Passionate Art

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Auguste Rodin, Claudia Moscovici, love, passion, passion in art, passionate art, postromantic art, postromanticism, Rodin, Romantic art, Romanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, the art of passion, The Kiss

Passion was the core of the Romantic movement and it is also, along with sensuality and the appreciation of beauty, the focal point of postromanticism. Sensuality and passion hardly seem separable since we tend to experience them together. It’s nearly impossible to imagine passion without the excitement, agitation and upheaval of the senses and emotions that we associate with sensuality. At the same time, however, sensuality and passion are opposites. Sensuality is the acute sensibility to beauty and to the myriad of potential delights it promises. It’s a way of seeing beauty in the world, in both human beings and objects. Such beauty is so vast and all-pervasive— kalon, or sea of beauty as Plato’s prophetess, Diotima had depicted—that it’s not necessarily anchored by any preference or bound by any attachment. Every week we may gaze at dozens of attractive persons, inspiring scenes and beautiful paintings or sculptures. Sensuality moves our eyes from object to object, stirring our desires, dreams and solipsistic emotions, but not necessarily capturing our devotion.

Much as sensuality, in its link to perception, evokes the aesthetic and epistemological dimensions of postromanticism, passion constitutes its ethics. This doesn’t mean that postromanticism mandates that human beings should not appreciate a multitude of objects or beings. But it does unabashedly declare: love is special. Many of us fall passionately in love and such feelings are so miraculous that they seem to defy explanation. Yet, at the same time, they are so important that they have inspired thousands of writers, poets, philosophers and artists throughout human history to depict passionate love. Not everyone does or should fall deeply in love. But those who do, we tend to believe, are very fortunate. If passionate love is a privileged form of human experience that has intrigued us for millennia, then it’s certainly worth valorizing it in our times.

Like Romanticism, postromanticism focuses above all on the expression of passionate love. Yet, in our day and age–an age so imbued with feminine and feminist sensibilities–one can no longer speak of the asymmetrical love between a male poet or artist and his ethereal muse, which has long been the dominant cliché of Romanticism. Postromantic love is reciprocal and symmetrical. Nor does postromanticism preserve the instrumental view of passion as a means of reaching something higher than human experience; of moving from the human to the divine, as we see in idealist traditions of love from Plato, to the Renaissance neoplatonists, to the Romantics. In Postromantic poetry, literature and art, passion begins with earthly existence and never transcends it.

Definition: So what is postromantic passion? Above all, passion is a focalization of the senses, thoughts and emotions upon one primary subject. I call it an ethics because it implies considering at every step one’s attitude and actions towards the beloved and, conversely, his or her actions and feelings towards oneself.

The transcendent in the contingent: The beloved is not randomly chosen. Even if meeting him or her occurs by accident—as do most human encounters—the fit between the lovers feels so right that it appears to be determined by a higher force. The intervention of that higher force cannot be proven. Nonetheless, it has a certain metonymic logic similar to the one described by the Stoics, who perceived the imprint of divine will in the beauty and harmony of the universe. Postromanticism thus spiritualizes, but only gently and lightly, passionate love. It doesn’t necessarily express a belief in divinity, but rather an elevation of emotion and humanity. Passionate love is that which uplifts one’s creative and life energies, as if by force of destiny, with the elegance, sense of wonder and inevitability of something that appears to transcend human experience.

The artist and the muse: With so many successful female artists in the world and, more generally, with so many women encouraged to pursue their talents, it’s impossible nowadays to retain the Romantic idea of the artist as male and the muse as female. When the passion is shared, both members of the couple can inspire and engage in creativity.

Idealization and lucidity: While Romanticism tends towards the idealization of the beloved, postromanticism claims that the beauty of love and of the beloved often lies in his or her imperfection. For the Romantic poets the muse was otherworldly. Only through her nonexistence could she embody aesthetic ideals. She wasn’t a woman, but a fantasy, a dream. In postromanticism, however, the source of inspiration is not a “crystallized” or idealized object of the imagination—as the novelist Stendhal had described love–but a contingent person who is known in the smallest details of his or her reality. Which is not to say that postromanticism follows the legacy of realism or naturalism. In postromanticism, unlike in naturalism, the mundane aspects of the lovers and of love itself never become scientifically predictable, mythical or grotesque, as they do, for instance, in Zola’s naturalist fiction. Postromanticism declares: real love is endearing and unique; a product of a rare fit between two individuals who, through their mutual devotion, create lasting values in an ephemeral life.

Focalization: We tend assume that the Romantic life is synonymous with the adventurous life, the life of an emotional tourist: traveling everywhere; having a multiplicity of relationships; experiencing each type of woman or man as one samples exotic dishes from distant parts of the world. Yet when one glides only on the surface of human existence, it’s difficult to be immersed in passion. For passion requires time to become deeper, richer and more intimate; it requires focalization so that it will not disperse and become a flash of intensity that’s one episode among a hundred others. In losing focus, passion also loses intensity and significance. It ceases to exist.

Energy: Passion is a mutual consumption that gives rather than depleting energy. Like a windmill, like any rhythmic movement, it generates while absorbing energy, but not all by itself, but from the external impetus of two individuals’ continual efforts to live for and with each other.

Symmetry: Passion is constantly reinforced by symmetrical dialogue. The lovers negotiate everything and feel equal in the relationship. Which doesn’t mean that they’re identical. In fact, often passion becomes more exciting when the lovers share differences in temperament, point of view and opinion. Yet there are no conventional gender roles in postromanticism. One person is not necessarily more submissive, the other more authoritative; one person is not necessarily more emotive, the other more rational. The differences are unique to each couple, not necessarily polarized. They are diffused, varied and less predictable than in the Romantic complementarity between masculine and feminine roles.

Reciprocity: Reciprocity, which was largely ignored by the Romantic movement, is the pillar of postromanticism. Passion that is mostly solipsistic—one human being’s dream or projection upon an idealized person—is not real. It may represent desire or even a strong infatuation. But only once feelings, thoughts and desires are shared, do we enter the realm of passionate love.

Proximity and distance: The Romantic male artists and their muses, even when they coupled in real life, appeared infinitely distant in art because the descriptions of women were so often veiled and disguised. The Romantics privileged the metaphors of woman as muse, angel, Salomé or femme fatale; of woman as all the more desirable because mysterious, multiple, changing and unattainable. In this tantalizing play and disguise of feminine identity, the difference between Romanticism, modernism and postmodernism is almost effaced. Postromanticism doesn’t need feminine mystery and masquerade to cultivate desire and love. Which doesn’t mean that it assumes love to be transparent. Postromanticism trusts that passionate love can generate its own dynamics: a constant movement between creating and lowering barriers which, unlike the Romantic vision of the femme fatale who fans desire through strategic advancements and withdrawals, is reciprocal, genuine and spontaneous.

Breathing: Passion is nourished by a proximity and intensity of communication so strong that it seems as if the lovers are breathing each other’s air. Without suffocating. The withdrawals are themselves part of the process of breathing. They are periods of inhaling air, of absorbing life experience and knowledge, in order to exhale it back to one another; to have a renewed life energy to offer one’s beloved.

Thinking: Postromantic passion is characterized by a rhythm and emotion which are genuine and spontaneous yet thoughtful at the same time. In this respect, it resembles Wordsworth’s Romanticism, which described passion as a processed and thoughtful rather than immediate and visceral emotion. Without the mediation of thought, passion risks being just a passing fancy; a gust of wind. And winds quickly change direction. Passion is a symbiotic relation between two individuals who enable each other to interconnect the important aspects of human life, including sensation, emotion and thought. Passion engages all of our human faculties.

Devotion: Passion is an enduring devotion. It’s not necessarily a commitment or responsibility in the way more institutionalized relations are, where the primary connection is external to the relationship. In other words, in passion the connection is not made by conventional morality and law. But the result is even more spectacular. Because devotion, a term evocative of religious experience, has transcendental dimensions. Passion is a secular form of adoration.

Fidelity: We tend to believe that virtue is a more reliable foundation for fidelity than passion, but postromanticism says that’s not the case. Virtue is often tested in the face of temptation and experienced as a tension between conscience and desire. All too often, the desire is more immediate, easier to satisfy and stronger. Passion reduces that tension and alleviates its pangs. In passion, the obsessive desire and focus upon a primary object is so strong that the energy left for others is weaker and more superficial, thus not posing a real threat to the relationship.

Jealousy and Possessiveness: If philosophers from Plato to Kant cautioned against passion, it’s largely because they associated it with negative emotions such as jealousy, possessiveness and hatred, which occur when love turns full circle and collapses upon itself. The Romantics, from Goethe to Constant, often confirmed this negative impression in describing how the force of passion leads to madness, murder and suicide. It’s undoubtedly true that passion is often accompanied by feelings of jealousy and possessiveness. Yet that’s not necessarily a bad sign. In moderation, jealousy and possessiveness may constitute a declaration of love. They can express: I know you desire others and that others are desirable to me, but I need and am grateful for the uniqueness of our attraction and feelings. Jealousy, in moderation, rekindles the flame of passion. It suggests: out of all the desirable persons we meet, I still chose you and you me. Jealousy in excess snuffs out the flame of passion. It suggests: I don’t trust you; you’re not freely mine. Rather than loving you, I possess you.

Ritual: Passion is a cherished ritual rather than a habit. A repetition of activities that appear always new, always exciting, because they’re primarily motivated by emotions and desires. In lasting love, one needs the repetition of activities as one needs to breathe air or eat regularly, rather than going through the motions today out of inertia, because one did it yesterday. In its rhythm and intensity, the repetition of acts in passionate love—going to a movie, dining out–resembles the repetition of religious rituals.

Erotism: Postromantic passion is erotic in a way that’s intensely sensual and at the same time different from diffused sensuality. In passion, the physical longing for someone is stimulated by knowledge and love of that person, rather than the love being motivated primarily by desire. That’s what makes passion different from the multiplicity of human attraction. While sensuality is a feast for the senses, passion offers food for the soul. Postromanticism places passion at its center, declaring: life and art would be emptier and more impoverished without such exquisite nourishment.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

Pushed to the Extreme: Beyond Picasso’s Modernism

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aesthetic philosophy, aesthetics, After the end of art, art criticism, Arthur Danto, beyond modernism, Claudia Moscovici, Duchamp, Gautier, Has Modernism Failed, Manet, modern art, modernism, Picasso, postmodern art, postmodernism, Pushed to the Extreme: Beyond Picasso's Modernism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Suzi Gablik, Warhol, Zola

In most of his work the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto explains the rise of conceptual art. His artistic heroes are Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, who arguably contributed most visibly to make art what it is today: aesthetic in the critical and reflexive ideas it raises about art, not in the way it represents objects. Duchamp’s urinal and Warhol’s brillo boxes, Danto argues, are not artistic in their materiality. There’s nothing intrinsic to these objects that makes them different from ordinary household objects; from the latrine that Gautier had associated with ugliness and functionality. Their aesthetic qualities, Danto suggests, lie in the way their make us question the nature and existence of art in a radically new and provocative way.

The millennia-old Platonic tradition of understanding art as some kind of inferior mimesis or imitation of reality is clearly gone in such ready-made objects and pop assemblages. Gone is also the equally old tradition, famously initiated by Plato and resurrected by the Romantics and even by Gautier, of art as a special, almost daemonic, inspiration that leads to the creation of beauty. Last but not least, in reading Danto we get the impression that the notion of creativity and originality, defended heatedly by Zola, remains in artists such as Duchamp and Warhol, but it’s hard to match after them. Once originality is pushed so far as to eliminate the intrinsic qualities and extrinsic social functions of art, what’s left of aesthetics? Does art even continue to exist as a separate domain of creativity? Even Danto, the philosophical defender of pop art before it became popular, is not optimistic about the future of art. In After the End of Art and almost all of his other numerous books on the subject, Danto sees no innovation possible after the destruction of the aesthetic object. Tracing the path to this destruction and seeing if it can be, in some ways, reversed or pushed beyond the current impasse hence presents a real challenge.

This is precisely what Suzi Gablik attempts to do in Has Modernism Failed? This book offers a bird’s eye view and critique of Modernist art, focusing in particular upon the effects of claming that art is autonomous from society. Gablik argues that Modernist emphasis upon artistic autonomy—which originally, in the works of Gautier and Zola, claimed nothing more radical than that the artist’s vision should not be subordinate to a social function—has turned into a ceaseless search for formalist experimentation and pushing the envelope of originality as far as it can go. Yet the envelope has become unfolded and, Gablik argues similarly to Danto, it has nowhere further to go:

“Modernism—the term that has been used to describe the art and culture of the past hundred years—appears to be coming to an end. As we live through the unsettling moral and intellectual consequences of what the American critic Irving Howe has called the ‘decline of the new,’ it has become harder and harder to believe in the possibility of yet another stylistic breakthrough, yet another leap into radical form… As long as we are willing to consider anything as art, innovation no longer seems possible, or even desirable.” (13)

Gablik regrets this trend in modern art much more so than Danto, who, as a philosopher, enjoys its conceptual moves. She’s more sympathetic to the general public who, she claims, tends to view modern and contemporary art as “a loss of craft, a fall from grace, a fraud or a hoax. …It remains one of the most disturbing facts about Modernism that a sense of fraudulence has, from the very start, hung round its neck like an albatross.” (13) Given that so many people still crowd into museums of contemporary art and that connoisseurs still pay millions of dollars for Modernist and postmodern art, Gablik’s claim may seem an overstatement. Yet her point remains valid in the sense that she’s not arguing that modern and postmodern art are no longer consecrated or that museums featuring such art are empty. Rather, she suggests that the consecration of conceptual art is regarded by the general populace with skepticism and even disrespect: the phenomenon of looking at the Emperor’s new clothes. Such skepticism is not incompatible with the social and cultural consecration of modern and contemporary art described, for instance, by Bourdieu. In fact, what the general public can’t appreciate is usually all the more revered by the critics and by the intellectual and artistic elite. The fact that mostly they are able to see its merit enhances its value even more (as well as theirs).

Gablik attributes the rise of conceptual art to an excessive emphasis upon artistic originality and autonomy. Zola critiqued the rigid teaching of the Ecole de Beaux Arts and praised Manet and the Impressionists for loosening them up a bit; Gablik maintains that they’ve been loosened so far that nowadays they’re practically non-existent:

“The overwhelming spectacle of current art is, at this point, confusing not only to the public, but even to professionals and students, for whom the lack of any clear or validating consensus, established on the basis of a common practice, has ushered in an impenetrable pluralism of competing approaches. It is not easy any more to picture to oneself clearly what art is, or how it got that way, or more importantly, how it can be justified. … Until the modern period, art and artists had always been imbued with a quasi-religious as well as a moral and social mission, and art was very much integrated with the social and spiritual orders.” (13-14)

We took the arguments for the autonomy of art which were used by nineteenth-century critics such as Gautier and Zola to defend some artistic independence and originality to an extreme which renders originality impossible. When art is subservient to social function, Gautier and Zola plausibly showed, it becomes predictable, standard, rigid. Yet, Gablik counters, when art is altogether removed from social functions—even for the beauty, stimulation and pleasure both Gautier and Zola sought in art—it becomes an exercise in futility:

Ever since the advent of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, singularity has been the norm instead of, as in the past, mastery over technique, or skilled knowledge. The overarching principle of Modernism has been autonomy. Liberation from rules and restraints, however, has proven itself to mean alienation from the social dimension itself; and perhaps the time has come against its present condition of arbitrariness and fragility. (24)

According to Gablik, artists and critics of the twentieth-first century need to rethink the relation between art and the social world and abandon the notion of art’s radical autonomy, which has gone far enough, and has nowhere left to go. She defends the return to some homogeneous aesthetic standards in the schools of Fine Arts, warning: “The freedom from all determinants leads to an indeterminacy so total that, finally, one has no reason for choosing anything at all. Pluralism is the norm which cancels all norms.” (77)

To return to some shared criteria and rules and to think about art’s function in society, Gablik suggests, is not to return to the old, rigid and irretrievable criteria of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. It is to revive the notion of art by linking it—without subordinating it—to society. It is to pick up where Gautier and Zola left off in their critique of originality without dismantling the relevance, beauty and meaning of art. In finding rule and measure in old yet updated Romantic aesthetic standards and ideals, this is precisely what postromanticism aims to do. For, to end with a citation by none other than Picasso—arguably the most subversive and original modern artist—even subversion cannot exist without tradition, nor can originality exist in the absence of aesthetic standards:

“Today we are in the unfortunate position of having no order or canon whereby all artistic production is submitted to rules. They—the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians—did. Their canon was inescapable because beauty, so-called, was, by definition, contained in those rules. But as soon as art had lost all link with tradition, and the kind of liberation that came in with Impressionism permitted every painter to do what he wanted to do, painting was finished. When they decided it was the painter’s sensations and emotions that mattered, and every man could recreate painting as he understood it from any basis whatever, then there was no more painting; there were only individuals. Sculpture died the same death. … Painters no longer live within a tradition and so each one of us must recreate an entire language from A to Z. No criterion can be applied to him a priori, since we don’t believe in rigid standards any longer. In a certain sense, it’s a liberation but at the same time it’s an enormous limitation, because when the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains by way of liberty he loses in the way of order, and when you’re no longer able to attach yourself to an order, basically that’s very bad.” (My life with Picasso, Françoise Gilot, 21)

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

The Legacy of Impressionism: Individualism, Autonomy and Originality in Art

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art, art blog, art criticism, Autonomy and Originality in Art, autonomy of art, Claudia Moscovici, Edouard Manet, Emile Zola, fineartebooks, Impressionism, Impressionists, individuality of art, Luncheon on the Grass, Manet, modern art, modernism, modernity, Monet, originality in art, Renoir, Romanticism and Postromanticism, the Impressionist movement, the Impressionists, The Legacy of Impressionism: Individualism

If any art collection can be said to have a profound impact upon the history of art and aesthetics, the paintings exhibited at the Salon de Refusés in 1863 would certainly be on a top ten list. This collection of paintings marks both a change of views about what counts as good art and a liberating shift in the institutions that consecrated French art to begin with. Before this crucial moment, the production of good art was heavily regulated. From the seventeenth-century, when Colbert instituted the first Salon that would display the art of the painters of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, the Salons and the Academy largely determined artistic standards. Even when the Salon was opened to all artists in 1791, the rules by which they were judged did not become less rigid, even though the number of artists who could display grew substantially as did the public patronage of the arts.

When in 1863 the official Salon rejected 3000 pieces out of the 5000 submitted by artists, with hindsight we can safely say that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a half-mocking, half-appeasing gesture towards the rejected artists, Napoleon III authorized a Salon de Refusés in a space that was distinct from the prestigious Salon sponsored by the Académie.

Like Napoleon I, the Emperor utilized art to express the glory of the French empire. The standards of the official salon were set by the traditional Count Nieuwerkerke, who was the Intendant of the Beaux Arts. He lived in a seventeen room suite in the Louvre and regulated all artistic life at court. By the 1860’s, however, artists and intellectuals–especially in more liberal newspapers– began to object to the rigid standards of the Academy and the Salon. Many of them demanded inclusion in the Salon for a wider range of talented artists.

Napoleon III paid a visit to the Salon and told Nieuwerkerke–perhaps in part to clip his wings–that many of the works rejected were just as good as those accepted. He then ordered that all the works rejected by the Salon be shown in the Palais de L’Industrie in its own show that would be called, condescendingly, the Salon de Refusés. This created the opportunity for new artists such as Manet, Pissaro and Whistler –the generation that had a profound influence upon modern art and especially upon the Impressionist movement–to become more visible in the public eye.

Manet also proved to be a key factor in the dissolution of the Salon de Refusés, however. Once the Emperor saw his Dejeuner sur l’herbe, he was shocked by its undisguised sexuality and agreed with the Academy that the first Salon de Refusés should also be the last. Nonetheless, the controversy stirred a heated debate over the nature of modern art and eventually opened the way for the Salon des Indépendants, galleries, and other institutions that soon rivaled and eventually exceeded the official Salon’s influence upon art.

In fact, in a surprising reversal of aesthetic values, less than twenty years after the Salon de Refusés, the artists associated with this controversial exhibit, particularly Manet, would be enshrined as the founders of modern art. Conversely, the official Salon art would fall into disrepute as mechanical, uninventive, formalistic: in short, l’art pompier, a pejorative term used to describe David’s Roman headgear, which resembled the helmets of firefighters (pompiers).

Judging by his naturalist novels, socialist leanings, journalistic polemics and particularly by what he says about literature in Le roman expérimental, Emile Zola (1840-1902) would appear to be an implausible spokesman for the autonomy, originality and individuality of art. In Le Roman expérimental, a collection of articles that relies upon some of the ideas developed by Claude Bernard in the biological sciences to explain the principles of naturalist literature, he proposes a view of literature as exposing the underlying temperament of human types. If anything, his literature taps into the deterministic currents of the human condition—its maladies, obsessions, addictions and inherited traits—rather than offering a model of human freedom or any kind of individualist ethos.

Nonetheless, throughout his earlier defenses of Manet and of the Impressionists in the art criticism of the 1860’s, Zola is one of the staunchest proponents of individualism and originality in art. True art, he claims, is individuated, original and, above all, autonomous. Individuated, in the sense of bearing the imprint of the personality and temperament of the artist who created it. Original, if it stands out from the rest. Autonomous, in not being subservient to any social function. It is with these premises in mind that Zola became one of the most visible supporters of Eduard Manet’s art and of the work of the Impressionists and postimpressionists.

Zola uses Manet as a counter-example and ammunition against the official Salon art. It’s not that Manet did not also exhibit in the official Salon, but that he and the Impressionists had an ambivalent relation to academic art because their innovations were not fully accepted by either the Salon or (in the beginning) by art critics. It is these very innovations–Manet’s originality and difference–that Zola wishes to defend against academic standards. These standards, he claims, are best represented by painters such as Cabanel, whom Zola regards as a representative of officially consecrated art. Cabanel’s voluptuous nudes, often allegorized as nymphs and angels to simultaneously hide and reveal their erotic appeal, were consistently embraced by the Salon critics as the epitome of high art. At the height of Cabanel’s popularity, Zola predicts in the Salons of 1866 and 68:

“I know that the crowd would scorn me if it heard me but I affirm that the canvases of Cabanel will pale and die of anemia before more or less twenty-five years from now, while the paintings of Manet will flourish throughout the years with the eternal youth of original artworks.” ( Pour Manet, Emile Zola, Le Regard Litteraire, Editions Complexe, 1989).

The author’s distaste for official art was so intense that, ironically, the socialist representative of the working classes even delivers a classist blow below the belt at Cabanel, declaring in the Salon of 1875:

“It’s a composition without defect or merit; the most inimical mediocrity speaks through it; it’s an art made up of all the old formulas, renewed by the able hand of a worker’s apprentice.” (Emile Zola, Ecrits sur l’art, Gallimard, Paris, 1991)

Zola’s prediction about Manet’s success turned out to be accurate, but the question remains: why? Or, otherwise put, what made Manet seem so original to his contemporaries and even to us and how did the aesthetic standards he helped institute come to inaugurate the modernity of art in general? For history, as they say, is written by the winners. So is the history of art, such that now, in hindsight, Zola’s prediction appears to be historically inevitable and his artistic judgment, at least as far as Manet is concerned, infallible. In the attempt to avoid this deterministic outlook, let’s examine how such a view of art emerged as triumphant and whether — or to what extent — its triumph is a positive outcome.

Manet, Impressionism and Postimpressionism have become analogous with the subversion of official academic standards and thus also with artistic modernity. It is said that Impressionism entailed a rejection of the principles taught by the Ecole des Beaux Arts and esteemed by the academic judges of the official Salon. This idea of the subversiveness of Manet and of the Impressionists has been, since Zola, deliberately overplayed to draw a firmer marker that separates old traditions from new art. For not only did Manet and the Impressionists regularly exhibit at the official Salon—with Manet and especially Renoir seeking its approval to the very end of their lives–but also they were influenced, along with the officially sanctioned artists, by the most famous Renaissance artists as well as by the masters of Romanticism and Realism: Delacroix, Corot, and Courbet.

Yet, without a doubt, Manet and the Impressionists did violate some of the important rules of what is called the “Beaux-Arts system.” The Beaux-Arts system was instituted to meet the requirements of the Academy, which were taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. These included the following principles:

1. A respect of the hierarchy of genres which privileged, in descending order, history paintings, religious themes, portraits and still-lifes. Of course, principles are always somewhat different from public taste and practice. Even during the eighteenth-century, when Chardin’s still-lifes were extremely popular and defended by notable philosophes such as Diderot, the hierarchy of genres instituted during Louis XIV’s reign was being called into question. During the nineteenth century, with the rise in popularity of realism and the representation of every-day subjects and life, it was even more radically altered. Although some well-respected artists, such as Cabanel and Bouguereau, continued to observe its rules, many artists did not. As Théophile Gautier announced in the 1846 Salon, “religious subjects are few; there are significantly less battles; what is called history painting will disappear… The glorification of man and of the beauties of nature, this seems to be the aim of art in the future.”

2. Drawing is more important than color. The reason behind this rule was that the drawing of forms was considered more abstract because it was not already found in nature. Thus, it was assumed that it took greater artistic talent to convey forms by drawing their shapes and outlines rather than by blotting, from nature, their colors.

3. Drawing from live models in conformance to the study of anatomy, not in order to convey nature as is, but to improve it by rendering it more noble, elegant and beautiful. During the seventeenth century, Neoclassicism perpetuated this improvement of nature, or capturing la belle nature.

4. Painting in the studio, as opposed to in the open air, since the studio was a place where the source and intensity of light and, more generally, the whole painting environment could be controlled to suit the aesthetic needs of the artist.

5. Paintings had to be elaborately detailed, meticulously executed and, above all, look polished and finished.

6. The overarching and unspoken framework behind the Beaux-Arts system was verisimilitude: or representing in painting—through shading, foreshortening, sfumato and the observance of one-point perspective–the three-dimensionality of objects as seen by the eye.

The Impressionists’ greatest contribution to art was not so much to change the notion of painting as representing what the eye can see—or the standards of verisimilitude that had been dominant since the Renaissance—but to alter what the eye should see as well as where and how it should see it. Their violation of the rules of the Beaux-Arts system was not revolutionary—in the sense of transgressing its underlying premises or goals–but it was thorough, in the sense of changing almost all of the means of reaching those goals. The Impressionists considered that the best forum to observe and represent nature would be in the open air—which is why their works were called plein air paintings–where the play of light and shadows would be most natural, striking and intense, rather than under the dim and artificial lighting of the studio.

Furthermore, as noted, the art students in the academies conveyed the three-dimensionality of forms by means of the subtle shading which was first perfected by the Renaissance masters. The Impressionists, on the other hand, evoked a sense of three-dimensionality by representing the dramatic contrasts of color which can be observed in vibrant sunlight. In seeking to capture visually the play of light and shadow—and its transformations—the Impressionists used rapid brushstrokes to produce paintings that looked rushed and unfinished as opposed to the well-rounded, glossy and polished forms and subtle shadings respected by the Beaux-Arts system. Similarly, rather than depicting a posed or characteristic angle of the objects painted, Manet and the Impressionists showed objects from uncharacteristic, and often, truncated perspectives. This truncation of subjects and objects, which is especially obvious in the paintings of Renoir and Degas, openly acknowledges the incompleteness of our field of vision and powers of representation.

Although he was Cézanne’s childhood friend, Zola became particularly fascinated with Manet. In Manet he identified the harbinger of a new kind of art. One mark of Manet’s originality for Zola is the painter’s frequent rejection from the official Salon whose standards, as we have seen, the novelist considered too rigid and retrograde. The (future) Impressionists were of course also rejected from the Salon—even the widely popular Renoir suffered some setbacks—but it’s Manet’s rejection in particular that drew attention. His painting Déjeuner sur l’herbe divided and riled up the public on the grounds I alluded to earlier: its sketchy and seemingly unfinished style; its minimal use of shading and bright color-contrasts to show perspective; its unadorned and decidedly non-allegorical or idealized depiction of sexuality. A few years later, in 1866, Zola vocally came to Manet’s defense. Of the Déjeuner sur l’herbe in particular he states:

Mr. Manet’s talent is made up of simplicity and justice. Without a doubt, before the incredulous nature of some of my compatriots, he will have decided to interrogate reality, all alone; he will have refused all acquired knowledge; all traditional experience; he would have wanted to take art from the beginning, which is to say, the precise observation of objects. (M. Manet, 1866, p65, quatrième article du Salon, 72)

To highlight the painter’s originality and make more general points about autonomy and originality in art, Zola focuses upon Manet’s difference from the art of the official Salon and uses Cabanel as a foil to Manet. And in many respects Manet does, indeed, violate the official rules. When under the apprenticeship of Thomas Couture, who was considered to be a modern, nonconventional painter himself, Manet is said to have told his models to pose more naturally. One model, the story goes, refused, saying that one of the works she posed for was sent to Rome (she was probably referring to a submission to the famous Prix du Rome). Manet replied: “We are not in Rome! And we do not wish to go there. We are in Paris. We intend to remain here.” (Manet: The Influence of the Modern, Francoise Cachin, tr. Rachel Kaplan, Discoveries, New York, 1995). Yet at the same time Manet, like more traditional painters, trained himself by copying the works of the Italian Renaissance masters, including Tintoretto’s Self-Portrait (1588) and works by Titian. Furthermore, art critics find in his Déjeuner the influence of a Rococo painting by Boucher, Diana and the Bath (1742).

Zola’s main argument for Manet is primarily one explicitly against the official Salon. But in defending Manet’s art, Zola also takes a stand against contemporary utilitarian theory, particularly the aesthetic philosophy of Taine and the social philosophy of Proudhon, who argued in very different ways for the same goal: the social utility of art. Taine used deterministic arguments, Proudhon proposed utilitarian ones, but both critics wanted art to serve the function of improving humanity. In arguing against this model of art, Zola and Gautier likewise share a common enemy and goal. In the essay “Proudhon et Courbet” (1866), Zola argues vehemently against Proudhon’s Du principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale, which was published posthumously in 1866. He takes issue in particular with the philosopher’s definition of art as “an idealist representation of nature and of ourselves, which has as a goal the physical and moral improvement of our species”” (43). While this seems an adequate description of Zola’s own naturalist fiction, the novelist sees art as fulfilling a radically different function: “Art perfects in its own way, by challenging the mind, not by preaching or addressing itself to reason.” (43)

The very purpose of art, Zola suggests, is to challenge and surprise, not instruct or indoctrinate. Originality and newness are art’s raison d’être—its impact upon the senses and emotions—rather than its contributions to our understanding. The notion that art should be original, emotive and surprising, however, depends upon an even more basic assumption: that of artistic freedom. For Zola proclaims the individuality of art to defend the artist’s right to express his unique aesthetic vision. In so doing, like Gautier, Zola expounds forcefully the notion of artistic autonomy. Whereas Proudhon elaborates a more traditional view of art in which the artist serves his patrons and the public—under the updated guise of serving “humanity” in general–Zola and Gautier both sever the direct link between art and society. In Proudhon’s aesthetics, Zola objects, “By himself the artist is nothing, he is all by humanity and for humanity. In a word, the individual sentiment, the free expression of a personality are forbidden. One must only be the interpreter of the general taste, work only in the name of all to please everyone.” (44)

In so far as an artist attempts to produce art to please others—even something as abstract as humanity or society—his creativity and freedom are constrained. The only art that’s true, Zola suggests, is the kind that fulfills his modern expectation of originality and artistic genius. Art that cannot be separated from religious and political artifact—as in the case of Egyptian tomb statues and papyrus paintings or the gothic cathedrals erected to glorify popes and kings—ceases to be artistic. The novelist thus rejects Proudhon’s aesthetic standards and preferences, whereby “Art attains its degree of perfection once the artist effaces himself, when the work no longer bears his name, when it is the product of an entire epoch, of a nation, as are the Egyptian statues and the Gothic cathedrals.” (44) With this emphasis upon artistic freedom and autonomy that is articulated in slightly different ways by Gautier and Zola, we see the birth of a modern aesthetics from which there would be no turning back.

Interestingly, Zola cites Michelangelo as an example of an autonomous artist, despite the fact that his art, like that of his contemporaries, was a social and religious artifact sponsored by prominent patrons and popes. So it appears that Zola conflates the notion of artistic autonomy with that of artistic originality. Yet he gets out of this logical bind by claiming, more modestly, that art is autonomous not if it’s completely removed from all social use, but if the artist himself is a free spirit—regardless of who pays for his art—and exhibits originality:

I declare in principle that a work of art lives only by its originality. I must find a man in each work of art, or the work doesn’t move me. I clearly sacrifice humanity to the artist. My definition of a work of art, were I to formulate one, would be: ‘A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.’ What do I care about the rest! (44-5)

Later, in his typical demagogical style, Zola asks: “I ask you, the people who allowed themselves to have genius without consulting humanity; the Michelangelos, Titians, Veroneses, Delacroix, who had the courage to think for themselves and not for their contemporaries, to say what was in their guts and not what the imbeciles of their times had in theirs!” (49) If Michelangelo, Titian and Delacroix could be considered autonomous artists by Zola and Gautier—both of whom mention these artists to illustrate the principle of autonomy in art– it’s because, significantly, these nineteenth-century authors do not mean by artistic autonomy what the notion has come to signify during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Nowadays autonomy means that art serves no social purpose whatsoever. Gautier and Zola, despite their bold, polemical language, don’t push the non-utility of art to such an extreme. Gautier doesn’t wish to conflate art and morality, but he still expects that art be beautiful, pleasing and entertaining to its public. Similarly, Zola defends autonomy as the motivation, not as the effect of art. Good art, his examples suggest, can be placed in a Church or city square, can be accessible and enjoyed by a wide public, can illuminate and please the public. What he emphasizes, however, is that an artist should not produce art exclusively to fulfill a set of social goals, concept of beauty or particular ideology.

Seeing what Zola means by artistic autonomy, it makes sense that he uses Michelangelo as his prime example. Even in seeking patronage, Michelangelo was not subservient to the tastes and religious assumptions of his patrons. The Sistine Chapel may have been paid for by a Pope, but it was done according to Michelangelo’s artistic vision and, as the painter’s ceaseless delays indicate, sense of timing. Art may be solicited and bought by others, and it may even serve their social or religious purposes, Zola implies, but it remains artistic only in so far as it does not pander primarily or exclusively to prevailing views, social and political ideologies or public tastes.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

Repression in Contemporary Art

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artistic freedom, artistic repression, artistic repression in contemporary art, censorship, censorship in art, censorship in contemporary art, Claudia Moscovici, elitism, freedom, freedom of expression, lack of freedom, lack of power of expression, no artistic freedom, no freedom, no freedom of expression, postmodernism, postromanticism, postromanticism.com, repression, repression in contemporary art, snobbery

We assume that artists are free to express themselves however they wish in Western societies. Aside from extreme and harmful forms of art, we believe that there is no censorship in the world art. I believe, however, that this so-called artistic freedom is largely illusory. Contemporary artists may have the freedom to express themselves however they wish, but many of them lack the freedom to be visible to the public. In the world of art and literature, for all practical purposes, what isn’t seen by the public doesn’t exist.

Artistic freedom and aesthetic value are interrelated. Art that is not considered valuable by the artistic establishment—art critics, museum curators and art historians—doesn’t even get the chance to be evaluated by the public.  Such art doesn’t make it to museums of contemporary art like the Guggenheim. It also doesn’t get discussed in the art sections of influential newspapers and art magazines. Analogously, literature that is not considered valuable by the publishing establishment—literary agents, editors, publishers and critics—doesn’t get a readership because it never makes it into print. So artistic freedom isn’t just about creating whatever one wants in the privacy of one’s home or studio without the fear of being arrested or shot for it.  Although this basic freedom is very necessary, artistic freedom also entails a correlate liberty: namely, the public’s freedom to be exposed to a wide variety of artistic and literary styles. That way we can make our own choices and express our personal tastes.  When there’s only one politician or political party to vote for on a ballot it generally means there’s no real freedom of choice in politics. When there’s only one artistic current or style displayed in museums of contemporary art it means there’s no real freedom of choice in art.

Artistic freedom requires an openness or pluralism in our cultural environment. It depends upon the artistic and literary establishments giving a variety of styles a fair shake. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that such an open-minded cultural environment exists in the art world in the United States today. I admit right away that I’m not impartial about aesthetic matters.  In 2002, the sculptor Leonardo Pereznieto and I began an international aesthetic movement, called postromanticism.com, which celebrates sensuality, passion and beauty in contemporary art.  But my argument for artistic freedom is more general than my preference for a certain type of art. I’d be curious to know if readers share my impressions of the contemporary art world (or not).

Many art critics are far more optimistic than I am. For instance, scholars who focus on contemporary art describe the liberating effect of “the end of art.” What they mean by this is that the elitist standards associated with the traditional art promoted by art academies and the salons, which made “good” art subject to very specific and rigorous rules, have died since the development of modern and postmodern art. In postmodern art in particular, they claim, artists can do whatever they please in a cultural environment where everything goes. Some scholars and art critics, such as Hal Foster (The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture) and Arthur Danto (After the end of art), celebrate this pluralism or interpret it as an inevitable cultural evolution. Others, like Susi Gablik (Has modernism failed?), tend to be somewhat more critical or at least ambivalent about it. Last but not least, organizations like artrenewal.org, begun by Fred Ross, lament the dissolution of aesthetic standards and promote Realism as an alternative.

In my estimation, this supposed artistic pluralism, or openness to diversity in art, is largely illusory. While it’s no doubt true that the hierarchy between “high art” or “good art” and “low art” or “bad art” has been seriously undermined, the kind of contemporary art that is displayed by museums of contemporary art or discussed by art critics and scholars who specialize in contemporary art remains strikingly uniform, even prescriptive. So while a pluralism in standards of value exists, it’s unfortunately overshadowed by a simultaneous dogmatism in the kind of art that’s being displayed, discussed and taken seriously by the artistic establishment for the past forty years or so. If one visits museums of contemporary art and departments of Studio Art and Design, one is struck by the conformity of thought and the similarity of artistic styles. One notices that only or primarily the art that’s currently considered “cutting-edge” and “postmodern” is presented as a valid part of the contemporary art scene.  By way of contrast, contemporary artistic styles that are more traditional in inspiration—especially Realism and Romanticism—are ignored or dismissed as “antiquated,” “old-fashioned,” “kitsch” or just plain “derivative.” The message of the current art establishment seems to be: “everything goes” as long as it’s not traditional, realist or resembles what the general public conventionally views as “art.”

If all or most contemporary artists created in a postmodern style, then the conformism would not be the direct result of any kind of dogmatism imposed from above by the artistic establishment.  Similarly, if the public only liked postmodern installations and ready-mades, then the fact that museums of contemporary art display such art would also be a reflection of the public taste. But that’s not what actually happens in our culture today. If anything, there seems to be aninverse relation between the art that the public prefers and what critics, scholars and museums curators consecrate. While the public tends to like and buy works in the Realist tradition, this kind of art is rarely featured in museums of contemporary art or discussed by art critics and scholars today. I find this automatic exclusion of certain artistic styles and dogmatic valorization of others a disturbing cultural phenomenon in a supposedly free and democratic society.

Growing up in Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu’s communist regime, I remember noticing the uniformity of contemporary art. During the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods, art had to be done in a certain “Social Realist” style. Sculptures and paintings commonly represented in a realistic (yet also idealized) style communist heroes fighting against our country’s invaders or workers combating the bourgeois oppressors. Drama and fiction predictably staged the on-going heroic battle of the proletariat against the threat (or temptation) of bourgeois values.  Granted, the dogmatism in art and literature was not one of the things that bothered our family most about living in totalitarian Romania. Nor was it what led us, ultimately, to immigrate to the United States. We had more pressing concerns than the impoverishment of high culture: we had to deal with the poverty of our daily lives. The lack of food and consumer goods and the constant monitoring by the Secret Police (Securitate) posed much more serious, and pressing, problems, which I depicted in my novel, Velvet Totalitarianism.  Nonetheless, the ideological homogeneity and censorship of art and literature was a symptom of a more general political and cultural repression: of the lack of choice and freedom that characterizes life in totalitarian regimes and that, by way of contrast, constitute two of the most attractive features of democratic societies.

After immigrating to the United States, I became especially interested in the link between artistic/intellectual freedom and political/social freedom. In college and graduate school, I studied literature and art: two aspects of culture that were dictated from above in communist Romania. It was not long before I noticed that contemporary art in Western countries also appears to be homogeneous, even if in a completely different (one could say, opposite) way from the Socialist Realism prescribed in Eastern Europe during the communist era. Rather than being Realist in style and bearing a clear ideological (Marxist) message, Western contemporary art seems to be deliberately anti-representational and anti-interpretation (as Susan Sontag describes the formalism of contemporary literature in her groundbreaking book, Against Interpretation). Some of the most important museums of contemporary art—the Guggenheim and MoMa in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris—consistently display pop art in the style of Andy Warhol and installations made up of trash and other materials and assisted ready-mades that carry the tradition of Duchamp to an extreme—all of which loosely fit into the flexible category of “postmodern art.”

I also noticed that the kind of art that actually sells in American galleries doesn’t seem to be the kind that’s displayed by museums of contemporary art or praised by art critics. If one visits art galleries all over the United States, one is much more likely to find contemporary paintings and sculptures in the Realist and Modernist traditions—up to and including Abstract Expressionism. The contrast between the kind of art that people enjoy seeing, buying and displaying in their homes or offices and the kind of art that critics praise may be a symptom of the fact that since the nineteenth century (more specifically, since Théophile Gauthier’s notion of “art for art’s sake” gained popularity) art has made certain claims to purely aesthetic value. Since then, critics have maintained that artistic value lies not in how well art sells (or its market value), but in its purely “aesthetic” qualities. The influential twentieth-century art critic Clement Greenberg, who popularized Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism in general, made the strongest case for this understanding of art solely on its own terms.

Yet in an era of supposed cultural pluralism, it seems somewhat suspect to assume that the kind of art that a large section of the general public prefers must necessarily be of poor quality. It’s also elitist and dogmatic to assume that only the art that critics and museums of contemporary art favor reflects “real” aesthetic value. Although the process of artistic consecration differs in the West from how art gained value in Eastern Europe during the communist era, the end result is, unfortunately, strikingly similar: artistic uniformity and conformism. Under communism, such uniformity was imposed from above by the state apparatus, through ideological indoctrination and censorship. In the United States, it occurs in a more complex, or “overdetermined” manner, through what the French sociologist of culture, Pierre Bourdieu, calls the processes of “consecration” which give art its “cultural capital”: namely, through the institutions that study, display, discuss and disseminate contemporary art. If art were truly democratic and the field of cultural production were truly pluralistic, as some critics maintain, wouldn’t a wide range of contemporary styles of art be granted value, provided that they were well executed? If I keep the qualifier—if they were well executed—it’s because, in my understanding, cultural pluralism doesn’t imply that all art is necessarily equal in quality. For as long as people will have standards of taste and value, by definition, not all art will be regarded as equally good or equally bad.

In my estimation, pluralism entails a democratization of art, where a wide range of diverse and distinct artistic styles are given a real chance to be considered, discussed and judged by the general public: by being displayed in museums, taught in courses, discussed by art critics and… debated on art and culture blogs, such as this one.  But pluralism in the sense that some postmodern critics use the word today–i.e. as the dissolution of the difference between “good art” and “bad art”—strikes me as dangerously similar to what occurred under the reign of Socialist Realism.  All Socialist art was by definition “good”: declaring that some artists were more talented than others was regarded as an old-fashioned and elitist bourgeois distinction.

Whatever the difference between good and bad art may be, I think that this distinction is worth preserving. A meaningful cultural pluralism doesn’t automatically do away with artistic standards. Instead, it multiplies the choices offered to the public. When a culture eliminates artistic choice and the standards by which people can evaluate different styles of art and presents only a few styles of art as valid—which is what I’m afraid is happening in our country today–the result is the flattening of art to ideology.

This creates a dull conformism that, no matter how much it’s justified or hailed by the artistic establishment, leaves the public feeling deeply skeptical about the value of contemporary art. As the New York art critic Suzi Gablik states, many people tend to view contemporary art “as a loss of craft, a fall from grace, a fraud or a hoax…” (Has Modernism Failed?, 13)  For art to be vibrant and alive in a culture, it has to be taken seriously—or at least enjoyed with pleasure—by a large section of the viewing public, not just by a small elite of critics, artists and scholars who appear to many of us to be praising the Emperor’s new clothes.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

Lady Gaga: The New Rococo Pop Princess

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art blog, Boucher, Claudia Moscovici, fashion, Fragonard, French fashion, Lady Gaga, Lady Gaga fashion, Lady Gaga Rococo, Lady Gaga: The New Rococo Pop Princess, Madame de Pompadour, pop culture, postromanticism, Rococo, Rococo style, style

The French have a saying about recycling the past: “Plus  ça change, plus ça reste la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same. This adage applies to the world of fashion more than to anything else. Lady Gaga, the international-sensation-pop-star-diva, is particularly well known for her far-out styles. These range from a bubble dress (which was literally made of bubbles!) borrowed from the fashion runway to the new Rococo styles that other singers, including Madonna and Christina Aguillera, popularized during the 1980’s and 90’s.

Eighteenth-century Rococo styles, in particular, are coming back in today’s music scene. Contemporary singers establish themselves in large part by setting a trend and having a signature style. Although Rococo fashions were once seen as outlandish and outdated, now they’re viewed once again as innovative, interesting and fun.

The Rococo period, also known as “late Baroque,” marked an era of aristocratic opulence and elegance, where the French kings’ official mistresses—particularly Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s paramour–set the tone for European fashion, interior design and art. The word “Rococo” itself denotes a decorative taste. It comes from the combination of the French words rocaille (meaning “stone”) and coquille (meaning “shell”) that were common Rococo motifs.

As is obvious in the paintings of the popular court artists François Boucher (1703-1770) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), Rococo celebrates opulence, grace, playfulness and sensual pleasure, by way of contrast to the seriousness of the earlier Baroque period.

For women in particular, Rococo fashions were feminine and flirtatious. A woman’s silhouette was created with the help of tightly fitted corsets and a panier, or round undergarment, that gave the long skirts more volume. The corsets were worn very low, practically exposing the breasts. We have seen this trend not just in Madonna’s and Lady Gaga’s sexy outfits, but also in the new hit movie, Burlesque, starring Cher and Christina Aguillera.

During the Rococo period, aristocratic women also powdered their hair, the way we might color and add gel to ours.  Eventually, to set themselves apart, they began wearing tall wigs which became so large (and housed all sorts of insects) that writers began ridiculing them in farces.  Lady Gaga’s ostentatious wigs may also appear ridiculous to some. But keep in mind that there’s no contemporary pop star that draws more attention to her style than Lady Gaga, the new Rococo Pop Princess.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

An Unlikely Cocktail: Mixing Pop with Bourbon in the Palace of Versailles

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An Unlikely Cocktail: Mixing Pop with Bourbon in the Palace of Versailles, art blog, art controversy, art criticism, art scandal, Claudia Moscovici, fine art ebooks, fineartebooks.com, Palace of Versailles, postromanticism, Takashi Murakami

What do you get when you mix the Bourbon tradition with Japanese Pop art in the Palace of Versailles? You get the newest scandal in the frequently scandalous world of contemporary art. Takashi Murakami’s exhibition at Versailles has not only stirred up controversy, but also provoked a lawsuit from the Prince Sixte Henri de Bourbon-Parme, a descendent of the Bourbon kings, in the name of “respecting the chateau and its ancestors.” M. de Bourbon-Parme claims that he’s not “against the modernity of art, but against a way of thinking that denatures and does French culture no good.”

Indeed, in some respects Murakami’s brand of pop art—which he calls “superflat”–couldn’t be more glaringly different from the Baroque splendor of Versailles. The palace embodies the triumphant power and control associated with Louis XIV, the Sun King who instituted Versailles as the seat of French culture and monarchic power.  By way of contrast, Murakami’s art couldn’t be more “plebian”. It’s influenced by Japanese comic books, turning pop culture motifs into greater-than-life, colorful and bizarre sculptures. One of Murakami’s most controversial piece, “My Lonesome Cowboy,” features a larger-than-life boy masturbating. This sculpture is absent from the Versailles exhibit. But the odd-looking pink teletubby perched on a globe of flowers (I don’t know how else to describe it) and the blond sexy maid in red high heels stick out like a sore thumb in Versailles’ majestic hallways and spectacular rooms.

Murakami himself attributes the scandal to “a misunderstanding” provoked by jealousy of his international success. Many of his sculptures sell for millions of dollars. In addition, the controversy generated by his art gives him the kind of international media coverage that many artists would have reason to envy. Ultimately, however, Murakami defends his Versailles exhibit in nobler terms, as a “face-off between the Baroque period and postwar Japan.” He hopes that this juxtaposition “will create in visitors a sort of shock, an aesthetic feeling.”

This sense of shock and aesthetic feeling is not altogether new.  It reminds us of other notable exhibits which first shocked popular taste, only to be later embraced as the landmarks of Paris. When it was first erected in 1889 The Eiffel Tower caused a stir. Similarly, the Centre Georges Pompidou (1977), which now houses the Museum of Modern Art, was viewed by many as an eyesore in the traditional Beaubourg area of Paris. Even I. M. Pei’s spectacular Louvre Pyramid (1989) was initially met with mixed reviews.

Of course, those who object to Murakami’s exhibit will find some solace in the fact that it will not be a permanent feature of Paris (it only runs from September 14 to December 12, 2010). But the argument the artist makes is similar to those who view the role of modern art as provoking viewers and providing a sharp contrast to past artistic traditions rather than attempting to emulate them or to fit in with their styles. Personally, I think that the contrast between Versailles’ ornate Rococo style and the playfulness of Murakami’s pop sculptures isn’t as striking as it may seem. The flowery and colorful Japanese displays could be viewed as a contemporary version of Rococo’s over-the-top ornamentation.

Yet, in some respects, it’s the traditional context of Murakami’s Versailles exhibit that lends his pop art some element of surprise. I sure wouldn’t be shocked or even mildly surprised to find it in contemporary art galleries or museums! When I step into any contemporary art gallery or museum I expect to find pickled sharks, crap ready-mades (sometimes literally!) and all kinds of post-Warhol pop art. By way of contrast, as I mentioned in my previous essay on the lack of genuine artistic freedom, nothing would shock me more than to find more traditional art—in the Realistic or Romantic traditions—in a Museum of Contemporary Art or discussed in the art section of prominent magazines. Perhaps this is why I’d find surprising, unexpected and refreshing a kind of chiasmic reversal: walking through the traditional splendor of Versailles to pass by Murakami’s comic book sculptures and walking through the “cutting-edge” galleries and museums devoted to contemporary art to discover age-old traditions, a new Romanticism or Realism, rediscovered and renewed by contemporary artists for our times. If this chiasmic reversal isn’t quite reciprocated, it’s because even though some people may vociferously complain about the newest fad in art, contemporary artists who aim to shock the public are in fact glorified and fetishized by the artistic establishment (by critics, the media and museums of contemporary art), while talented traditional contemporary artists are systematically ignored.  Given this inherent bias in the artistic establishment, pretty soon the “cutting-edge” art that’s supposed to shock and stir in us “aesthetic feelings” will be greeted by the public with a big yawn.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com