The Perils of Art Revisionism (2018)

We live in an age where every voice is projected through the megaphone of social media, and every opinion is elevated to Olympian heights of authority, no matter how baseless, uninformed, or just plain wrong. With depressing regularity within this artificial, self-absorbed arena, there are attempts to denigrate culturally significant figures from the past because of their political beliefs, their presumed misogyny, or their ‘difficult’ personalities etc. Their creative contribution to culture is invariably ignored by the complainants, whose ‘arguments’ spring entirely from their C21st perspective. A recent example of this kind of retro-denigration is Pablo Picasso. I shall return to this shortly.

The dawning of the Internet, in the 1990s, was an exciting event of incalculable importance for civilisation. A ceaseless tide of information could be disgorged endlessly into everyone’s homes. This revolutionised and democratised the getting of wisdom. For the first time in the history of humankind people were free to access an endless stream of data, both lowbrow or highbrow; frivolous or serious; non-scholarly or academic. The effect of this, however, was that all information was now suddenly homogenised and, by extension, seen to carry the same weight of authority.

The hierarchy of imagery was also suddenly lost. From personal experience as an art lecturer of over three decades standing, I found that from the end of the 1990s, students were more likely to search online for an artist’s images than to walk across to the library and pick up an art book. Indeed, I came to understand that many students had never even set foot in the library by the end of their courses. Consequently, when they scrolled through the Google suggestions for an artist’s work, any number of other images would flash up as well. The ‘pecking order’ of quality had suddenly dissolved. Now, for instance, a great masterpiece by Caravaggio, featuring an angel, would be seen, cheek by jowl with a kitsch, ham-fisted angel daubed, say, by a 12-year-old in West Virginia; or a bizarre Manga monstrosity etc. This has had the effect of devaluing all imagery in the homogenising online melting pot. A similar effect can now be observed with human online interaction, where opinion is stated as fact, and where feelings are presented as absolutes.

Which brings me back to my opening point. In recent months, a Melbourne comic has launched a well-publicised campaign against Picasso - an artist whose towering creative genius and unparalleled artistic vision have immeasurably influenced western art and culture. The Melbourne comic’s opinion was summed up by the comment, "I hate him". Her position was ‘validated’ in the media on the flimsy pretext that she had once taken a brief Art History component of a college course as an undergraduate, where she apparently learned what a bastard the artist was in actual life. Unfortunately, her combative stance has nothing to do with empirical art history and everything to do with feel-good, gossipy, revisionist, wishful thinking.

It is a grave mistake to assess any historical figure from the perspective of one’s own era. It is probably safe to say that everybody who has ever lived has felt that their own period of existence on this planet is the pinnacle of all that has been before. There are things that we take for granted today which would be unheard of even 100 years ago. Codes of behaviour continually modify over the centuries; social mores shift and change over time. Artists, writers and musicians are as prone to emotional turmoil as everybody. But they are products of their period in history, as are we all.

The revolutionary Baroque painter, Caravaggio, once, in a rage, smashed an earthenware jug against a waiter’s head; he later killed a man with an ill-judged point of a rapier to the groin. What a psycho! But we may not ignore his astonishing contribution to western art. The astounding Renaissance sculptor, Gianlorenzo Bernini, bashed his brother with an iron bar when he discovered that he had been sleeping with his lover, Costanza. He then paid a servant to slash Costanza’s face. What a brute! But this does not mean that we may dismiss his exquisite sculptures – such as ‘The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa', which is amongst the most sublime creations of western art. The irascible Edgar Degas believed that it was a waste of time to educate the children of the poor – but in this he was no different from any other member of the French bourgeoisie at the time – he was also furiously anti-Semitic. What a cad! But we may not disregard one of the greatest draughtsmen (or women) who ever lived. Jean Genet was a thief and jailbird, who constantly ratted out his criminal buddies in order to save his skin. What a little shit! But he was responsible for novels of great poetic power, and we may not reject him. Virginia Woolf was a staunch anti-Semite, who also thought that her servants were worthless and didn’t deserve a decent life. What a creep! But she is held in high regard as a proto-Feminist writer. Pablo Picasso had many lovers, and he was undoubtedly as chauvinistic as most heterosexual Spanish men of his time. What a turd! But this does not give us permission to write his work out of culture. Put simply, these artists have an unassailable position in human history. The list goes on. It is essential that we separate the art from the artist.

We may not like the artist personally - for any number of reasons - but the work they produce is the important factor, for it is this which nourishes humanity. A certain Melbourne comic would do well to remember that.