The Game of Art Part I

The last time I entered an art museum, sweaty in short sleeves and hunched over a baby stroller, the distracted, no longer young man emitting the air of a person not at peace with himself who was working the front desk took one look at me, handed me a brochure and an audio recording and said "Rembrandts to the left, Impressionists to the right. We close in half an hour". Perhaps if I had been a few years younger I would have protested that in fact I had just come in, having waited even for my little boy to fall asleep and all, to take a quick perusal of the Fragonards and Watteux of which I was pretty certain this museum (it was the National Gallery in Washington) had several particularly famed examples. However I forewent responding to this challenge, and declined as well to attempt to inflame the atmosphere with any of that danger and intensity of an antagonistic personality such as serious art appreciators are supposed to crave above all else, and dutifully went to wander through the Impressionist rooms as was expected of me. Naturally within ten minutes I was as unthinkingly soothed and comforted as the director of the gift shop could have expected me to be, with only an occasional passing flurry before my mood that to be soothed and comforted so breezily without the electricity an encounter between a pair of superior minds could be expected to generate was to be missing the greater purpose behind the production of such work. Badly.

After this I became interested in the hierarchical designations which certain artists represent to the general museum-going public, as that is no doubt a large part of the pleasure of the experience. The range of my examinations of this game extends from that part of the middle class which has a certain pride in being humanistically educated but for whom doing anything that one might think typical of a humanistically educated person (such as being attentive to rules of grammar, or studying) appears singularly uninstinctive, to that portion that has actually attained a highly refined aesthetic life, without quite having taken on a truly artistic one. True artists of course have their own exquisite games, being marked however by the highly individual personality and taste of such people, which are virtually impossible for those who are not of their number to get at well enough to explain. But as several astute commentators have pointed out, there are enough quasi-hip and attractive singles hanging around the cafes and string quartet performances at the MoMa to make the effort to become a reasonably well-informed aesthete not entirely a waste of time.

The Impressionists, I believe, are generally the first painters other than Norman Rockwell and famous children's book illustrators with which the earnest, perpetually nonplussed type of American bourgeois inquisitive about culture engages with some enthusiasm. The common explanation for this is that compared with almost everything else in the European tradition, the Impressionists do not require much in the way of either education or knowledge of the world to feel that they are kind of sexy and that one has gotten somewhere with them right away. As those of us who enjoyed limited sensual affection in our adolescence and early manhood are forever loyal to those couple of pretty girls who allowed us to touch them whatever dreadful things the world may say about them, Americans of a certain kind are loyal to the Impressionists, as anyone who has attended a Manet exhibition or attempted to tour the grounds of Giverny can certainly attest. All this popularity, needless to say, cannot but make the truly sophisticated wary, to the point that even purchasing an original Degas for millions of dollars invites a certain condescension in serious art circles, such expense often being explained away as the flailing about of new money in a milieu which it is only interested in and can only understand upon its own terms of investment and dollar value. In all of this of course it is not so much that the painters themselves whom one wishes to degrade and distance oneself from, but the grossly voluptuous, substantially empty wine and madeleine-misted Francophilia that they have a tendency to inspire. I myself used to be convinced that if I could ever become fluent in speaking the French or any other major cultural language I would impress sophisticated people and beautiful women and that my life would change, and it is still one of the disappointments of my life that I was never able to do this. It is however typical of the half-developed ridiculousness of mind that creates a market for Vincent Van Gogh playing cards, and which actually brings a certain happiness to the purchaser of said cards upon seeing them in his desk drawers nearly ten years after his purchase.