Art and Power

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Paris ≠ Art follows power like a leashed dog.

    This sad truth came home again to me this week as I dragged myself through the Louvre, in company of tens of thousands of other tourists. Like the Metropolitan, like the Getty, like the Uffizi, like the Prado, like the National Galleries of London and Washington, the Louvre has more than you can see in a month of Sundays, and is a conspicuously tortured context in which to see it.

   The collection is, of course, breathtaking. And though I pushed my way through thongs of picture-takers to get a gander at Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks and the absurdly fetishized Mona Lisa, though I eddied briefly within the human river before masterpieces by Raphael and Ghirlandaio, it was the quieter galleries of northern European art that took my breath away: Albrecht Durer's [two dots over the u] self-portrait, Georges de La Tour's [capitalization correct] candle-lit faces, Hans Holbein's Erasmus, intensel-observed still lifes.

     Art was centralized simultaneously with political power on an international scale, and the collections housed in Louvre ≠ and indeed the absurdly huge and ostentatious building itself ≠ were the products and the symbols of royal and imperial wealth and conquest. Our National Gallery, like our capital city as a whole, is a claim to equal status to the great aesthetic displays of power that are Rome and Paris, Luxor and London, Moscow and Beijing.

    Many people ≠ in particular, museum directors ≠ argue that all great art should only be housed in mega-museums on the grounds that they have the best security and the best technologies for preservation. But absurdly, much of the collections of these museums is housed in basement vaults, removed to the galleries for occasional display, otherwise seen only by specialists. Museums quietly "de-accession" works of art, but for the most part everything that is widely admired or discussed gravitates toward the mega-museum.

   This removes art from people's everyday lives and makes it the sublime object of tourism.

    Rather than slogging through the Louvre, glancing at each masterpiece, you'd find out more about art by paying your 8 Euros and making a beeline for a particular work, looking at it for ten minutes and leaving. But I daresay the Louvre is not designed or well-suited for that sort of use: from Raphael to Vermeer is a good half-mile.

    Just as power ought to be decentralized, so ought art to be. It would be a good idea to distribute the masterpieces of the Louvre to a couple of hundred small museums, and maybe drop a few on other public spaces and even private homes.

    Of course, despite the Sovietizing of art in the mega-museum, art still inhabits plenty of other contexts. An exquisite contrast to the Louvre is another of Paris's museums, the Musee [right-leaning accent over first e] Marmottan, where perhaps thirty Monets keep company with some sketches from other impressionists and decorative arts from a variety of periods. It's quietly housed in what was once a private home ≠ albeit a grand one. You can walk right up to the insanely gorgeous paintings ≠ "Impression: Sunrise" (from which impressionism took its name) being the most famous ≠ and spend as long as you like. Then you can walk away and then return. You came because there was something you wanted to spend time with, not because no one comes to Paris from Ohio or Osaka without going to the Louvre.

    Wealth and political power work to control every aspect of culture, from television and publishing to architecture and music. But the hopeful thing is that these things keep escaping, that the way people make and experience things is always a step or two ahead of the institutions annexing their expressions.

    The institutions of power ≠ political and corporate - make art: they shape space for the purpose of impressing or intimidating people. The imperial architecture of Paris or of Washington dwarf the human and express the augustness with which empires want themselves to be regarded. If there is a single message of these cities, it is this: resistance is useless.

    But by their very vastness such embodiments of power inadvertently create hiding places: the small spaces of escape and subversion without which they will in the long run have no culture to annex. The Salon des Refuses [right-leaning accent over final e], in which the impressionists whom the official salon could not tolerate exhibited, mutates into the Musee D'Orsay, where they take up their place in the official narrative of the glorious march of French culture.

   Eventually, there will be museums of hip hop and punk, museums of graffiti and customized motorcycles and computer hacking. Perhaps there are already museums of these things, ways they can be made to speak for the glory of the authorities.

    But from the corners, under the ground, nestled amid the refuse, the anarchy and discipline of creativity rises still as a challenge to power.