réalismes» (1980) and years later a book where he wanted to correct the leeway of the modernity towards the insipid thing, «Criticize of the modernité» (1983). He was the director of the Museum Picasso of Paris between 1986 and 2005. He has visited Madrid to take part in the cycle of conferences of the Friends of the Prado Museum.

- one usually speaks about the crisis of the contemporary art as if the future of the humanity was in game, but: does not the crisis of the education seem more important to him?
- surely the crisis of the education is more important. Let's say that also it affects more persons, especially comparing it with the contemporary art, which does not stop being the expression of a minority with many will to it be. But these two crises it is joined because there cannot be contemporary creation if there is no education. It is not possible to imagine the formation of an artist and of the proper visitors of the museums without a quality education, a few visitors who, the opposite to what believes, give the back to the contemporary art, because the sensation that the citizens have is that the creation is a spontaneous and capricious game that does not need study. I would say that there is especially a general crisis of the culture that appears in an exaggerated declaration of me of the artist, who is what he explains that absolutely empty works should be realized. Here of what it is a question it is of educating the taste, because the spontaneity is not at all, it is a gesture, but the taste is the literary, artistic, philosophical, musical culture.

- of me of the artist it has called it to this aggravation the «narcissistic hypertrophy».
- and worse things. I will put an example. When I did the exhibition on the melancholy, «Melancolie, génie et I foliated in Occident» in Grand Palais, there were persons who asked me: what is the melancholy for you? They wanted finally that I was thinking for them, that I should say to them that the melancholy is not a narcissistic feeling but a new history of the western conscience, his incapability to represent the reality and nevertheless his will to want to represent it. What happens is that the contemporary art has transmitted the sensation that there is no will of working, of knowing, of studying.

- Does a relation exist between the investment of the State in culture, and in the last times of a very special way in museums and art, and this alienation between the society and the art?
- the fact is that I do not believe that the state invests in culture so much as he says. The game that the State, at least in the French case and I do not believe that very different from Spanish, it destines to the art or to the culture it is 0,95, that is to say, it does not come to one per cent. I have gone to see El Escorial and it is something extraordinary, one of the best European works...: of course that is a beautiful monument to the melancholy! There yes that we can speak about investment, but of lasting investment, which it keeps on upsetting and dignifies all of us. Speaking seriously, this is a complicated topic because we can defend an aristocratic system of the culture but that does not coincide with what must be in a modern democracy. I believe that now there is a big opposition between democracy and artistic creation because the democratic societies do not promote works that exceed the man to heighten the power of a king, of the state, of the fascism or of the communism. . A democratic society is better, undoubtedly, but I accept that El Escorial thrills me and nevertheless the contemporary art repels me.

- on the intervention of the State in the culture and the art there is an exact date: in 1959 the first Department of Culture is created in France. Does it inaugurate an epoch?
- this way it is, it was Malraux the one that created the Department of that time of Cultural action, model that then it inspired what there are the called cultural policies to the use. But it is necessary to see it with a historical perspective. First, the State must preserve the artistic patrimony, the documents and the books to transmit the past. Then, there is a diffusion level: the state must bring the artistic works over to the citizens, offer concerts, operas, exhibitions, libraries... and this was what created Malraux with Maisons de Cultures. And there is another level: to facilitate the creation, and this is the delicate point because he supposes an esthetic intervention on the taste, finally on what we name art, and this one, if it is defined by something, it is for his fragility, almost emptily. Perhaps what provoked the creation of the Department of Culture is to untie the culture of the education and of the plans of study.

AN INVENTION OF THE ELITES

- Has the intervention of the state sterilized the contemporary art up to making a product banal?
- not always it has been like that. If the state intervenes in the art, it means that the value judgments on this art will be taken for officials of the state and me, that I have been an official, I know that there are no objective judgments. The discovery of the big writers, of the big musicians, of the big painters is a work of a small cultivated elite that with lucidity has been able to distinguish the exceptional work of the current work. The discovery of the modern art is not an invention of the state, but of four, five or six critics, historians and poets. To Picasso it did not discover a governmental commission, which then it was representing precisely to the academic painting. There are exceptions. I meet some conservatives that with great pleasure and they have discovered a lot of intelligence to good painters, he would say than to the big ones of the century. One is Georges Sall, which was the director of the National museums, and Jean Cassou who was the director of the Modern Art museum after the war and introduced Picasso in the collections.

- What does he think about the creation of new museums that they answer to the called «cultural diversity», for example the Museum of Quai Branly?
- it is a terrible, terrible question... It is the apotheosis, the victory of the will of not politics of Chirac. It is a museum of not European art using a few anthropological collections. The works that the collection of this center has have belonged earlier to other museums, that of the Man and that of Science and Anthropology, therefore they have been studied by anthropologists, ethnologists and where there have formed intellectuals of the size of Levi Strauss or Michel Leris. These museums were not created robbing other peoples, but it was the salvation of a patrimony that was in danger, although today it is incorrect to say it. Now all that has changed radically with the target to construct not European art museum, that in himself something seems much loaded to me ideologically, when the peoples of Africa, for example, did not have art notion because it is a completely western idea. I think that the African ones, the Indians of North America or of the South do not understand the elaborated, worn out, carved objects... like art objects, although yes how sacred, but not like art. It is phantasmagoric: now they want to invest this fact under an ideological criterion marked by the cultural diversity.

THE MYTH SURREALISTS

- perhaps there is something of bad conscience.
- yes, a little of bad conscience must have, because if not, how to explain that the ancient African Art museum and Oceania should have closed and should have turned into Museum of History of the French Colonization. It is as if there was created the Museum of the Repentance of the western and European action in the world! The problem is in that perhaps we have left the economic colonialism, but a cultural colonialism has been opened, queriendo to impose a way of understanding the past and the life. It is the colonialism of France or of the United States, the colonialism, in defintiva, it is that of the cultural industry that acts in the museums and on the works of art. But let's not forget that this change also has happened to satisfy to a certain cultural tourism, to anybody more.

- admit at least that was an instigator when he published his essay on the surrealism, an untouchable movement in France, and his ties with the dictatorship.
- this book has not been translated in Spain, «Du surrealisme considéré dans ses rapports avec au totalitarismen et aux tables tournante» yet. The ties of this untouchable movement go beyond the fascism and the communism and it reaches to the spiritualism and the occultism. We are not going to discover anything if we speak about Breton and his implications with the Soviet revolution and the Stalinism, but also they were touched by the National Socialist violence and nevertheless then they went away to the United States and did not want to know anything about the resistance... But what I am interested in is the union of this extreme and revolutionary rationality and to the aspect teosófico, spiritualistic that mystic speaks about secret and magnetic forces, quite so cryptic, and enlightener.

- the contemporary art seems that he has inherited this point of spectacle of magic and hypnosis of wanting to see big ideas in a completely empty room.
- of course, and it is obscurantist because it is unintelligible. The clearest case is that of Beuys, which does magic with a series of objects and material fetishes: the fat, the felt..., that did spiritual retreats following San Ignacio of Loyola, who wanted to be sick to the life to a dead hare.