sacrificing the baby for the sculpture: on a modern theme

 

In his 1910 tome, The Individual and Human Existence, Josef Popper-Lynkeus asks a question:

“If for example we were in Paris in the Louvre and a great fire broke out while the gallery was full of visitors, who would we try to save? The art collection or the people, to the very last one of them? It would not occur to the firemen or the volunteer helpers to save the pictures by Raphael, Leonardo, the Venus de Milo and other such irreplaceable artworks before all the human existences were secured. And if someone tried to do otherwise, he would be greeted with universal condemnation and even punishment.”

Josef Popper’s way of stating the problem of the value of art in terms of the value of people is part of a tradition in modernism, bringing together the “irreplaceable” art work and the irreplaceable human individual. This tradition exists in some uneasy relationship with the justification of war, or the sacrifice of irreplaceable human existences to the protection of the state – or the ideals of the state, such as freedom.

Popper, unlike his nephew, Karl Popper, is not a much quoted man anymore. He was an engineer and an inventor as much as a philosopher and ideologue, and his book has a certain engineer’s way of looking at problems in terms of affordances – how to design a gimmick to achieve a certain objective or function within an overarching structure or machine. And for an engineer, Popper’s thesis produces an interesting social design. Not art, not anything is equal to the value of an individual human life. If that part is the most intrinsically important thing in the social machine, how should the machine be designed to make sure that the part is protected?

His question, in a different form – substituting medieval Italy for the Louvre -  was answered by Harold Nicholson, who, in 1944, said he was prepared to sacrifice his own self – to be shot against a wall – to save a Giotto fresco. Perhaps the British upper class, coming from a line of very cold blooded collectors, have made the calculation. Bertrand Russell once said that if he were given the choice between saving a Ming Vase and a Chinese man (I am not sure what the ethnicity has to do with this, except I am pretty sure what the ethnicity has to do with this), he did not know what he would do.

Nicholson’s statement of the case has entered into the literature on the protection of cultural heritage, an aspect of international law that, like so much other elements in the architecture, arose from the Nuremberg Trials. Alfred Rosenberg was hung for, among other things, looting cultural treasures – “irreplaceable” objects of art. The Allied armies, as historians have noted in an aside, showed a rather spotty adherence themselves to irreplaceable cultural treasures In the casuistic literature of international law, questions are posed like: say the Chartres cathedral was occupied by a hostile force taking potshots at the American army. Would the American army be within its rights to call in a strike and obliterate the thing?  Popper would no doubt not have approved of the whole attitude of these questions, in which individual lives are divided up in value according to sides, after which you get to using your own cultural heritage, ie bombs, bombers, drones and the lot.  The notion that one would never sacrifice a human life for an art object must have seemed a bit archaic to Popper himself in the decade after he posed his question, for, as is well known, between 1914 and 1918 twenty million people were sacrificed to make sure the Austrians didn’t invade the territory of the Serbians after a crown prince was assassinated in Sarajevo.  After World War II, where the free peoples of the world and their counterparts, the nasty totalitarian communists, had agreed to raise the stakes to nuclear annihilation, it would seem that the problem of who to sacrifice at the Louvre, or on a trolley track, should take back seat to the question of why our systems were based, literally, on sacrificing everybody. The latter is a problem that is still unsorted out, hence the voices in D.C. calling for a nuclear exchange who are also bitching that gas has gone up by 50 cents a gallon. The apocalypse will be trivial.

Another way of asking the question is: if the Athenians and the Spartans had had forty thousand nuclear bombs between them, should they have let go to defend their various principles, and would we, looking back, decide nothing in human history was as important as their dispute?

But this is an unprofitable discussion, since the people who control the bombs will do what they do. Don’t we all gag at gnats and swallow camels, to quote the savior? And the value of an art piece has always posed a certain conundrum. In 1910, Popper could depend on his readers thinking that art works are invaluable, meaning unexchangeable – being unique -  in some idealistic sense. Now, our sense of the artmarket has long trumped our sense of art. If Russell was asked if he’d save 85 million dollars – the price of a Van Gogh, say – or a baby, it would make for an easier answer, philosophically, even if every bank robbery movie tells you that some people’s answer would be unphilosophical, and those people draw an audience. However, even if the price put on the art work destroys, or at least erodes, the idea of the irreplaceability of the art work, so that the higher the price, the higher the triviality – there are still those – even me I’d say – who believe in that woozy superiority and irreplaceability of the Louvre’s treasures. I leave the artmarket and its monkey shines behind,  since the one thing we know about those prices is that they are not paid by expert art lovers, but by sad sack billionaires. The Bill Gates, the Elon Musk – they have the trustworthy art judgment of your average clerk in the adult video place. Or I should say, their judgment will probably be below the clerk’s. No, the human scale that counts here is still, I’d like to say, the scale Popper started out with.

The motif of the value of the artwork versus that of the human being, though dented by the general discredit that accompanies trading the sacred aura of the artwork for a price tag, is still a topic … among those, mostly, who care about art. In my favourite of John Banville’s novels, The Book of Evidence, the narrator does kill a person for a painting. Freddie Montgomery steals the painting for a gang that has his wife more or less hostage. But the killing – of a servant girl with a hammer – is not a matter of sacrificing a person for a Vermeer.  Rather, it is the final event in a life that has spun out of control – Montgomery’s – and his crime is an ethical carelessness that extends to all parts of his life. I read that novel at a time when I was feeling that I had been living a life of extreme ethical negligence in the deepest sense, and it hit me hard. One of the paradoxes of selfishness is that it blinds the self, since the self, in us social monkeys, is rooted from the beginning in others. To disconnect is to float in another medium, one that dissolves the self in its selfishness. The bloat is fatal.

Perhaps Banville inherits his plot not from Beckett, the model he often holds up, but from Yeats, whose lifelong pondering of the sacrifice of life for the work keeps coming back again and again, especially in the late poems. Life, for Yeats, is a fire of long duration in the Louvre, threatening to destroy everything, as it destroyed Byzantium, and his solution is to harness that fire to the work – but it is a solution he could never be happy with.

 

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.