Boldt Words & Images: Upon watching the film “The Mona Lisa Curse”

Losses of a world

By Bob Boldt

I am about as far away from any understanding of the contemporary art world of the last nearly forty years as it is possible to be. I left my artist friends in Chicago when I moved to Missouri back in the early eighties, a time when respect for artists and aesthetics still transcended finances, popularity, and notoriety, even though we in the Windy City were feeling some trends blowing out of the East.
    I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid-sixties with classmates who founded the Hairy Who, a renegade band of outsider artist wannabes who initially cared less for fame and more for art than many less rebellious movements of the time [see Chicago lmagists].
    Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes endeared himself to me when, in his marvelous program on American Art American Visions, he extolled the influence and virtues of Thomas Hart Benton’s murals in the Missouri Capitol lounge. Since taking up residence in Jefferson City I have had ample opportunity to share this seminal work of modern art with many friends and visitors. It is truly an amazing work of art.

Luca Del Baldo, Robert Hughes,
2011, oil on Belgian linen,11.8"

    In 2008, Robert Hughes produced the documentary The Mona Lisa Curse¹ (directed by Mandy Chang), about the pernicious rise of the commercial art market. I viewed it recently and loved everything about it. Watching the long, lingering extreme close-ups of Hughes’s face as he surveys New York through his apartment window or watches passing images from a taxicab allows you not only to hear his words more profoundly but also to appreciate the thoughts and memories that helped frame those words.
    I was fascinated by the impression that Hughes’s analysis was forming that our market economy has not only devastated aspects of our entertainment, politics, culture, economy, and spirituality, but has also destroyed our art as well.
    Halfway through his documentary, Hughes gets down to it. The real crime of art as commodity is the very real, very deliberate process of stripping art from any context but its monetary one.

Art treated merely as a spectacle becomes something disconnected from any real context (and) loses its meaning. –Robert Hughes

Slavoj Žižek

European philosopher Slavoj Žižek pointed this out in his analysis of Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece film, Children of Men:

I think that this film gives the best diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history, or to use another political term, biopolitics. And my god, this film literally is about biopolitics. The basic problem in this society as depicted in the film is literally biopolitics: how to generate, regulate life. But again, I think the crucial point is that this obvious fact shouldn’t deceive us. The true despair is precisely that; all historical acts disappear. Like all those classical statues are there, but they are deprived of a world. They are totally meaningless, because what does it mean to have a statue of Michelangelo? It only works if it signals a certain world. And when this world is lacking, it’s nothing. It all depends on whether we have a world. Do we have some horizon that makes it meaningful? It’s against this background that I think that the film approaches the topic of immigration and so on.²

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1. 
   
   "the mona lisa curse" - robert hughes / mandy chang from kevin doyle on Vimeo.
2. The whole video of Žižek’s commentary deals with the loss of history, memory, context. Žižek’s most poignant comment about art and context occurs at 2:30:
   

Copyright © 2017 by Bob Boldt