So This Is The Quality!
Art Antagonistas Appeal to Admiring Anti-Aestheticists
[The sub-title is like a Bronx cheer, but with alliteration: “AAAAAAAY!]
A successful businessman uncle of mine instructed me, when, as a buyer, you tour a factory, to never disclose to the vendor what you really think. Rather, count the machines, headcount, estimate production capacity, turn-around time, etc. Neither offer praise, nor criticism: Praise raises the price; criticism antagonizes. Always flatly say, “So this the quality.”
Here is yet another Observer puff piece designed to make you think you’re reading “criticism,” but is, in fact, slyly crafted praise that reads to me like an attempt to raise prices. After all, the NY/Miami Beach axis of superwealthy art “cognoscenti” readership desperately wishes to read about themselves and the superlative discriminating sensibility their wealth must have inevitably brought them. “NO, NO, we can’t be Philistines! We are too wealthy! We set the trends…”
Even his signature motifs emerged largely from the chaos of the creative process. Deeply interested in mysticism and metaphysics, Slonem told me about an early painting of the 16th- and 17th-century Peruvian saint Martín de Porres, said to have levitated to the top of a 22-foot cross every night for years. (de Porres wasn’t canonized until the 1960s when he became the patron saint of mixed-race peoples, racial harmony and animals.) Slonem explained how he painted de Porres surrounded by a wild menagerie of animals. There wasn’t much of a market for religious art of that ilk in the 1970s, so he discarded the saint but kept the animals—setting the tone for the next five decades of his career.
SO THIS IS ART!
Most likely unknown to himself, the writer discloses the real motive hidden between his lettered lines: sales. Saints don’t sell to the super-wealthy, for these, their mates and their children, their friends, their networks, all have abandoned everything that is meaningful — certainly anything holy in a traditional sense, as the superwealthy for centuries used to — for an immersion in the cheap and temporary sensation-seeking material mundaneity to which their unhappy waking lives are devoted, incessantly requiring unceasing stimulation. Bunnies must sell, evidently. Even if they aren’t fluffy and even if you can’t get a good hand-swipe on downy fur every once in awhile.
But I suspect there are even more superficial reasons for the decision to abandon divine meaningfulness for animal crudity, made cutesy. Divine art requires genuine artistic talent and the rare ability to glimpse the Beauty WHICH IS THE BUSINESS OF ART.