Denial After Recognition

March 20, 2025 could have been the end of a story. But it was not.

The recognition of the Abode of Chaos by the Minister of Culture did not make twenty-five years of representations, conflicts, administrative habits and local positions disappear in a few hours.

It even produced an even more interesting phenomenon: it made the denial visible.

Before that date, everyone could still claim that the artistic nature of the Abode of Chaos remained an open question. After that date, it was no longer exactly the same debate.

The state's cultural authority had now ruled on the artistic and evolving nature of the whole.

This obviously did not mean that all legal or administrative issues disappeared. I have practiced law too much to confuse the two areas of expertise.

A Minister of Culture cannot transform one procedure into another with a letter, nor can she replace the courts. But something was now impossible: to continue speaking of the Abode of Chaos as if its artistic nature had never been recognized by the State.

Yet that is precisely what was going to happen.

And this persistence interests me far more today than the anger it might have provoked at the time. Because it reveals a universal human mechanism. We readily imagine that facts correct our perceptions. This is often false. When a perception has been repeated long enough, it can outlive the fact that contradicts it.

We do not always update our map when the territory changes.

We sometimes try to force the territory to remain consistent with the map.

I spent part of my life working on this issue without yet giving it the name I would use today.

The bias.

The Blind Spot: the blind spot.

The zone in which an intelligence, individual or collective, no longer perceives that it is selecting what confirms its model.

The conflict surrounding the Abode of Chaos provided me with an almost perfect laboratory for this mechanism for twenty-five years.

An initial representation is formed. It is repeated. It is repeated.

Documents reproduce it. Articles summarize it. Procedures cite it. Then, over time, the representation acquires autonomy.

It no longer even needs to return to the object. It has its own archives. Its own vocabulary. Its own certainties. That is exactly how a bias becomes a system.

March 20, 2025 introduces new information into this system.

This is serious information.

It comes from the Ministry of Culture. It should therefore trigger a reassessment. But every reassessment has a psychological and political cost.

Recognizing that an object that one has looked at for twenty-five years in a certain way must now be looked at differently forces one to re-examine a part of one's own past.

It is difficult for an individual.

This can be even more true for an institution or an elected official who has publicly defended a position. Changing their mind can be interpreted as a loss.

On the contrary, I believe that knowing how to change one's mind in the face of new facts constitutes one of the highest forms of intelligence. But this culture of revision is rare.

So the conflict continues.

I want to be extremely precise here. I would never refer to the "village" as if it had been our adversary. That would be historically inaccurate. Active local opposition involved a limited number of people.

Some residents supported us.

Others came to visit.

Some had no opinion.

Some have changed their perspective over time.

Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or is not a person. A municipality does not have a single consciousness. And I refuse to retrospectively create a war between the Abode of Chaos and its inhabitants.

There were opponents, elected officials, supporters, indifferent people, and visitors.

In particular, there were twenty-five years during which all these positions evolved.

Accuracy also requires distinguishing between the actors.

The mayor is not the senator. The senator is not the ministry. The Ministry of Culture is not a court.

A parliamentary question is not a court decision. A ministerial response is not a judgment. A political stance is not a scientific expert opinion.

If we mix these levels, we produce exactly the confusion we criticize in others. So I want to keep them separate.

After ministerial recognition, the protest did not die down. It changed battleground. And the affair eventually reached Parliament.

On September 4, 2025, a written question from the senator from the Rhône was published in the Senate.

The fact is important. Not because a parliamentary question would in itself constitute a condemnation or an endorsement. A parliamentary question is a question addressed to the government. It allows a member of parliament to question a minister about a situation, a public policy, an interpretation, or the actions of the administration. It therefore has a particular function in our history.

It forces the state to speak again.

This time, publicly. And in an official setting.

The paradox becomes remarkable.

The recognition of March 20, 2025, could have ended the cultural debate. The continued protest will instead provoke something even more powerful:

The state will have to clarify its position.

This is often how history works. Resistance intended to weaken recognition can ultimately strengthen it. I know this phenomenon well. It exists in law. It exists in businesses. It exists in networks. It exists in information systems.

An objection requires clarification.

An attack necessitates documentation.

A contradiction forces us to define.

Since 1999, a considerable part of the history of the Abode of Chaos has been built in this way.

We were asked what this work was. We had to answer.

Its unity was contested. We had to document its cosa mentale.

We were talking about disorder. We had to show its structure.

We were asked to restore it to its previous state. We had to explain why returning to a previous state could mean destroying the work.

Its cultural importance was doubted. Visitors, researchers, architects, academics, journalists and gradually institutions have produced an increasing amount of evidence allowing us to measure its reality.

Contradiction has therefore often had an unexpected effect.

It forced us to become the archivists of our own existence. That is a sentence I probably would not have uttered in 1999. I understand it now. Without the conflict, would we have documented each stage of the Abode of Chaos with such obsession?

Would we have compiled as many files?

Would we have produced as many photographs?

Would we have sought such precision in the records?

Would we have developed this idea about digital twins so early?

Would we have questioned the notion of living heritage with the same intensity?

Perhaps. But certainly not in the same way.

Adversity produced archives. And archives gradually produced knowledge.

The parliamentary question falls within this logic.

It claims to reopen the issue. It will help produce a new piece of the historical record. I do not, however, want to anticipate the response of December 18, 2025.

It should be read as a primary piece.

Dated.

Located.

Analyzed word by word.

Because its strength lies precisely in the fact that it does not come from me. I can talk about my work. I can explain my intention. I can defend my concept. I can produce thousands of pages.

But when the state responds itself, it produces a document of a different nature.

Before we get there, we need to understand what is really at stake in this sequence of denial. It is no longer just the Abode of Chaos. It is the very possibility of changing our perspective.

I have often wondered why some conflicts persist even though their initial conditions have disappeared. The answer sometimes lies in this:

Conflict becomes an identity.

After enough years, abandoning a position no longer simply means recognizing that a fact has changed. It means losing part of the narrative one has constructed about oneself.

If I have defined myself for twenty years as someone who fights against something, what do I become when that thing is recognized?

If I have maintained for twenty years that an object is an anomaly that must be eliminated, what happens when the cultural authority of my own country qualifies it as a Total Work of Art?

I can revise my judgment. Or I can strengthen my resistance.

Cognitive psychology is well acquainted with these mechanisms. Contrary information does not necessarily diminish a belief. In certain circumstances, it can even reinforce it.

Because the issue is no longer just the truth of the facts. It becomes the preservation of inner consistency.

That is exactly why I have developed this obsession with the Blind Spot throughout my life.

The blind spot is not the error. We all make mistakes. It appears when we no longer see that our own model might be at fault.

I must distinguish observable facts from the diagnosis I might be tempted to make about those who interpret them. I can describe the persistence of a vocabulary, compare the pieces, and show that a model does not incorporate new data. I must subject my own reading to the same test.

Algorithmic systems will encounter precisely this problem. An artificial intelligence fed with biased data can reproduce that bias with tremendous efficiency. It can even make it appear objective because it calculates it.

The story of the Abode of Chaos taught me, long before generative artificial intelligence, that the accumulation of data is never enough to guarantee the accuracy of a conclusion.

If all the data comes from the same angle, mass does not correct the bias. It industrializes it.

An administration can experience the same phenomenon.

A scientific community as well.

A media outlet.

A company.

An individual.

Including me.

That is why the only discipline that interests me consists of periodically returning to reality.

Watch again.

Accept the possibility that the object has changed.

Above all, accept the possibility that we have changed.

The Abode of Chaos had changed. It was no longer the object of 1999.

Thousands of works had been added.

Millions of visitors had come.

The whole world had photographed it.

Researchers had studied it.

Heritage architects had worked on it.

Digital records had revealed its organization.

The digital twin had produced a new form of memory.

The pink period had further altered its reading.

And now the Ministry of Culture recognized its artistic value and its character as a Total and evolving Work of Art.

Continuing to talk about this object exactly as on the first day therefore required a considerable effort of non-perception.

That is what I call denial after recognition.

It does not necessarily consist of saying: the letter does not exist. It can be much more subtle. We acknowledge its existence but we empty it of its meaning.

We reduce it to an opinion, we select one word and forget the others, we shift the question, we revert to the old vocabulary.

We act as if the new information does not require any update to the model.

This is precisely what a flawed artificial intelligence system would do with contradictory data: it would consider it an anomaly to be eliminated rather than an indication that its model needs revision. That is why this story goes far beyond a local dispute.

It constitutes a textbook case of our collective relationship to truth.

We like to believe that we want the facts. In reality, we often want facts that fit our mental framework.

Intelligence begins when we accept that a fact may force us to rebuild this architecture. I do not exclude myself from this rule.

I am thinking of pink. I myself had stopped seeing certain relationships in a work I knew better than anyone. The chromatic shift forced me to look again at what I saw every day. So I am not external to the problem I am describing. I, too, can construct a model of reality and end up looking through it.

The Pink Period demonstrated this to me in an almost cruel way. After twenty-five years, some sculptures had become spectral to my own eyes. They were there. I had created them. And yet I no longer saw them. The gradual uniformity of rust had flattened planes. My brain, accustomed to the place, had finished the job. Then a few chromatic interventions brought the forms back to life.

With Nadège, I rediscovered initiatory totems that my gaze had ceased to isolate.

What more perfect lesson could I receive?

Being the author of something does not even guarantee that it will continue to be seen. Sometimes you have to relearn how to look at your own creation.

How then could I ask others to change their perspective without accepting this discipline myself?

Pink and ministerial recognition ultimately tell the same story on two different levels.

Pink reintroduces depth into the visual gaze.

Recognition reintroduces depth into the institutional perspective.

In both cases, something that already existed suddenly becomes visible in a different way.

The Abode of Chaos did not become a work of art on March 20, 2025.

It was.

But the cultural state looked at it and named it as such.

Similarly, the initiatory totems were not created when the pink made them reappear.

They were there.

Their gaze had lost them.

This symmetry fascinates me. Perhaps it says something about all knowledge.

Seeing is never just receiving light.

Seeing is about building.

The brain constructs. The institution constructs. History constructs. And sometimes a sufficiently strong disturbance must be introduced for this construction to reorganize itself.

Pink was a chromatic disturbance.

The letter of March 20th was an institutional disruption.

The parliamentary question then constitutes an attempt to subject this disruption to a new test.

Very well. I have never been afraid of questions. The entire Abode of Chaos is built upon them. The work should question, not provoke.

A democracy must also be able to question.

A senator must be able to question the government.

A mayor must be able to defend a position.

A citizen must be able to challenge.

An artist must be able to respond.

The problem never lies in the question itself. It lies in what we do with the answer. That is why I do not want to caricature this situation. The question being brought before the Senate is part of the normal functioning of the institutions.

It even creates a remarkable opportunity: that of obtaining public clarification.

Where ministerial correspondence could still be presented as a private exchange, parliamentary mechanics lead the government to respond in an official space accessible to all.

The local conflict has thus paradoxically created the conditions for a national documentary record of the response. We have therefore reached a point that no one could have written in this way in 1999.

A work born in a village in the Monts d’Or.

A local conflict.

Twenty-three years of legal proceedings.

Millions of visitors.

International media coverage.

European researchers.

A digital twin.

A Minister of Culture.

Then the Senate of the Republic.

The geography of the issue has been reversed. What some wanted to reduce to a local anomaly has become a question addressed to the State.

And the state will have to respond.

This answer will not say that the story is over.

It will not be able to erase the years of conflict that preceded it.

Nor will it be able to resolve all the future contradictions of a work that specifically claims the right to continue to evolve.

The protest, however, produced an unexpected effect: it forced the State to respond in a public space that was dated and lasting.

On March 20, 2025, France uttered the word. A few months later, it was asked to explain itself. It would do so. And this time, its answer would not remain in an envelope.

On December 18, 2025, this response would be published in the Official Journal of the Senate.