"HERE come the suits!" was the only possible response to the panel formed for a conference hosted as part of La Friche La Belle de Mai's Project exchange week. La Friche is at present trying to discover its attitude to a city-wide redevelopment plan run by a structure called Eurnmediterrane - clearly a rough Marseillaise translation of Temple Bar Properties.
So it was that among the baggy sports clothes and art-school hand-me-downs of La Friche, there appeared two gentlemen with sharp-cut grey hair, wearing dark suits one accessorised with a silk scarf and a cravat muffling his throat, the other topped off with a silk tie of a livid plum hue.
The discussion," which ranged from passionate to elbow gnawingly dull, saw the one with the plum tie, (Mr Thierry Martin of Euromediterrane to his colleagues) elaborate on the social benefits which had to be weighed against any investment in culture about the cost of road repairs which might have to be deferred if money were spent on the arts.
It was all a very long way from the money-no-object days of grands projects and Jack Lang's Ministry of Culture. Indeed, just how much the wind has changed in France was brought home during the week by a TV interview with the former minister which posed a brutal question "After the Mitterand years, what use is Jack Lang?"
But while Mr Martin seemed to be rehearsing a free market debate from the mid-1980s, the project contingent of artistic director Fiach Mac Conghail and director Joseph Long outlined their sometimes troubled feelings about what might happen if cultural development did, after all, figure prominently in the renewal of Marseilles.
Kicking off for the project, with what one French newspaper quaintly described as "precision et humilite", Long expressed misgivings about developments in Temple Bar, explaining that even if a good number of buildings dedicated to various, art forms had been constructed in the area, they often seem to lack precise objectives.
Fiach Mac Conghail, the project's other representative on the panel, bid the local artists beware the various temptations they might encounter in the coming months - chief among which, he seemed to suggest, was the malignant drift towards using the language of economics to justify our existence".
Such warnings, however, may come too late for, as one local remarked from the floor not one artist sat on the panel. (This last comment must have been missed by one French journalist who throughout her report on the conference referred to MacConghail as "un artiste dublinios" presumably because Mr Martin at one exasperated point addressed the project's artistic director as "monsieur l`artiste")
The Obligatory Taxi Driver Anecdote: So what's on at La Friche?" the driver asked as we crawled through the evening traffic. "They're having a festival of Culture irlandaise" "So there'll be whiskey then?" Yes...but of course there's more to Irish culture than whiskey." " Oh I know," said the driver, stealing a glance in the rear view mirror, "there's beer as well."
