This is Not Just a Painting

Bernard Lahire

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509528714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

In 2008, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon acquired a painting called The Flight into Egypt which was attributed to the French artist Nicolas Poussin. Thought to have been painted in 1657, the painting had gone missing for more than three centuries. Several versions were rediscovered in the 1980s and one was passed from hand to hand, from a family who had no idea of its value to gallery owners and eventually to the museum. A painting that had been sold as a decorative object in 1986 for around 12, 000 euros was acquired two decades later by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon for 17 million euros. What does this remarkable story tell us about the nature of art and the way that it is valued? How is it that what seemed to be just an ordinary canvas could be transformed into a masterpiece, that a decorative object could become a national treasure? This is a story permeated by social magicthe social alchemy that transforms lead into gold, the ordinary into the extraordinary, the profane into the sacred. Focusing on this extraordinary case, Bernard Lahire lays bare the beliefs and social processes that underpin the creation of a masterpiece. Like a detective piecing together the clues in an unsolved mystery he carefully reconstructs the steps that led from the same material object being treated as a copy of insignificant value to being endowed with the status of a highly-prized painting commanding a record-breaking price. He thereby shows that a painting is never just a painting, and is always more than a piece of stretched canvass to which brush strokes of paint have been applied: this object, and the value we attach to it, is also the product of a complex array of social processes– with its distinctive institutions and experts– that lies behind it. And through the history of this painting, Lahire uncovers some of the fundamental structures of our social world. For the social magic that can transform a painting from a simple copy into a masterpiece is similar to the social magic that is present throughout our societies, in economics and politics as much as art and religion, a magic that results from the spell cast by power on those who tacitly recognize its authority. By following the trail of a single work of art, Lahire interrogates the foundations on which our perceptions of value and our belief in institutions rest and exposes the forms of domination which lie hidden behind our admiration of works of art.

Book 1
History, domination and social magic

Not much attention has been paid to the retreat of sociologists into the present. This retreat, their flight from the past, became the dominant trend in the development of sociology after the Second World War and, like this development itself, was essentially un-planned. That it was a retreat can become clearly visible if one considers that many of the earliest sociologists sought to illuminate problems of human societies; including those of our time, with the help of a wide knowledge of their own societies’ past and of earlier phases of other societies. The approach of Marx and Weber to sociological problems can serve as an example.

Norbert Elias, ‘The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4 (2), June 1987, p. 223

1
Self-evident facts and foundations of beliefs

The past is not fugitive, it stays put. […] After hundreds and thousands of years, the scholar who has been studying the place-names and the customs of the inhabitants of some remote region may still extract from them some legend long anterior to Christianity, already unintelligible, if not actually forgotten, at the time of Herodotus, which in the name given to a rock, in a religious rite, still dwells in the midst of the present, like a denser emanation, immemorial and stable.

Marcel Proust, In search of lost time. II. The Guermantes Way, London, Vintage, 2000, p. 482

1. Our current behaviour is determined by a past, often very long, which manifests itself in the form of self-evident facts (institutions, buildings, machines, tools, texts, categories of perception, of representation, of judgement), in other words in an established order of things more often misunderstood and opaque than acknowledged and transparent.

Scholium 1. When Nietzsche rails against the way history imposes itself on the present, he is thinking about history used as an example or held up as a model, of figures from the past who are evoked as ideals to be imitated (‘a half-understood monument to some great era of the past is erected as an idol and zealously danced around’¹), about the history that is taught to young people and which prevents them from living their lives. In contrast to this use of history through which ‘life crumbles and degenerates’, Nietzsche proposes another use in which it ‘stands in the service of life’.² Yet the difficulty inherent in this way of approaching the issue of the relationship between the present and the past lies in the fact that the weight of the past is essentially seen as the weight of memories imposed on people in the present. As a result, we completely fail to see that this ‘weight of the past’ lies in facts (in institutions, objects, machines, texts, customs, mental structures) and that, for this very reason, this past is for the most part not consciously present in the minds of those in the present even though they are very much products of it. The men and women of the present can forget or be ignorant of history, they may well not fantasize idealistically about the past, yet, as Nietzsche says, they nevertheless continue to be ‘overwhelmed’ by the ‘great and ever greater pressure of what is past’.³ But by ‘past’ or ‘history’ we need to understand all that has crystallized and accumulated over time and which we inherit, more often unconsciously than consciously.

It is this same past that Marx refers to in a famous passage of Le 18 Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte⁴: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ He criticized Ludwig Feuerbach for his failure to see that ‘the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is a historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs.’⁵ Nothing that appears to our immediate sensual experience to be natural or present since the beginning of time is completely detached from history. The same applies to the elements of a landscape we contemplate which themselves depend on the industrial, agricultural and commercial past of the country. ‘The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become “sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach’.⁶

If Marx generally draws his examples uniquely from the economic order (thinking about the state of productive forces, economic exchanges, etc.), the analysis he sets out is just as much about language, law, the State, cultural customs, art, science or politics.⁷ Just as the cherry trees, which seem such an obvious element of nature to the eyes of a European at the end of the second millennium, with their impression of always having been there, necessitate a historical detour via the commercial exchanges between East Asia and the West, so the smallest cultural gesture dates back to a distant or recent history. Thus, eating with a knife and fork, as the majority of Westerners today learn to do at an early age, is an action which has its place in the long history of the self-control of manners in Western experience.⁸ In the same way, the simple act of reading a book or a newspaper in silence is the result of a number of key moments in the history of writing. These include the invention of the codex around the second to third century AD, the development of silent reading in monastic circles from the sixth century onwards, the widespread use of the practice of putting spaces between words from the seventh century onwards, the introduction of printing in the mid fifteenth century and its subsequent mechanization in the nineteenth century.⁹ Or, finally, in the context of polite rituals, raising one’s hat to greet someone means ‘unwittingly reactivating a conventional sign inherited from the Middle Ages when, as Panofsky reminds us, armed men used to take off their helmets to make clear their peaceful intentions’.¹⁰

Not only is the present determined by an accumulated and multi-layered past, but the product of past activities appears to us as realities over which we have no more control than when we find ourselves contemplating the spectacle of a mountain range or a wild sea. The realities of the past, completely arbitrary as they are, impose themselves as self-evident facts which we must simply accept and which we can in no circumstances ignore. Referring to the social division of labour, Marx and Engels wrote:

This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now. The social power, i.e. the multiplied productive force, which arises through the cooperation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they cannot thus control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these.¹¹

Society, the State, the economy, take the form of external forces which are both mysterious and overwhelming (Marx and Engels use the term ‘alienation’) and which are beyond the control or the will of individuals.

That does not mean that the accumulated past rigidly fixes history, allowing only the eternal repetition or renewal of what already exists. The products of history are, on the contrary, continuously re-appropriated by the actors of the moment according to whatever new consideration they are focused on. But the present is never totally autonomous and the new, when it comes along, is never independent of all the past which forms the conditions of possibility.

At each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its condition of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances. This sum of productive forces, of capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given; is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as ‘substance’ and ‘essence of men’.¹²

Each moment in the history of societies is therefore a combination of in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Acknowledgements
• Plates
• Introduction: unravelling a canvas
• Book 1. History, domination and social magic
• Book 2. Art, domination, sanctification
• Book 3. On Poussin and some Flights into Egypt
• Conclusions
• Post-scriptum: the conditions for scientific creation
• Summary of information sources consulted
• Bibliography
• Supplementary bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement