Pas d'avant les domestiques

But if you will overlook these obstacles, the author's marvelous irony, insight, and intrigue will endure with you, as it has with others for over a century. One final word of caution: you will meet bad people who do good things and good people in the wrong places. Not every person or idea comes with a well-stuck label. They are all mixed up in what Balzac called the Human Comedy.

[ Here is some music I wrote especially for enjoying with this story.]

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whenever
you go with serious intent to the annual exhibition of painting and sculpture at the Millennial, don't you get overcome by feelings of anomie, ennui, malaise, and other French diseases? Not since the 2020 Revolution has there been a real Show, just long, crowded galleries. Before then, the Show carried off the greatest honors by showing the very best works of art. From among the one-hundred fifty pictures selected by the Academy, the public would make a further choice; laurels of whispered wonder would wreathe a masterpiece in glory. Fans in high-flown discussions would raise a canvas to heaven. The insults lavished on HoBoy or Flechette served their fame as well as the praises of their fanatical partisans.

Now no one, crowd or critic, gets excited about the products at this bazaar, even though these days they make the choice without a pre-screening by the selection committee With ever more to choose from their attention slacks at the task; by the time they have finished choosing, the Exhibition is about to close. Before 20I7, the pictures accepted never occupied more space than the first gallery of the North wing where the 20th-century masters are. After dismissing with a jury that year, the number of works eventually came to fill the entire building and zone the public into total zap-out.

Studio and lively arts, digital illo, eleMental, matrix/web, virtual genre, and holoactive: these seven categories did not offer more than twenty pieces each worth the attention of the public. As the number of artists grew greater and greater, a selection committee would have become more and more difficult to please. But without standards, the Show overflowed into the main building and everything was lost. The Show ought to have remained a fixed, limited place of enduring appraisal, in which every genre exhibited its masterpieces.

Ten years' experience has shown how good the old system was. Instead of a tournament, you have a riot; instead of a magnificent exhibition, you have a rowdy yard sale; instead of selected pictures, you have everything. With what result? The great artist is the loser. If Wang Tze's Café Blasé, Swim Meat, DysFUNction, and Perdido had all four been exhibited in the Show alongside the hundred good pieces made this year, they would have done her reputation more good than her twenty pieces lost amid three thousand works, indiscriminately hung in ten galleries. A strange fact: since the door was opened to everyone there has been much talk of unrecognized genius.

Before the change, Schinner's TexturePlex, vos Savant's Lucidity Loosed, Munchausen's Whorror and Baptista's Media Medea were admitted to the Show by the committee that was nonetheless accused of being a cabal of reactionary neo-post-Modernists. They recognized the new works that showed the world capable young enthusiastic painters. In spite of cavils by the critics, no one complained then.

Nowadays any dauber of pixels can send in work and there is talk only of misunderstood painters. Where judgment is no longer exercised there is no longer any picture judged to be best. Whatever artists may do, they will come back to the scrutiny that recommends their paintings to the admiration of the multitude for whom they work. Without the Academy's choice the Show at the Millennial will cease to exist, and without the Show, the recognition of great Art may perish.

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