Sitcom Ellen is at an art gallery. For a reason known only to the show’s writers she’s brought her philistine pals with her, and they’re now capering doltishly around, making embarrassing remarks without any respect for the art on display. Ellen makes one last, exasperated attempt to bring them back into line. This is a multimillion-dollar painting! she exclaims. The flower of civilization! Behave yourselves with decorum, as you would in any comparably important financial institution.
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As a result of continual hounding from investors and the marketplace, artists, to a degree greater than any group except their close relatives in fashion and advertising, know the intimate relationship that exists these days between transgression and investment. While previous centuries valued things like lavishness of display, verisimilitude, and piety, the various art movements of our time are united mostly by a common aim to smash art’s traditions and stand bourgeois propriety on its head. But throughout their hundred-year dash to startle, defy, and violate decency in every imaginable way, artists have never been able to shock the bourgeoisie enough to make them stop buying. No matter how they twist and turn, spit and spite, artists cannot seem to escape that annoying throng whose lavish spending and childlike enthusiasm increase with every new outrage and insult. Just as the advertising industry finds it useful to promise that a given product will deliver us from the everyday, will “break the rules” or “resist the usual,” so it is beginning to seem that an artwork’s cultural value, and ultimately its investment value, is directly related to its subversiveness.
After all, the charade of cultural rebel versus prudish bourgeois is central to the workings of our society these days. Where would Hawkeye Pierce have been without the hilarious counterpoint of Frank Burns? And who would buy Tropicana Twisters or Cinn-a-Burst gum if their ads didn’t feature a host of puritanical old folks cautioning against it? Rebel just doesn’t work without prude. This is common knowledge at the Reader’s Digest, a vigorous denouncer of offensive art which also doles out huge sums to artists every year and displays prominently in its offices a group of large photographs by none other than Robert Mapplethorpe. Gossip around Pleasantville has it that the photos appreciate every time Mapplethorpe is blasted in the Digest’s pages.
Monet may be the most prominent beneficiary of this strange state of affairs–what with the giant exhibition that’s just arrived at the Art Institute and the Oldsmobile commercials comparing his “audacity” to their pseudo-advances in “luxury performance car design”–but it was even more noticeable at the Art Institute’s earlier exhibit of paintings by “Urban Impressionist” Gustave Caillebotte. Leaving aside all their obvious and less obvious merits (I must admit I was particularly taken by one rendering of an uncooked roast), it is evident that Caillebotte’s pictures rank among the all-time libidinal favorites of the American middle class. You know the ones I’m referring to: nice-looking people in top hats and umbrellas wandering along the streets of Paris in the soft European rain. For many viewers the appeal is placid reassurance, no more. But the text that accompanies the paintings is stuffed not with references to Caillebotte’s affirmation of the bourgeois vision, but with homages to his subversive daring, his positive defiance: we read of “Caillebotte’s readiness to challenge the norms of picture-making,” of his “unorthodox viewpoints and radical compositions,” of his “readiness to subvert traditional themes and challenge even the norms established by the Impressionists,” of how “Critics denounced this painting…because it was seen as subverting the natural order of male-female social relationships.”
And as long as we’re at it, let’s go all the way: Diego Rivera? A genius, a true subversive. Warhol? A posturing conformist buffoon. The unknowns who illustrated all those WPA buildings? Dynamic revolutionaries in the raw, questioning every inherited piety of the 20th century (too bad you can’t get those murals off the walls and sell them). Anyone who’s ever executed one of those teeth-grindingly stupid ads for Absolut vodka? A certified commercial charlatan. Get thee to an ad agency.
