When Victor Hugo, after separating from his wife Adèle in 1830, witnessed the negative assessments of his contemporaries regarding the Gothic art of the city of Paris, where demolitions of buildings and facades from the medieval period were promoted (and executed). Hurt by this situation, Victor Hugo wrote pamphlets defending examples of Gothic architecture. At one point in the text he tells the story of two monks looking at Gutenberg’s Bible while the view out the window was of Notre Dame Cathedral, nostalgically saying: “This will destroy that.” The fear was that the temple was a space made to listen to the word of God. The domain of the monk and the opium of the people. The fear was that the written word was replicated even in the book and thus entered the domain of the home and private space. The temple and the spatial experience of its architecture perished in the face of the reproducibility of the written word.
And yet, on September 11, 2001, as I watched the fall of the second tower live on CNN, I felt something similar to Victor Hugo’s monks. A symbol was being destroyed. It was falling before the live eyes of a simultaneous world, the symbol of Western capitalism. But the WTC attack, despite its holy war intent, was not the climax of our world. I thought at the time that the attack on our world by the other world was not against the economy symbolized by the towers. Perhaps, more certainly, what the attack wanted to destroy was our idea of God. Money is the God that makes everything equal. Only the abstraction of the figure of capital symbolized by money flattens the world. But I thought, if Osama wanted to attack the foundation of savage capitalism, the planes should fall on the Louvre.
The art and value of a Miro, which to the visitor seems like a child’s drawing on their refrigerator, or the copyright discovered in art, is the formula for success. Picasso’s sketch, the absurd value of an object like a work of art, is where the core of our Western sustenance lies. That something has value, as much as a work of art, is incomprehensible within the system. Like discovering Modigliani’s long necks, Botero’s fat ones, Miro’s childlike sketches—and replicating them as a style, as a copyright, forever destroyed the aura of the work, which, as its word suggests, acted upon the viewer. Like Caravaggio’s bodies in the temples, they acted like the word that Victor Hugo’s monks thought would drown out the words that once belonged to God in the silent signs of writing, and then in methodical doubt, and now in the copyright of the work that no longer has meaning in experience but in the abstract market of the world where the image is everything and no longer represents or presents. It is reproduced without aura, without meaning.
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