Art, Place, Identity.

Sometimes it is a simple case of cash that lies at the heart of an ownership contest. A recent row between the town of Florence and the Tuscan State, in which both the city and the state each contends that the sculpture is uniquely its own, highlights what is at stake when you go up against a beloved artifact in its home environment to challenge to whom the work actually belongs. This tussle is about the division of the spoils generated by the millions of international tourists and their wallets, and there is no push to relocate the actual artifact itself, just its residuals. When Art generates significant income through tourism, Nationalism and Capitalism are its twin shadows, but it is an uneasy brotherhood of mutual distrust.

At other times the circumstances of ownership are layered with more than just cash value. Did Adele Bloch-Bauer ever expect one of her portraits to be the most expensive painting in the history of the world? After a protracted legal battle between her niece Maria Altmann and the Republic of Austria. five pictures that had been relinquished to the Belvedere Museum in Vienna after their illegal seizure by the Nazis were in 2006 put into the hands of their rightful owners. The surviving niece, who had fled to Los Angeles to escape the oncoming Holocaust, exhibited the pictures briefly at the LA County Museum, and then sold them by auction at Christie's, where the most famous among them (above) fetched an astonishing $135 Million. It now hangs in the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

What was a jewel in Austria's multi-faceted crown - a portrait by a Viennese artist of one of the city's beguiling patronesses voluptuously enveloped in her spectacular wealth like an Egyptian queen - has recently and vulgarly been called the American Mona Lisa. It is, of course, only American insofar as America was where coincidence or fate led it; it was American lawyers that wrestled the paintings from the Republic of Austria, it was American Dollars that purchased them and it is America that will give them permanent residence. Although some Austrians think the wounds of the loss particularly egregious, having been inflicted by a legal team headed up by their native son Arnold Schoenberg's grandson, they should not quibble over whose treachery is the greatest; Schoenberg's for leaving Austria for the safety of the Capitalist West Coast, his grandson for outsmarting the Austrian authorities, those authorities for lying about the ownership of the pictures, or the Nazis for looting the art in the first place.

The money from the sale of the pictures has yet to surface. (Presumably Maria got the new kitchen she had promised herself in Adele's Wish, one of the movies covering the story.) There is no Altmann or Bloch-Bauer or Klimt Foundation in any of the databases, and no major bequests yet by any of the families involved. At 94, Maria must at least have made plans for its charitable dispersal to avoid or to reduce the current 55% Estate Tax that will fall due at her death, otherwise one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Rape of Europe will be the American government.

Rendered simplistically, Austria abandoned the Bloch-Bauers and so the Bloch-Bauers abandoned Austria. Despite their wounded pride, Austria was unable to depict Adele as an impoverished hostage sold obscenely into American slavery because Austrian reserves of moral authority had been emptied; the Nazis had confiscated the chattels of the Jewish Bloch-Bauer household and the authorities did not intervene. They then accepted the looted art and appropriated it as their own. Ex-private citizen Maria Altmann delivered a blow of devastating impact to the State by attacking its patrimonial identity. Taking away the nation's art made a fundamental mythology disappear along with it, and the blow to the nation's pride was immense.

Happily, Ronald Lauder's Mona Lisa is surrounded exclusively by other Austrian artifacts in the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a typically American home-from-home recreation of The Old Country. But the plundering begins again; her image is now available as a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, a 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, a mug, a vase, a bangle, a t-shirt, and a waste-paper basket.

Pope Joan

Driving home a nail into the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg in 1517 on which to hang a list of 95 clerical abuses was Martin Luther's act of whistle-blowing, unequivocally calling the Catholic Church to account for its intermingling of theology and capitalism that he found so reprehensible. This was the primary catalyst of the movement that we call The Reformation, officially blowing the whistle on the church's immoral tactics and practices, and legitimizing the opposing forces that had been amassing on its flanks.

Chief on his list of grievances had become the selling of indulgences, by which, for a price, the hapless could purchase future heavenly release from the consequence of their misdeeds on earth. This would not sound quite so benighted to our 21st century ears if the church had not recently reintroduced the practice. Of all the barriers that the church had erected for its own financial gain between God and the believer, Luther considered this the most egregious.

Chaucer satirizes the Pardoning profession in The Canterbury Tales, deriding the man who shamelessly ble$$es the gullible with his bag of 'holy relic' meat bones to support his bawdy alcoholism. His appearance and demeanor are of a piece with his insalubrious attitude to the rest of the party, and the tale that he contributes to the set of stories, of three louts keen to out-swindle each other, is humorlessly nihilistic.  

Luther's goal was twofold; to attack the corruption within the clergy that was taking advantage of the general populace, and to attack the church's gaudy trappings that had become such a lucrative sideline even though they littered and impeded the believer's path to the divine. The regalia of the church had actually become a barrier to the thing to which the organization was claiming to provide access, and instead of making God more approachable, the path to God had become strewn with more and greater obstacles that were removable only by the application of cash, or by the exchange of some useful worldly influence.

Which brings us to the world of grand opera. The death last week at the age of 83 of Joan Sutherland, La Superba, unofficial pope of the church of bel canto opera, rings the knell on an age of interest in the specifically grand operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi, similarly high artifacts on the scale of the Gaudy Trappings Quotient. They too draw attention to their own tawdry magnificence by introducing yet more layers between the worshiper and the deity. The church has thuribles, thurifers and reredoses, grand opera has cavatinas, recitatives and turbe dramatice. The church is presided over by the pontiff, the opera is presided over by the prima donna.   

Credibility in grand opera is not of prime concern; you can hardly throw a brick in a work by Donizetti without hitting a beautiful village maiden who is in love with a penniless painter who turns out to be a Viscount, and who later goes insane. Verdi's Il Trovatore is so famously opaque that "to have an chance at all of understanding it, you first have to learn a background story that's even more complex and unlikely. Then, when it all shakes out in the end, it's hard to know who betrayed whom, who threw which baby into the fire — and whether we've just seen a bitter old man unwittingly execute his own brother or a vengeful old woman plotting to get her beloved son beheaded. Or both." (NPR)

Rather than a road to the divine, which I take to be the amplification of drama by music even to the point of danger, the road itself has become a diversion from the divine, and the objects along the road have assumed falsely divine significance. The magnificence of the display, the costume drama dress-up of it all has replaced the initial relationship of the seeker to the goal, the very thing that Luther was wishing to reestablish. When the audience forgives the dramatic ludicrousness of a corpse singing from inside a sack because she sings so beautifully and the high notes are so stratospherically gorgeous, there may as well be pig bones in that sack because the mission of sustaining and intensifying a narrative by musical means has been derailed, it has indeed been undermined, and who cares any more if the relics are real or not.

Operatic reality is when the actors on stage are so full of their characters that it comes out of them in the form of song; they are not singing about being angry, they are so full of angry that the only way to express it is to sing it out. Try to say, "Let there be Light!" as if you were ordering lunch and you'll understand; things take on their own natural weight and intensity. Intensity of emotion is the root of song.

However, what what is important is not the altarcloth, the crozier or the chasuble. Sung drama is by definition drama that is sung. Take away the narrative, and all you have is pompous singers playing with make-up. Take away God from the church and all you have is an old man in purple Prada slippers and a hat like a tea-cozy. And why would you want to take that away?

Strike Tactics

When the cabin crew of British Airways announced a twelve-day strike to impact its customers flying around the world in late December 2009, thousands of vacations were disrupted, weddings were ruined, and the currency of the airline plummeted from the unreliable to the worthless. Who would buy a ticket for a plane that might not fly? Who would want to be served by a bunch of surly and (according to the newspaper reports) overpaid and (according to them) under-appreciated space waitrons?

Calling a strike is an adult tantrum of limited worth whose success is far from guaranteed. If your service is essential and your cause a good one, then the public might be on your side, eventually. But throwing a wobbler in public is a risky and often humiliating tactic that can easily backfire; I for one have torn up my British Airways credit card, I will never fly on British Airways again, and I will never miss an opportunity to steer away from them any business that I can by sharing my story of the European family reunion vacation that almost never was.

For an American symphony orchestra like Detroit's to go on strike in 2010 presumes that the members consider their services vital to the smooth running of city services, which is of course as quaintly misguided as it is chronically out of date. Whether the majority of citizens will notice this ceasing of operations is anyone's guess, but I would hazard that with the median house price in Detroit currently at about $7,500 (seven thousand five hundred dollars) I doubt that the survival of the local symphony is at the top of most people's list of essentials; that list would more likely comprise utility bills and groceries and less a weekly helping of live Mendelssohn.

The striking musicians are trying to raise awareness of the necessity of art to the community, but their argument is incomplete. The issue they are focusing on here is the usefulness of live art, and whether a city of Detroit's miserable economic predicament can afford the luxury (for luxury it is, without a doubt) of a band of professional musicians trotting out the classics of yesteryear for the benefit of fewer than 1% of the population. How about everyone assemble as usual, and they listen to the music as planned, but what would be lost if instead of a live orchestra, the evenings' concerts were given over to playback of recordings, available on CD and much more inexpensively licensable for public broadcast?

Sure, the pageantry and thrill of the concert experience would be lost, but the product would be the same. The audience would still get its piano concerto, the hall would still get its box office receipts. You live within your budget; you eat frozen pizza when you can't get to Naples, you drive yourself when you can't afford a chauffeur, you cut your coat to suit your cloth. Nobody died from recorded Mendelssohn. (Anyone?.....) Cities benefit from the pat on the back that they get from displaying their wealth, and a concert by a symphony orchestra is a significant method for communicating to the city's occupants that all is well in Musicville. But all is not well in Detroit, as any casual tour around the city will reveal; these players must really not get out much.

Demanding to be seen as essential is its own irony. Placards like "HELP US SAVE YOUR ORCHESTRA" scream disingenuous propaganda (suddenly it's 'my' orchestra?) at an uninterested public who have better and more worthwhile things to do than encourage adolescent hissy fits about cutbacks at the office. We all have to pack a lunch sometimes, so get used to it. Not every family can afford a European vacation every year, not every city can afford a professional symphony orchestra, and parading in public your scorn for other people's hardships brings the industry into disrepute. Shame on the musicians of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for giving in to their sense of entitlement and yelling at their fellow citizens that they owe them a living, because they don't.