Roberta and the ruling classes
To get some idea about Big Brother, it’s enough to watch it for two or three Thursday evenings, as I did. These are the days of reckoning. I tried connecting up via the Internet and saw in low definition a tattooed female in underpants, frying an egg. I held on for a while, then found something better to do. But every so often you catch glimpses of the average Italian mind, which might be of interest, at least sociologically. Take the case of the infamous Roberta, who, loudmouthed and extroverted, had been rejected by a united Italy, reducing the house to a morgue.
In her desperate attempts to make herself hateful, Roberta dared suggest she was a cut above her companions, most of them butchers, since she regularly dined with art dealers. In response, not only her companions in misadventure but also television viewers decided she belonged to the ruling classes and was therefore to be castigated. Nobody paused to think that members of the ruling classes do not dine with art dealers, unless she was referring to the president of Christie’s. Rather, they summon art dealers to their homes to examine a 1.8-meter-high Raphael or a ninth-century Russian icon.
Why we are happy to let artists take drugs
Someone recently wrote a letter to Corriere della Sera asking why we are scandalized if a cyclist or soccer player shoots up with some stimulant, whereas we’ve always been fascinated by great artists who smoked opium or sought inspiration through LSD or cocaine. At first sight the question is reasonable: if we regard an athlete’s victory as unmerited, then why should we admire a poem that comes not from the poet’s genius but from a substance taken perhaps intravenously?
Yet the difference between sporting rigor and artistic broad-mindedness conceals a deep truth, and this instinctive public attitude tells us much more than any theory of aesthetics. What stirs our admiration for sporting achievement is not a ball that goes into the goal or a bicycle that crosses the finish line before another, since both are phenomena that physics can explain perfectly well. What we find interesting and admirable is a human being who does something better than we ever could. If soccer balls were fired into the goal by a cannon, soccer would lose all interest.
In art, on the other hand, we admire the work first, and the physical and mental state of the person who has created it is only secondary. So much so that we find great beauty in works by someone of low morality, we are touched by Achilles and Ulysses even if we don’t know whether Homer actually existed, and The Divine Comedy would still be miraculous if we were told that a monkey had chanced to type it on a computer. We even look upon certain objects produced by nature or accident as being works of art, and we are moved by ruins, which, as such, have not been created by any exceptional human being. When confronted by the magic of the work, we are prepared to ignore the way in which the artist arrived at it.
And we allow Baudelaire all his artificial paradises, provided he gives us Les fleurs du mal.
2000