Questions & champions

Cleaning out my bookshelf a bit here, not a big job, but still enough to find some surprises--I found a copy of Paul Gauguin's "Cahier pour Aline" that a friend gave me a few years back for Christmas.  Re-reading passages I underlined I found the following (my translation):

"Like an artist. Art is for a small minority, it is itself aristocratic. Only the great lords have known to protect art, by instinct, by responsibility (by pride perhaps). It doesn't matter, they have helped in the creation of great and beautiful things. The kings and the popes, as such, treated artists as equals.

Modern democracy, bankers, ministers, art critics, they take on the air of being protectors of art, but they protect nothing, they make a commerce of art as if they were fish merchants at the market. How could you expect an artist to be republican!"

A "republican" in the French sense is someone who supports the modern democratically-elected government (there have been 5 different Republics in France since 1789) as opposed to the old absolute monarchy, which ended in 1789, which was reinstated in 1815, or the slightly more "constitutional" arrangement that came after 1830 in the person of Louis-Philippe, not to forget the two different "Empires" of the Bonaparte family.

The question he raises is not subtle though.  Can there be democracy in culture?   Can something as artificial (artificial in the sense of needing to have been acquired, learned, pondered, and studied, amongst other intellectual exercises) as artistic codes of excellence be decided upon by the great populace, even if limited to interested individuals?

It is loony to believe that artistic excellence can be voted upon and even though we do so endlessly nowadays ("People's Choice" this and that), I wonder if this democracy à la American Idol is not a ploy to do exactly what Gauguin is writing about -- to sell culture as merchandise, not to one king or one pope, but to as many people as possible.  Crowd funding is in general the recipe for bland white bread.

Artists do not necessarily work within an ivory tower, but choices are made daily, value judgements, the most idiosyncratic and individual ones imaginable.  Especially today, when there are absolutely no rules and no academies, daily decisions are made, down to the most critical and simple one -- do I continue to pursue this practice?

What is it that one champions and how does one ultimately find meaning in the pursuit of those ideals, that is really the question that is essential to any artistic practice.  It is not necessarily finding the new gimmick or "schtick" that sells or interests per se, it is about sticking to one's guns, believing in that original "calling" if you will, that brought one to make the decision to become an artist in the first place.

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Jacopo Zucchi, Amour et Psyché , 1589, huile sur toile, Rome, Galleria Borghese

At the Musée du Luxembourg right now, there is a fascinating exhibition called "Renaissance and Dream."  The exhibition traces, at times arbitrarily, the depiction of dreams, from Michelangelo, to Hieronymus Bosch.  The last painting in the exhibition is the one above by Jacopo Zucchi, the Florentine mannerist, depicting Psyche spying on the sleeping Eros, who is soon to be awakened by the dripping oil from his lover's lamp.  Whatever the neo-Platonic explanation of this narrative, the painting is fantastically supercharged with an abundance of exposed skin, languid muscle, ivory gray modeling of flesh, all of it asking to be caressed by one's gaze.  A painting like this, likely destined to be viewed in the privacy of a palace, is disconcerting when exposed in a public space like a museum with swarms of visitors and a museum guard sitting right next to it.   

Zucchi's career was mainly in the service of the powerful men of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.  He died at the age of 49, celebrated and rich.  It certainly was neither a democracy nor a republic that championed Zucchi's artistic enterprise.  His main patron was Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici.  The painting above, Cupid and Psyche, belongs to the Galleria Borghese, which  stems from the collection of Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli-Borghese, the great patron of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and also of Caravaggio.  He was amongst the earliest collector of the dark-eyed, dark-haired, pouty boys painted by Caravaggio, and, according to Robert Hughes, in his final book Rome, he was a homosexual.  During his life, he was known by his contemporaries for many scandals including that of having a collection of homo-erotic works of art.  That being the background, the overall effect of the Zucchi painting is not surprising.

Final note: the psycho-analyst Jacques Lacan noted that in the painting, Cupid is lying passively in slumber and literally castrated, his penis replaced by a bouquet of flowers, while Psyche is upright, powerful, brandishing a large sword in her right hand.