Beauty Mark:
The Diderot Distortion
13 January 2015
A word about the Charlie Hebdo killings. I’ve been very confused about them — until today.
Today I came to understand that “free speech” has nothing, aside from the matter of provocation, to do with the slayings. Free speech, as a right guaranteed by modern democratic states, can be infringed only by the state. A disagreement between private persons, as the terrorists and their victims were here, does not become more than that simply because one party said things that the other didn’t like. The killers had no right to kill the journalists or the hostages — let me be perfectly clear: these horrific crimes were absolutely unjustifiable — but they would have had no more or less a right to kill anyone at all, had the cause of the dispute been one of the myriad things that breed feuding neighbors, or an affair of the heart, or professional jealousy, or — anything at all. The journalists do not move to a special class of victims because they were “speaking out,” any more than a trapeze artist who falls to her death suffers a thereby more momentous fate.
But when it is the state that violates its citizens’ rights, which are supposed to be guaranteed by that very state, a killing — or any other oppressive action — is darkened by an order of magnitude.
It is true that states vary the interest that they take in preventing likely crimes. Where victims are poor or members of a minority group, states can be very remiss indeed. Such was not the case here, however. One of the victims was a police officer detailed to watch over the journalists.
What if the terrorists had opened fire on some shoppers at the Galeries Lafayette, and taken others hostage? What sort of discussion would we be having then? Almost certainly there would be more critical interest in the environment from which the killers sprang. No one would be satisfied by the pat explanation that Muslims hate consumer capitalism (although the followers of Sayyid Qutb do hate it). Instead, there would be a repeated outbreak of hand-wringing over the economic plight of Mégrebins stuck in the banlieues, such as erupted several years ago when youths took to burning cars. There might even be a clearer recognition that it is fatuous, in today’s media climate, to expect people of any age to be content with dead-end lives. Bleak economic prospects, so at odds with reality-TV lifestyles, are fueling a massive social resentment along lines last seen in Paris in 1871 — but by no means just in France.
That is the kind of discussion that we ought to be having. It would put a very different construction on the solidarity of European leaders linking arms in the Champs Élysées.
***
On page 36 of Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist writes of Denis Diderot’s art criticism, “These writings marked the beginning of the understanding of exhibitions as publicly received events whose contents could be assessed in terms of newness, originality, and vitality.” The sentence implies, what nobody is likely to contest, that newness, originality, and vitality are virtues integral to art.
But in fact they are merely virtues integral to news. News was what Diderot was providing — news about the art world, but news.
Borrowing a page from DIY enthusiast Obrist, I shall here instruct the reader to supply a paragraph about the warping effect of journalism upon public affairs. Hint: this warping effect is almost entirely the result of paying journalists to make boring and/or complicated matters readily apprehensible to the casual reader. Challenge: write a must-read, 100-word paragraph about Géricault’s Scene of Shipwreck — better known as The Raft of the Medusa.
My own very rough estimate is that a well-grounded mind can devote no more than 20% of its attention to news. Too much news, and the mind becomes topheavy, and capsizes in a sea of incoherence. Happily, there is not enough real news to take up 20% of anybody’s time. Sadly, this fact is concealed behind a blaring pageant of bogus news. Today, bogus news is often concerned with the doings of celebrities. In the Nineteenth Century, there was a lot of bogus news about Progress. Progress was understood to be a semi-divine afflatus that, like a beneficent wind, propelled the nations of the modern West toward ever-greater peace and prosperity. (There were still wars, but domestic peace increased very greatly.) The cascade of new inventions and conveniences was far more exciting than our recent discovery of the Internet. As regrettably extreme as today’s income inequality is, it has not yet repeated the excesses of the Gilded Age. The first time around, spectators were dazzled and shocked by the leaping power of millionaires and superpowers — you might well say that they were electrified.
Progress, which began to be noticed toward the end of the Seventeenth Century, reached its torrential climax two hundred years later. After World War I, only Americans could be heard talking about it. Americans alone seemed to think that anything good had come from the carnage and its termination.
One of the flowers of progress was photography, and its relation to art on the one hand and to journalism on the other makes for fascinating juxtaposition. In one blow, photography obviated the “progress” that painting had been making since the dawn of the Renaissance. The object of this progress was the realization of pictorial illusion, but the reduction of art to a problem of progress — the growing misunderstanding of painting as an activity preoccupied by illusions, ever more expertly captured by painters but never quite so completely as it was captured by photographers — was the doing of journalism. Journalism, always interested in the new, is a natural promoter of progress. Modern journalism, ever since the Thirties, has understood that progress can lead in the “wrong” direction, as it did with the rise of Hitler (widely seen as a progressive figure, at least until the fighting began). But it is fixated on discovering that things are steadily progressing in one direction or the other. And it compounds the problem by struggling to envision this progress in terms that any semi-literate person can easily grasp. Journalism as practiced by the minions of Rupert Murdoch is journalism at its most natural.
Photography, tagged by journalists with the totally incorrect assertion that the camera never lies, quickly became as important to journalism as words, and, in the age of television, much more important. Meanwhile, painting was no longer associated with progress. This had a liberating effect on painters. So did the enormous changes in the nature of patronage that followed the collapse of the ancien régime in which the idea of art had been given its distinctively Western stamp. Painting and art — two different things, as we shall see.