Life In The Bubble

This past Friday marked the halfway point of my second summer class--Art History. Despite the intensity of having to grasp 5000 years of artistic expression and philosophy within a one-month period of time, it's been a pleasure discovering and rediscovering what has always been a great passion of mine. I'm not an artist, by any means, but I derive a great deal of satisfaction from other people's talent. Take the pleasure of studying the great masters of painting, sculpture, and architecture and inject it with the entertainment value of historical contexts, and the result is me being one very happy camper for a month! (Actually, I'm a pretty happy camper on general principles...just FYI. Maybe a better phrase would be "entranced student.") The instructor is 'listenable' too, which is nice.

Have you ever thought about how art has been used in the past, and how it is used today? I was fascinated by the art found in French Rococo Period, because I could relate to it in a way that I couldn't with art in other time periods. First of all, the language that's used to describe the French Rococo style is incredibly revealing: decadent, confectionary, intimate (as opposed to the grand manner of Baroque styles). 'Decadent' in this sense is used to mean "not in cadence," or in other words, "out of step." Art during this time was patronized almost exclusively by the aristocracy, and the primary subject matter was predictably, the rich at play. The pieces that were produced during this time period reflect a condition that affected the upper classes of society and which ultimately led the French Revolution: a pervading lack of awareness of how the other half lived. Jean-Honore Fragonard, a popular painter of the time, was commissioned by Madame du Barry (Louis XV's mistress) to paint a series of fourteen canvasses entitled The Progress of Love (one of which is featured above). The results are truly some of the most sickeningly sweet pieces of art in the history of the world--you get cavities after two or three. The reason that they are so fascinating, however, is not because of what Fragonard included but because of what he left out of the picture: millions of starving peasants who could've cared less whether the love-struck boy featured in the series ever got his girl or not. Thus, the use of the term 'decadent' to describe the art of the time was absolutely correct: it was out of step with reality.

The same label could be tacked onto many of our art forms today. As a society, we're guilty of living in a bubble, oblivious to the neediness around us. Selfish and self-absorbed, we hoard our wealth instead of looking for ways to make the world better. We're insulated away from wars, famines, and disease, and are unable to empathize with the want in the world--there's no discomfort, but also no awareness.

To balance out my diatribe against society, I've also included one of my favorite works of art from roughly the same period (although not from the same country): Jan Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance. It illustrates a technique called tenebrism, which is basically spotlighting an image that the artist desires to emphasize. Vermeer painted mostly Dutch genre works, and many of his paintings contain symbolic elements (such as the balance the woman is holding and the painting of the Last Judgment on the wall behind her, which you probably can't see here because I didn't have the space to put a big enough image in my post). The element of balance is obviously very important to the painting, but the inclusion of the Last Judgment gives the scales a religious allusion as well. (Reminds me a little of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, for those of you who saw the movie.)

"To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are." --Eric Hoffer