My Year With Proust - Day 277

   "But do let's change the subject," Mme de Guermantes added, "because she's dreadfully susceptible . . . You must think me very old-fashioned," she went on, turning to me, "I know that nowadays it's considered a weakness to care for ideas in poetry, poetry with some thought in it."

   "Old-fashioned?" asked the Princesse de Parme, quivering with the slight shock produced by this new wave which she had not expected, although she knew that the Duchess's conversation always held in store for her those continuous and delightful thrills, that breath-catching panic, that wholesome exhaustion after which her thoughts instinctively turned to the necessity of taking a footbath in a dressing cabin and a brisk walk to "restore her circulation."

   "For my part, no, Oriane," said Mme de Brissac, "I don't in the least object to Victor Hugo's having ideas, quite the contrary, but I do object to his seeking them in everything that's monstrous.  It was he who accustomed us to ugliness in literature.  There's quite enough ugliness in life already.  Why can't we be allowed at least to forget it while we're reading?  A distressing spectacle from which we should turn away in real life, that's what attracts Victor Hugo."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 515-516

I find this section interesting because it brings me back to a topic that I find myself thinking about frequently, and which seeps into class discussion occasionally.  Proust reports that several people are discussing art and the role of art, especially in regards to Victor Hugo.  As Mme de Brissac opines, "I don't in the least object to Victor Hugo's having ideas, quite the contrary, but I do object to his seeking them in everything that's monstrous.  It was he who accustomed us to ugliness in literature.  There's quite enough ugliness in life already.  Why can't we be allowed at least to forget it while we're reading?"  Essentially, she's asking the question: Isn't the point of art to provide beauty to our lives and not to shine a light on the ugliness that surrounds us?  We are mired in the ugliness, can't art lift us, even temporarily, to more rarefied and beautiful surroundings?  Early in my Aesthetic Expressions class I have my students rank ten disparate works of art, from best to worst - or, to think of it another way, from most beautiful to least beautiful.  Now, obviously, it's difficult assignment - and one would argue, impossible and inappropriate - but I do it to help the students understand that they walked into the class with aesthetic criteria that they didn't know they possessed.  One of the works of art that I show them is Banksy's Let Them Eat Crack graffiti piece.  It plays off of the famous/infamous statement from Marie Antoinette to "let them eat cake," when told that the peasants were rioting because they had no bread.  Beyond the fact that she probably never actually said it, the point is not that she didn't care, but instead that she was such a caricature of privilege that she just assumed that if you didn't have bread you would just choose cake.  Banksy plays off this by implying that the wealthy business class isn't does know of doesn't care about the plight of the inner city.  The students always rank it very highly, and one of the reasons is because it has a deeper meaning.  Banksy is saying something, and what he's saying is beautiful because he is revealing ugliness.  The Proust passage above reminded me of this dichotomy.  Art is often at it's best when it is pushing the boundaries and making us think - and showing us the ugliness that scars so much of our world - but yet we also want it to be beautiful and to take us away from the horrible, mundane world.  In his massive tome The Story of Art, Gombrich points out that the whole point of western art was to provide more and more accurate reflections of reality, and while he was discussing it in regards to the image itself, shouldn't it also be true of the deeper meaning?  Think of the work of Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet, who shared a world that few (but a growing number) middle and upper class people knew existed.  Courbet famously said, "Show me an angel and I will paint it."  However, circling back to our original point, is the process of showing us reality, and ugliness, aren't we ignoring one of the most wonderful attributes of art; aren't there times when we need to see those angels; that we need to experience the transcendent.  Sometimes I will place the centerpiece of the Sistine Chapel next to Courbet's The Origins of the World, and ask if they're not actually the same painting?  They both represent, to very different artists in very different religious and intellectual ages, the origins of the world.  It's usually here that the students realize that they're truly in college, or at least that they're not in Kansas anymore.  It brings up the entire question of beauty, but also begs the question about rather or not in our rush to capture the real we have lost sacrificed a more transcent beauty, the angels that Courbet dismissed.

The students love this piece of art, although it is hardly beautiful in any traditional sense of the word; rather, it's beauty lies in its deeper meaning.

Jean-Francois Millet's The Gleaners.

Gustave Courbet's The Stone Breakers.

Michelangelo's the Sistine Chapel.

Gustave Courbet's The Origins of the World.