Taking it all despite it all: some thoughts on the advantages of being a lucky bastard

William Adolph Bouguereau, "At the edge of the brook," 1875, 

On a Twitter feed this past week, @LaTribuneDuLard posted a painting of Bouguereau and wrote that it is the background of the background of Bouguereau's paintings which are the best parts of his work.  A point which I do not disagree with.  The problem with Bougueureau is that there is often very little background and the foreground is just putride.  In reply, Paul Perrin, a curator of painting at the Orsay Museum wrote, "It's funny, I am precisely in the process of writing a piece on the subject of Bouguereau-bashing (the poor guy was subject to criticism from his beginnings." [My translation].

The "poor guy" indeed.  This all gave me a bad taste in the mouth as the Oray Museum has since 1984, claiming to be an all inclusive museum of 19th century art, exhibited in great pomp and circumstances all the Pompier academics that the French State had collected, relegating the Impressionists and Post-impressionists to the 5th floor of the museum in the name of "natural light."  Whatever the case, to see the greatest Cézanne bathers, one needs to go to Philadelphia, to see the greatest Seurats, one needs to go to London and Chicago, and to see the greatest Gauguin, one cannot expect to find any here in Paris, one must go to Boston, or Saint Petersburg, not Paris.

Then came an astounding critique by Holland Cotter in the New York Times about this year's edition of the Venice Biennale, in which he ended by writing on the attempted come back by Damien Hirst, his grand wreck of an installation exhibited under the hospice of his patron François Pinault's exhibition spaces in Venice:

"So I don't have much to say about 'Treasures of the Wreck' except that it's there; that some people care; and that it's irrelevant to anything I know about that matters."

And of course, to cap off the arc of this story, we have Mr. Jeff Koons placing a giant tchotchke ballerina in pseudo-lushly-polished-titanium, an inflatable/deflatable ersatz of his usual bling-bling puerile grandiosity, licensing agreement in hand this time from the figurine's original Ukrainian designer's estate, to avoid possible lawsuits of plagiarism, of all places, at the Rockefeller Center.  Robert Hughes must have spun around three or four times in his grave.

Do you see the pattern?  Three artists, all male, who happen to be white, with rich patrons, Bouguereau and the Troisième République with its state patronage of state-approved artists at its official Salon sponsored by the state (not to mention the fact that the cultural shadow of Napoleon III's Second Empire lasted much longer than its demise in 1871), Damien Hirst and his luxury goods oligarch, and Jeff Koons at the Rockefeller center . . .

In essence, this all looks so much like our current President of the USA, shoving away another world leader and smugly tugging on his own suit tails, making that stupid smug face of his, relentlessly touting his own horn and pathetically making sure he is the center of attention.

The trend is alarming really.  No matter how many years, decades, centuries, of bad press, no matter how many different critics have decried their all consuming pervasive rot, these guys just seem to keep going, chugging on like the zombies that they are, the eternal return of the cis-white-male who wins, no matter what, and recruiting people, influential people, who should know better, to write their apologetics of greatness, bigness, supreme badASSness.

I know, yes, patience, karma is a bitch, but sometimes, it takes much too long for Karma to work.