From Ritual to Commodity

ART 100Module 3.2

Beginnings in ritual

Lascaux cave, Dordogne region of France, Hall of the Bulls, c. 15,000 BCE

“Magician” or “Birdman” from Lascaux

Historians speculate: this is not “art” but may be a magical technique used as part of rituals preparing for the hunt.

The Game

As ritual:

You are an active participant

Everyday rules don’t apply in this deviation from ordinary space/time

Sacred beverages are consumed

As spectacle: You are consigned to

watch someone else doing something; your role is limited to viewing.

Football as ritual

The Game

As ritual: You are an active

participant Everyday rules don’t

apply in sacred space/time

Sacred beverages are consumed

As spectacle: You are

consigned to watch someone else doing something

Your role that of viewer, even, element of spectacle.

Football as spectacle

Ritual/spectacle

RITUAL

Everyone participates; there is no such thing as a spectator.

SPECTACLE

Extremely few participants, untold millions of spectators.

An ordered representation of a chaotic and often hostile universe, expressing our wish for a desired outcome.

An ordered representation of a chaotic and often hostile universe, expressing our wish for a desired outcome.

decoration

So if art finds one set of origins in ritual, it finds another in the human tendency to decorate anything and everything that we make.

useful objects: combs

Jade comb,China,c. 400 BCE

Ivory comb,Etruscan (ancient Italian)6-5th century BCE

useful objects: swords

Ancient Persia, , c. 750-650 BCE sword hilt, silver, (iron blade)

Ancient Korea, Bronze Age sword hilt,Between 900-300 BCE

assertions of wealth & status

Precious courtly objects

THE ORIGINAL BLINGHTTP://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=TSYLLWZ5JP8

Precious courtly objects

Objects like these were created to impress and intimidate.

Status and power

“I’m the king, and you are not.”

“This are the symbols of my worldly power and wealth.”

Rihanna, Nov. 2009

Napoleon in his coronation garb, painted onporcelain after a lost painting by Gérard.

What creates value in art?

Reliquary of Ste.-Foy at Conques

Real gold Painted gold

Skill

Simone Martini (and Lippo Memmi), The Annunciation, tempera on panel with gold leaf, c. 1333, 10’1” x 8’8”

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, fresco in cell 3, Convent of San Marco, Florence , c. 1440

Simone Martini (and Lippo Memmi), The Annunciation, tempera on panel with gold leaf, c. 1333, 10’1” x 8’8”

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, fresco in cell 3, Convent of San Marco, Florence , c. 1440

Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece (open), completed 1432, Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent, Belgium

Jan van Eyck, Mary Crowned, detail of the Ghent Altarpiece, completed 1432, Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent, Belgium

Jan van Eyck, Mary Crowned, completed 1432Jan Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665-6, oil on canvas, 17 1/2 x 15 3/8 inches

Vatican City, Rome

The monumental Papal Basilica (St. Peter’s) is at the heart of this miniature state.

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1499, marble, 68.5 in × 76.8 inches St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican, Rome

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1499, marble, detail of the Virgin’s face St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican, Rome

Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Juan de Pareja, c. 1650Oil on canvas

Diego Velázquez, Surrender of Breda, 1634-5,oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid

Diego Velazquez, Los Borrachos (The Drinkers), 1629

Diego Velázquez, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, 1618

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1619

Annibale Carracci, Assumption of the Virgin, 1600-1601Oil on canvas, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome (in Cerasi Chapel)

 

Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600, oil on canvas, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome (Contarelli Chapel)

Goya, Charles IV of Spain and His Family, 1800

Goya, Countess of Chinchòn, 1800

King Ferdinand VII with a Royal Mantle, 1814, Prado

Thomas Couture, Romans of the Decadence, 1847

Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882

François Boucher, Diana Leaving Her Bath, 1742Louvre, 22x28"

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Punished Son, 1777Louvre, 51x64"

Jacques Louis David, Death of Socrates, 1787Met, 51x77"

“You emerge through a stairwell like a trapdoor, which is always choked despite its considerable width. Having escaped that painful gauntlet, you cannot catch your breath before being plunged into an abyss of heat and a whirlpool of dust. Air so pestilential and impregnated with the exhalations of so many unhealthy persons should in the end produce either lightning or plague. Finally you are deafened by a continuous noise like that of the crashing waves in an angry sea. But here nevertheless is a thing to delight the eye of an Englishman: the mixing, men and women together, of all the orders and all the ranks of the state….This is perhaps the only public place in France where he could find that precious liberty visible everywhere in London. This enchanting spectacle pleases me even more than the works displayed in this temple of the arts. Here the Savoyard odd-job man rubs shoulders with the great noble in his cordon bleu; the fishwife trades her perfumes with those of a lady of quality, making the latter resort to holding her nose to combat the strong odor of cheap brandy drifting her way; the rough artisan, guided only by natural feeling, comes out with a just observation, at which an inept with nearby bursts out laughing only because of the comical accent in which it was expressed; while an artist hiding in the crowd unravels the meaning of it all and turns it to his profit.”

—Pidansat de Mairobert, 1777

“Myself, I maintain that in the Salon where the paintings are displayed, the public changes twenty times a day. What the public admires at ten o’clock in the morning, is publicly condemned at noon. Yes, I tell you, this place can offer twenty publics of different tone and character in the course of single day: a simple public at certain times, a prejudiced public, a flighty public, an envious public, a public slavish to fashion, which in order to judge wants to see everything and examine nothing. I can assure you that a final accounting of these publics would lead to infinity. I must allow that the Salon can always be filled with these same kinds of people, but believe me, after having heard then all, you will have heard not a true public, but only the mob, and not at all that public on which we should rely. Let us not confuse the one with the other; the mob at first rushes forward passionately, speaks with vehemence, fears to waste in reflection those few moments it devotes to its oracular pronouncements. But time in the end moderates its passions: it is then that one is able to hear the knowing public that the mob hides in its midst and whose voice it smothers.”

—Charles Coypel, 1751

audience vs. public

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1875

James Abbott MacNeill Whistler (American, living in London) painted this picture in 1875. Art critic John Ruskin complained,

“I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected a coxcomb to ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”Ruskin printed this insult in his pamphlet series, Fors Clavigera, in 1877.

J.M.W. Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, 1835