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17 Artistic Interlude II: The Abyss of Distinction
- University of Illinois Press
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17 Artistic Interlude II: The Abyss of Distinction I had only been in the Louvre once before, and only for a couple of hours.The immensity of it is too daunting; the nightmare of déjà vu corridors and endless,airless cocktail-party drawing rooms where grandiose paintings hang around stiffly, not speaking to you. So the previous time I was in Paris, when I arrived to find a museum workers’ strike in progress, I felt a sense of happy reprieve. I stood around watching a robotic device cleaning the windows of the glass pyramid over the entrance: clearly, somebody needs to teach these robots about solidarity. But the next time I came I had no excuse not to go in, and even though I arrived (prudently, I thought) at three, I had not counted on the museum being open until 9:30 p.m. that day. Its size makes the Louvre exemplary in shouting at you the question all museums ask: how do you decide what to look at and what to pass by? I opted unimaginatively for one of the house specialties, Italian Renaissance, and started walking down the corridor of the museum’s Denon section, a couple city blocks and five centuries long, waiting to see what might pop out at me and get me to stop and look. But all the paintings seemed to have been painted to pop out, human figures and faces leaping off canvases, giant pink people looming against indigo skies and gold leaf. With everything popping out so much all over the place, it felt a little like watching nonstop ads on TV. I started thinking how different it must have been to encounter one of these paintings in their long-lost world of origin, a world with no synthetic colors, no neon and no electric lights and no continual barrage of two-dimensional images. Those big pink people must have really popped out like magic. Even now,some of the more famous ones did manage to buttonhole me as I walked 16-22.109-182_Livi.indd120 9/27/053:29:05PM along (Oh, hello—Raphael, isn’t it? You’re looking good—and the dragon, too! Well, I must be going—nice to see you). I continued to reformulate the question the museum had posed to me, wondering how much the question of whattolookat is about the museum and how much, if at all, it’s about the art. Of course, a museum is supposed to be about the art displayed in it, but how much is the art really just interchangeable filler for the rigorously controlled aesthetic interlude the museum orchestrates or,more to the point, for the punishingly massive and smug spectacle of real and symbolic hoarded state wealth (excuse me, I must have meant to say “the immense glories of Western civilization”)? And still more to the point, how much of the art was already about versions of those things in the first place? The first things that really grabbed me were the daVinci paintings. If they can be said to pop out, it is because seemingly for the first time in history, at least in the highly selective version presented in this corridor of the Louvre, they seemed to be painted to notpopout. What they did instead was gently recede, faces and hands slipping softly into velvety shadows, muted twilight colors, landscapes fading into the distance.When I finally came to the Mona Lisa, what struck me most was not her famously ambiguous smile or her more interestingly ambiguous sex but her ambiguous depth. A face, maybe life-size or maybe miles wide and miles away, seemed to be peering out of a black hole in the middle of the canvas, from some other dimension, a hand emerging from the depths to grasp an arm, around what must have been a torso, hidden in curtains of dark cloth. For all the desensitization of this image by centuries of bad copies, kitsch, and parodies, the painting just doesn’t quit: thisthingisweirdashell. Maybe this was part of Leonardo’s brilliant pitch: since everybody’s got those pop-out pink-people paintings (I can hear him saying), you gotta get one of my non-popper-outers if you really want to make yourself pop out, the real understated oldmoney way. Or was this Leonardo Effect something engineered by the museum? Maybe, I thought, because they...