The Lost Arts

There were both too many metal guitarists for a stately ceremony on the Seine, and yet, too few. When the broadcast cut to a wide shot of the Conciergerie, it revealed nothing, nothing—a vast expanse of beige wall with a few ant-like figures crawling in its cracks. The primary image of the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony was emptiness–literal, visual emptiness. Strangely, the planners seemed not to have considered the composition of the huge widescreen shots, so the set pieces on the Seine looked eerily unpeopled—strange puppet-like dancers on pogo sticks floated sparsely and aimlessly in the glowering sky above the Pont Neuf like the souls of the unbaptized in Limbo. A pre-recorded video set in a library was, the announcers intoned, meant to celebrate French literature. Not a word was spoken or read. The only parts of books we saw were the covers. The now-infamous banquet table-cum-catwalk was likewise curiously barren, looking awfully Lenten for the Dionysian banquet we are now assured was intended. Where were the overflowing cornucopias of voluptuous summer fruits? The steaming platters of roast meats dripping in fat? Where, in fact, was the wine? A self-serious sobriety reigned. Don’t you dare revel. In their haste to kill the Catholic God, it seems the French may have also caught Dionysus in the crossfire.

Before dismissing the opening ceremony as an ephemeral TV spectacle, recall that the greatest artists in history often supported themselves by designing ephemeral spectacles for the courts of kings, particularly in France. Louis XIV funded elaborate mock naval battles at Versailles and his court entertainments codified ballet as an art form. Leonardo da Vinci created celebrated court masques and celebrations which are now lost to time. Ben Jonson wrote court masques for 20 years.

Oscar Wilde famously quipped that when good Americans die, they go to Paris, but where are we supposed to go now that the vapid, jewel-toned aesthetics of global capital have conquered the city of lights? Americans previously marked out for a celestial reward may even now be floating in a lukewarm Purgatory, the flood of Americanish global homogenization overflow having washed them out of Heaven itself, lost, without a Paris to go to, like the aforementioned unbaptized souls of babies who the post-Vatican II Church has announced were never in Limbo at all.

In fact, images of the afterlife abounded, none of them particularly reassuring. Down the grey, Styx-like Seine came a parade of dreary, rained-on boats. The ghost of Marie Antoinette sang headlessly from the windows of the actual building where she was held before her death. What to make of such a tasteless display? The ghost of Marie Antoinette, if indeed she does walk, can hardly have expected better treatment after what she received in life. Unlike her husband, she was subjected to sexual and bodily humiliation during her imprisonment, and her eight-year-old son was induced after long imprisonment with adult men to accuse her of lurid sexual crimes against him–charges that even at the time were considered shamefully false. Also, unlike her husband, who still retained some superstitious respect as the French king, the foreign-born queen was denied last religious rites in accordance with her faith. Legend states that a Catholic priest whom she recognized stood in a window as her tumbril passed to absolve her from sin from afar, at peril to his own life. When she saw him, she became calm and met her death with dignity.

After the ghoulish spectacle of Marie Antoinette’s headless body appeared, a flimsy, cardboard-like boat, presumably Charon’s, appeared to ferry---who?---to Hell. Marie Antoinette remained in her window, but an opera singer was a passenger, having previously been tortured by the sounds of Les Miserables and heavy metal.

To briefly address the aspect of the opening ceremony that has received the most attention: a group of drag queens and trans and gender-non-conforming performers seemed to recreate da Vinci’s Last Supper. After trads complained online, the organizers tentatively suggested that actually the work being re-created was a Bacchanalian feast. Does it matter? Either interpretation seems a bore. If someone had opened one of the books in the very photogenic library, they might have found a more illuminating allusion. For example, Saint Wilgefortis, a 14th century AFAB who, in order to preserve her holy virginity after her father arranged an unwanted marriage, prayed for and received a beard so off-putting that her would-be husband fled (her father had her crucified). For example, Saint Marina, a fifth century saint who disguised herself as a male monk with such success that she was accused of impregnating a local peasant girl and whose sex was not discovered until her death.

But in any case…satirizing the Catholic church? The phrase “to beat a dead horse” comes to mind, but it’s more than that; it’s spitting on an icon of a powerless god. The desecration of an altar has lost the power to shock; it is an empty gesture. Raoul Vaneigem, the Belgian Situationist, wrote in his 1967 book The Revolution of the Everyday that “pissing on the altar is still a way of paying homage to the Church.” Lines from his book were oft-quoted in graffiti during exuberant, iconoclastic, even nihilistic May 1968 riots in Paris.

In this case, the altar being pissed on is not the altar of a Catholic church, but the altar of modern art itself. Since at least the 1880s, the purpose of art has been contested: while traditionalists maintained that art’s purpose was to create beauty out of the chaos of the world, modern artists proposed that the purpose of art was to shock, provoke, and offend. For roughly a hundred years, the beautyists and the shockists fought it out, with the shockists steadily gaining ground and ultimately winning.

But who today is shocked by satire against the Catholic Church? By drag? By gender bending? By a headless queen? No one that matters to the Olympic planning committee, and they know it. The horse is dead, like God, like the idea of art for the sake of beauty. Contemporary art is no longer made to shock—it is imminently safe. The idea of really shocking anyone really important is no longer possible in an art world dominated by elite international capital. Having jettisoned the idea of making beauty long ago, what is art in the 21st century for? No wonder the Seine was so empty. I’m not sure the designers of this spectacle know what their purpose was. To flatter capital? To comfort the PMC elite? To condescend to their class enemies?

These are the pat, political answers that anti-woke crusaders might give, but I don’t think it’s that simple. I think the world of visual arts is lost, directionless, floating, in a wilderness. It does not know what it wants to be–-without form, and void, darkness upon the face of the deep. We’re not in hell, but Purgatory. Perhaps with enough fasting and penance, we will find our way out.

Or maybe beauty, not pain, is the way forward. Once, when I was in art school, I tentatively confessed to an academic counselor that one of the purposes I had as an artist was to create beauty. Genuinely shocked, she warned me that to seek to create beauty was “a little bit fascist.” To this, years later, I’d like to ask, why are we giving away beauty? Why do we think so little of ourselves and ask for so little? Do we hate ourselves so much for the crimes humanity has committed that we think we don’t deserve beauty? Maybe we can let go of fasting and penance for a while and reach for the light.