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However, if we then turn to Paris Grande Palais (p.32), we see Grennan & Sperandio, perhaps, hinting that an image was always just an image, produced as ‘beautiful’ picture rather than as pictorial ‘truth’. There is no moment of historic loss, when the iconic becomes the postcard. The status accorded painting, even in its moment of production, was always as mythic as its content, and that myth obscured. Paris Grand Palais has, as its basis, a distorted and reversed reproduction of Adolphe-William Bouguereau’s L’éveil du Coeur (1892), partly obscured by brightly coloured digital renderings of what might be molecular structures (in other words a rendering visible of something equally as intangible and imaginary as the heart’s awakening as it is rendered in the story of Cupid and Psyche...). Bouguereau’s ghastly sentimentalising of Greek myth was the kind of painting that the sisters could easily have seen in the Paris Salon on their way back from Italy. (I do not think it is the kind of image that they could easily have bought...) It is now a picture that you can buy, as anything from an “art print” to a “museum standard oil painting” via some 500 sites on the internet. It was an image that you could buy, within a decade of its first exhibition, mass-produced on porcelain plaques, by the Berlin company KPM (Königliche Porzellan Manufaktur). This history of reproduction and dissemination suggests that what ‘auratic’ value the original of the painting might ever have had was soon disseminated. The painting existed more as an image to be copied and to form a suitable background to life, rather than to be a work of art whose content might change a spectator’s life. Yet that, precisely, is what we want the work of art to do with its truths and meanings. (I’m thinking here of Theodor Adorno’s argument in his essay Commitment about the transcendent power of abstraction in Kafka, Beckett or Beethoven against the political specificity of Brecht, but we might want to make the same argument for a painting – perhaps Guernica or Manet’s Death of Maximillian - that after the encounter we will never be the same again.) Yet the point of one of those works, the Manet, at least as Georges Bataille has it, is that after the work we can only be the same again, such is its representation of our indifference. Perhaps the mark of the artwork, rather than the image, is that it makes no false promises.
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