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Jean-Antoine Watteau The Surprise ca. 1718 private collection, courtesy of Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd. “Watteau, Music and Theater” Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Antoine Watteau The Pleasures of the Ball ca. 1716 Dulwich Picture Gallery, London “Watteau, Music and Theater” Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Antoine Watteau Love in the French Theater 1714 Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin “Watteau, Music and Theater” Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Antoine Watteau Island of Cythera ca. 1709-10 Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main “Watteau, Music and Theater” Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Antoine Watteau Italian Comedians ca. 1719 Art Institute of Chicago “Watteau, Music and Theater” Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Antoine Watteau Three Studies of a Seated Woman ca. 1717 Art Institute of Chicago “Watteau, Music and Theater” Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Antoine Watteau Woman Reclining on a Chaise Longue ca. 1718 Fondation Custodia, Paris “Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection” Frick Collection

Jean-Antoine Watteau Standing Man (Persian) 1715 Fondation Custodia, Paris “Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection” Frick Collection

Jean-Antoine Watteau A Member of the Persian Embassy n.d. The Thaw Collection Pierpont Morgan Library

Jean-Antoine Watteau Seated Young Woman ca. 1716 The Thaw Collection Pierpont Morgan Library

Francois Boucher Standing Woman Seen from Behind ca. 1742 Fondation Custodia, Paris “Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection” Frick Collection

Louis-Léopold Boilly Portraits of the Artist’s Family and Servants n.d. The Thaw Collection Pierpont Morgan Library

When was the last time you enjoyed a painting that was sexy, odd and hilarious all at once? Just visit the all-round wonderful show “Watteau, Music, and Theater” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sept. 21-Nov. 29, 2009, and look for The Surprise by the Rococo artist, Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721).

The elegant and witty game of love turns suddenly serious in this small oil painting on wood  from ca. 1718. A guitarist dressed as the commedia dell’arte character Mezzetin, splendidly attired in satin with a lace ruff, looks up from tuning his instrument to watch a couple whom he has been, or was about to begin, serenading. The swain has suddenly, violently embraced his lady, swiveling her body across his as he steals a passionate kiss. He grasps her left arm, which he attempts to place around his neck, while her other arm dangles passively, suggesting that at least for the moment she does not reciprocate his ardor.

The scene is pervaded by a sense of suspended animation. Will she respond with a kiss or a slap? Like most of Watteau’s paintings, several scenarios are possible, but here the ante has been upped by this unusual eruption of desire. Certainly, this is not the classic “fête galante.” That genre’s usual gentle, teasing and sometimes melancholy atmosphere is nowhere in sight.

(CH writes: Watteau is a favourite of mine; I love his strange, melancholy paintings. They are evoked in song and poetry too: see the poems of Verlaine and the music of Faure and Debussy for an evocation of how the 19th century thought the 18thcentury saw itself..)

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PARADISE ISLAND by N.F. Karlins.

How messy it all is

The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is. In graph after graph measuring various welfare functions, the authors show that the best predictor of how countries will rank is not the differences in wealth between them (which would result in the US coming top, with the Scandinavian countries and the UK not too far behind, and poorer European nations like Greece and Portugal bringing up the rear) but the differences in wealth within them (so the US, as the most unequal society, comes last on many measures, followed by Portugal and the UK, both places where the gap between rich and poor is relatively large, with Spain and Greece somewhere in the middle, and the Scandinavian countries invariably out in front, along with Japan). Just as significantly, this pattern holds inside the US as well, where states with high levels of income inequality also tend to have the greatest social problems. It is true that some of the most unequal American states are also among the poorest (Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia), so you might expect things to go worse there. But some unequal states are also rich (California), whereas some fairly equal ones are also quite poor (Utah). Only a few (New Hampshire, Wyoming) score well on both counts. What the graphs show are the unequal states tending to cluster together regardless of income, so that California usually finds itself alongside Mississippi scoring badly, while New Hampshire and Utah both do consistently well. Income inequality, not income per se, appears to be the key. As a result, the authors are able to draw a clear conclusion: ‘The evidence shows that even small decreases in inequality, already a reality in some rich market democracies, make a very important difference to the quality of life.’ Achieving these decreases should be the central goal of our politics, precisely because we can be confident that it works. This is absolutely not, they insist, a ‘utopian dream’.

Read more here:

LRB · David Runciman: How messy it all is.

Educative Violence

Towards the end of On Violence, Arendt makes the following side-remark without developing it any further:

“For better or worse — and I think there is every reason to be fearful as well as hopeful — the really new and potential revolutionary class in society will consist of intellectuals, and their potential power, as yet unrealized, is very great, perhaps too great for the good of mankind. But these are speculations.”

You could hear an echo of this idea, which we may call “intellectual violence,” in Agamben’s early (and still untranslated) essay, “On the Limits of Violence.” Following in Arendt’s footsteps, he begins by admitting that on the face of it any link between violence and politics seems contradictory, because politics is the sphere of language, of persuasion, from which brute violence is strictly excluded. Nevertheless, Agamben argues that today we are witnessing with our own eyes the emergence of a new phenomenon that he calls “linguistic violence.” Probably the most obvious example for the way by which the modern age transforms the apparatus of language into a special form of violence is propaganda (in late capitalism, we seem to prefer the terms “public relations” or “advertisement”). Violence can become an integral part of language at the moment in which language crosses the thin line between rational persuasion and psychological manipulation. On the other hand, one could add that today it becomes clear how certain acts that we would traditionally call “violent” — from independent terrorist attacks to established wars — are nothing but twisted means of persuasion or manipulation of public opinion. Linguistic means and violent means — which were completely separated in Arendt’s mind — therefore enter a dangerous zone of indetermination, where the expression “linguistic violence” no longer appears to be contradictory at all. Agamben further claims that even the modern world of letters could be suffused with the sort of powerful linguistic violence that already led Plato to call for the banning of poetry from the Greek city. Agamben therefore treats Sade as an example of an author who exercised, by means of his writings, a form of intellectual violence that

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notes for the coming community: Educative Violence.

By Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted October 24, 2009.

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