Precisely five centuries ago this year, 1511ce, Michelangelo illuminated the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the "Creation of Adam." Also that year brought Raphael's "The School of Athens," Durer's "Small Passion," Titian's "Salome'," the publication of the first illustrated edition of Vitruvius' "De Architectura;" working were da Vinci, Fra Bartolomeo, Bellini, Grunewald, and on ad gloriam.
By way of comparison, about 1,500 years earlier the wealthiest of the wealthy, Nero, was sold a single crystal wine glass for what is considered to be the equivalent of one million dollars-US today. The vaporous and vapid who float, stratospheric above we lesser grubby earthbound souls have changed little since either Nero or Veronese. Though all those of wealth are by no means shallow more than ever enjoy inflating their egos with the feted gas of vulgar excess in the art market. Silly piddlings of thought, weak exercises not of art, but art theory are made to seem important only by the outrageousness of their price tags.
Nero's wineglass no longer exists. If it does it is either earthbound or sitting, ignored and unrecognized in some backwater museum on a shelf labeled "glass, Roman, c 100ce" for which the museum likely paid in the range of two or three thousand dollars. It's prior value based solely on a fool with endless means, his absolute belief in his own genius - and a crafty salesman.
Today's art-world Neros are still fiddling - and themselves being well played - while worthy thought burns. Financially tubby intellectually anorexic these art market gasbags float blissfully self-satisfied in the rarified outermost stratosphere of cutting edge "art." These happy, vapid few are constantly on the lookout for something - anything - that can make them appear to have the prominence and intellectual mettle they are absolutely convinced they possess. Petite Neros, they mistake great wealth for great worth and great hucksters for great advisors.
Clambering against each other to occupy the cutting edge, the needle's tip of Kandinsky's metaphoric inexorably rising triangle of spiritual and aesthetic evolution they fail to attend to his caveat that periods of spiritual deadness in art are marked by the overwhelming desire to possess an object of value rather than to experience a work of art's spiritual depth. And so they make smut of art and art of folly.
Imagine now, if you will, the year 2511, five hundred years opposite our current place relative the monumental thought, the humanist genius of the Renaissance. Assuming any of the current crop of art mag fodder survives our society, our common intellect could actually be gauged by crumpled auto bumpers, a single florescent light bulb (then having been changed 1,214 times) glowing numbly at a carefully placed 45 degree angle 3.5" off the floor, the astonishing buffoonery of self portraits in frozen blood and floors painted in vaginal effluent with the artist's head of hair as brush.
There, too, baffling or worse boring our descendants is the utter, cynical folly of a dead baby bull bristling with ever so sinister black painted arrows strategically malleted into it's still-born carcass (the queasy artist would never sully his own karma by actually killing it himself, I mean get real!) and hung from the neck by a wire in a fishtank of formaldehyde. Get it? Why, yes, of course! It's St Sebastian! How frightfully droll ....and only 5.6 million dollars plus 50,000.00 every time it's hauled out for a showing. Fabulous!
I can see it on the museum shelf there in 2511 - half of it precipitated to the bottom of its murky little tank, a card under it "American, c 2011pce, preserved animal specimen, unknown ritual."
Pickled bullshit.
Read it three times. Will undoubtedly read it again. Each time I enjoyed it more than the last. Like a fine wine, remorse of the dwindling after taste. As I inched closer to the end, anxiety gripped me AGAIN... thinking, "why does this have to end"?
ReplyDeleteHugs,
Pen