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Discrete Charm Published by Faine Contemporary Art - May 2015
"The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity". Gustave Flaubert in a letter to George Sand 1871. I took the film The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie as the starting point for this print. The antics of the various characters in the movie reflect the smug snobbery that pervades large areas of western society. The rigid adherence to social rules and a dogmatic insistence on the observation of them can lead to a form of tyranny in which any opportunity for castigating transgressors is grasped. The satisfaction this engenders in the denigrator is irrespective of significance of the failing, such as when one dares to utter a profanity in polite society.. Nietzsche was right when he wrote, 'beware of those in whom the will to punish is strong'. This print comprises a number of cameo sections from famous paintings, which at some level might be said to display different aspects of the bourgeoisie's ideals and lifestyle. The text is an A to Z of alliterative phrases that exhibit and are critical of the self-satisfied attitudes of the bourgeoisie. These views are reflected in the arbitrary rules and mores of the group, such as the edict expressed recently in a society magazine that 'pale lavender blue should never be worn on a Tuesday afternoon'. Indeed the whole notion of self appointed experts in etiquette, behaviour, decoration and style is what makes the bourgeoisie into a kind of ridiculous club. We live in a society in which the bourgeois feel totally at home, where spin eclipses truth, opinion masquerades as scholarship. meagre ability is accepted as expertise and lies are interpreted as facts. However as Andy Warhol said, "Nothing is more bourgeois than the fear of looking bourgeois". |
Canvases from 2015
