Celebration’s Deception

As early as 1939, in Le sacré de transgression: Théorie de la fête,1 1  - Roger Caillois, “Le sacré de transgression: Théorie de la fête” (1939), Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard [Quarto], 2008). Roger Caillois had deplored the loss of the full sense of celebration—“a ­paroxysm of society ”—as it gave way to the leisure class and mass culture. For, “as they evolve, societies tend toward indifferentiation, ­uniformity, a general levelling and easing of tensions. Society, ­increasingly complex, becomes less tolerant of interruptions in the normal course of life. Everything must go on today as it did yesterday, and tomorrow as it does today. General disruption is no longer possible. It no longer takes place on fixed dates, nor on a large scale. It is diluted, so to speak, through the calendar year, absorbed into the monotony, the regularity of a schedule. ‘Celebrations’ become holidays.”2 2  - Ibid., 289. This analysis is all the more ­compelling today upon observing the sheer number of celebrations throughout the world—Gay Prides, music festivals, all-nighters, concerts, carnivals, street entertainment, parades of all kinds, raves, and even the ­quintessentially Parisian “Paris plage”—all thoroughly ­harmonized with the state apparatus. Everything is carefully orchestrated by the authorities, with the help of “merrymakers” and “revellers,” so that things don’t go overboard, don’t change, don’t explode, and crowds don’t get jostled by revolution or revolt. We are at a cathartic time of ­globalization, where the death of a multimillionaire American pop singer can galvanize the whole world and bring it to tears more effectively than the desperate cries of the billion human beings now dying of hunger. Celebrations no longer transgress. They exist to make us forget true hardships, pain, ­catastrophes. To obliterate, hide, evade—or, in psychological terms, to deny and suppress—, such, today, are the functions of celebration, with the blessings of neoliberalism. This is no caricature: a little after the April 6, 2009, earthquake hit L’Aquila (capital of the Abruzzo region), “il Cavaliere” Berlusconi, Prime Minister of Italy, quite publicly told the 17,000 victims who now depended on government aid that they “lacked nothing. They have medical aid. They have hot food. Of course, their current lodgings [tents] are a bit temporary. But they should consider it like a weekend camping.” If you are in no mood for celebration, because you’re mourning the dead, the disappeared, the wounded, you must nonetheless put on a festive, convivial face and show community and national spirit. The festive may come into play anywhere, at any time, on any and all topics, like the Mother Theresa of revellers.

I don’t see that “celebrations of contemporary art” in their ­explicitly celebratory incarnations (openings, launches, inaugurations) are any different than the events by which works of art are brought forward. Considering the millions, public and private, that are regularly spent on the biennial and triennial packaging of contemporary art throughout the world, on foundations, on exported museums—the Louvre to Abu Dhabi, the Musée national d’art moderne/Centre Pompidou, also to Abu Dhabi, and soon to Shanghai—, and of course on the transparently named Fairs, little money ever goes to the authors, journals, editors, and emerging ­artists, the very substance and life force of the art world. And for good reason, since the court celebrations these generosities are given to—think of the Jeff Koons exhibition, among others, at Versailles—are so much more important and magnificent than any alternative venue or ­small-time publisher. Are these financial liberalities actually useful or effective?
For indeed, the problem must be cast in terms of utilitarian ­philosophy. With respect to contemporary art, father of utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham’s famous phrase may take a peculiar and unexpected turn: the greatest aesthetic good for the greatest number of people. By this reasoning, maximizing the aesthetic well-being of those who already possess a comfortable dose of it can have beneficial effects on those who have less.