Facebook X Email Print Save Story Number of Latin speakers in the Roman Empire: multitudo . Number of native Latin speakers in the world today: nil . Number of Latin speakers in the back yard of a Chelsea bar one recent sticky evening: unus .
Donatien Grau, an adviser on contemporary programming at the Louvre, was in town from Paris to do a reading from his book “De Civitate Angelorum,” a treatise on Los Angeles written entirely in Latin. He wore an intellectual’s patterned scarf and a too-heavy blue blazer, and was fortifying himself with a pre-reading iced tea. The Louvre is not known for contemporary art, but after Laurence des Cars took over as the head of the museum a few years ago, she brought in Grau, who had previously worked for her at the Musée d’Orsay.
“What we wanted to do is for contemporary to be not the opposite of heritage, but actually be a take on heritage,” Grau said. “Laurence says, ‘The Louvre is not a place for contemporary art, it’s a contemporary place for art.’ ” Grau sees himself as an emissary.
“When I converse with artists, I come not as someone from the present,” he said, “but as someone whose principal activity is in history.” In 2018, Grau was curating an exhibition about Plato at the Getty Villa, in Los Angeles, when he had an idea. “For Jean Paul Getty, the United States were the new Roman Empire, and the Pacific Palisades were the new Amalfi Coast,” he said.
“The way the villa was received, in the seventi.