You might have noticed something new around here… After weeks of going by “Lauren’s Substack,” I finally landed on an official title for this space. I am pleased to introduce Chouette! What the heck is chouette, you might wonder. Well, on a literal level, it’s a French word that technically means owl, but has a slang meaning of “cool.” When I studied French in high school, my teacher, who was a Paris native, taught us this phrase. My classmates and I would enthusiastically use it in class and outside, too (we were nerds, the lot of us) until we met our French exchange students in the spring of sophomore year. Our counterparts from Nantes quickly informed us that chouette was a totally dweeby, outdated word, akin to saying swell or neat. Some people dropped it from their vocabulary, but others like myself, still thought it had a nice ring to it. It popped into my head last week as I wracked my brain for a catchy blog title, and I immediately knew it was the one. What could be a more perfect name for a collection of my favorite things than an outdated French word meaning cool? When I’m not covering contemporary art, I seem to gravitate toward things that others now deem “off trend.” Old Masters, still lives, 19th century painting and the like might feel overused to most people nowadays, but I want to prove that these things might simply be misunderstood. I want to show you that anything can be timely if you’re willing to take a fresh look at it. So here you’ll find everything I think is chouette—and who knows? Perhaps in time, you’ll come to find it all quite cool after all.
