by Jon Lackman | 12 September 2008 | Books
In the September 2008 Art Bulletin, Aruna D’Souza reviews Petra ten-Doesschate Chu’s book The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture. In her conclusion D’Souza writes:
Ultimately, this book approaches–even if it chooses not to address head-on–what is perhaps the most urgent cultural question of our moment: How does art find a politics in a time defined, on the one hand, by an overheated and all-devouring art market that effectively turns every artistic gesture into a salable commodity, and, on the other, by a political situation in which the need to act is equaled only by the absence of clear terms within which to do so? How does art find its political footing on a terrain in which any critical utterance is so readily co-opted by the marketplace? We would be fair to wonder, at the end of the book, if Chu has merely replaced the image of Courbet as an independent and defiant hero of a politically engaged, newly born avant-garde with that of its seeming opposite, as cynical an “operator” as any of the contemporary art superstars that now grace our cultural stage. I will admit that I do not want to believe this to be true, and perhaps that is my own failing: I am invested in the idea that there is a politics–a real politics–to Courbet, one that still has lessons to teach us. I want the “both/and” version of Courbet: both an economic pragmatist and a revolutionary. I am willing to concede–almost–that this fantasy might no longer be possible, or that it perhaps never was. But not quite.
