"Art is a wound that becomes light"

At the end of his retrospective at the Grand Palais, there is a quote of Braque on the wall:

C'est l'artiste qui doit nourrir la peinture, la nourrir de sa chair, de son esprit, quasiment jusqu'à ce qu'il en perde connaissance, qu'il en perde son sang profond.  S'engager jusqu'au péril dans la voie de la fidélité totale.  L'art est une blessure qui devient lumière.

My translation:

It is the artist who must nourish painting, nourish it with his flesh, with his spirit, until he loses consciousness because of it, until he loses his deepest blood.  To engage himself to the point of peril in total fidelity to his path.  Art is a wound that becomes light.

It is strange to read this quote, so romantic and nearly mystical in its sentiment, expressed by Braque.  This paradigm of the artist-martyr is preponderant in the make-up of modern artistic culture.  It is celebrated in our shared histories -- the agony of the artistic genius who creates despite it all: Van Gogh, Rothko, Gonzales-Torres . . .

All this brings me to wonder about the pernicious logic that stands behind the following master narrative of an artist, which in essence is quite the contrary of what Braque speaks about:

An artist must absolutely forge a career by being represented by the best gallery possible because it is through the exposure that this affords that his work will gain in value as it becomes collected and speculated upon through auctions by the most important art collectors, who have become, with the end of art criticism as we once knew it, the real judges of worth.  As such, the artist will be remembered, and his work will be eternally preserved in the shrine of our culture's greatest institutions and museums.

This master narrative isn't very different from what would have been the 19th century version of success in the monarchies, republics and empires of France:

A painter must absolutely forge a career by finding official recognition in the state Salon, being welcomed into the ranks of the elite in order to find commissions and sales to the most noble, the wealthiest and most influential of taste-makers.  As such, the artist will be remembered, his work eternally preserved.

This sort of run-around, like a sort of maze that artists need to run through to end up ultimately on the good end of eternity (to be remembered rather than be forgotten), to find wealth and success, and have the "good life."

Of course, the need to have a "good life" is debatable.  Rothko once wrote: "It will be pointed out that the artist's lot is the same today, that the market, through its denial or affording of the means of sustenance, exerts the same compulsion." He had earlier spoken about prior societies' need to control and put into submission its artist. Later on, he finishes his thought by these strange yet exalting words:  "The freedom to starve!  Ironical indeed.  Yet hold your laughter.  Do not underestimate the privilege.  It is seldom possessed, and dearly won."*

I don't personally think there is an underlying plot to silence artists and conspiracy theories in general do not hold water.  Early 21st century societies in general, however, have been built on shared beliefs--the power of money, the finality of capitalism, the inevitability of this framework of exchange within the context of our sleepy democracies.  The things that our societies hold as dear and important are necessarily the things that will be embraced, and this is reflected in its cultural enterprises, or at least in its current form of culture.

Being in France, it is the readily available presence of the paintings of salon painters of the 19th century that reminds one that a whole society and culture can get it wrong.  The very bad salon paintings, exposed throughout the museums here (at the Musée d'Orsay here in Paris, at Montpellier's Musée Fabre, and the legion of others in all the larger cities here), remind us that humans have gotten it wrong over and over and over again.

The courtyard of the town hall in Arles, that Van Gogh painted.

* Mark Rotko. The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art.  Christopher Rothko, Ed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004.