Welcome to 2022 in the era of uncertainties 2.0

Since August 26, the Weibo account, Chinese equivalent of Twitter, of actress Zhao Wei, as famous in China as Catherine Deneuve in France, has mysteriously disappeared, while some 86 million subscribers followed it. Worse: Zhao Wei's name has been completely "erased" from all Chinese search engines, and all of her filmography is no longer available for streaming. The “erasure” of the Chinese actress, who is also a Francophile and owner of four Bordeaux vineyards, shows once again that reality today exceeds fiction. For nearly six months, the Chinese actress has remained well and truly digitally erased. The desire for erasure goes back to ancient origins bearing the name, in ancient Rome, of damnatio memoriae (literally "damnation of memory"), that is to say, a set of condemnations, post mortem , aimed at forgetting a wrong personality. It corresponds, according to academic Robyn Faith Walsh, to "the destruction, beheading or 'resculpture' of statues, the removal with a chisel of names from inscriptions or from coins" ... But, if the damnatio memoriae concerned Marc Antoine as well as Néron, it did not succeed in erasing them from history. What is becoming more and more uncertain today as the information is digitized, and with a single click a world can disappear. No wonder that, on the art market, as a great gallerist specializing in ancient China pointed out to me, we are now witnessing an explosion in the selling prices of old books, once again considered as sources of unique and valuable information, unmatched on the Internet. And which makes it possible to denounce the many fakes circulating on the world market by tracing the history of works of art more reliably. Contrary to what some prophesy, the books - if only for this reason! - are not going to disappear. Beaux Arts Magazine maintains a vast library, which continues to grow, because we are aware that we do not find, for example, any information as complete on the Venice Biennale (created in 1895) as in consulting the catalogs that it has published. Anyway, we are entering a period where the facts become more and more relative, as shown by the possibilities of the metaverse which will make us live at the same time in the real and virtual world. As early as 1926, quantum physics, thanks to scientist Erwin Schrödinger, demonstrated that a cat could be simultaneously alive and dead - the latest research advances the hypothesis of a world that is not governed by rules of consequences and effects. In other words, to the question "Who from the egg or the chicken appeared first?" Quantum physicists respond: neither one nor the other, but both at the same time. Did Cycladic icons appear before Picasso's sculptures? Welcome to the 2.0 and quantum era of all uncertainties! seen in Beaux Arts, Fabrice Bousteau Video about Pau Rousteau self published book