that this was to everybody’s liking. In 1871, the Paris Commune would attempt to divert history onto another path. For the first time, the proletariat had its own revolution. While the representatives of the state retreated to Versailles, the communards became authors of their own history, if not at the level of government, then in everyday life. That the Commune had no real leaders might not be a weakness, and at least it had the wit to arm the people. It may not have understood power, but it understood the city, and intervened in its space. As Marx said, it suffered from too many trying to refight the old revolutions to grasp the originality of its situation. Or as the Situationists put it: “The Paris Commune succumbed less to the force of arms than the force of habit.”31
“In our opinion, the Parisian insurrection of 1871 was the grand and highest attempt of the city to stand as the measure and norm of human reality,” writes Henri Lefebvre.32 Product of unique circumstances, and doomed from the start, when the ruling Versaillese return, the Commune closes a whole era of revolutionary politics, and perhaps not just politics. Clark: “After Courbet, is there any more ‘revolutionary art’? After the Commune, and what Courbet did in that particular revolution, is there the possibility of any such thing?”33 Charged with instigating the destruction of the Vendôme column during the Commune, Courbet faced imprisonment and exile, and became an enduring hero to the left.
The new city becomes the site for the painter who stays with the truth of appearances. But this imagining of the city is a kind of fetishism, an inability to see capital at work. Those workings are too spectral. Clark: “Capitalism was assuredly visible from time to time, in a street of new factories or the theatricals of the bourse; but it was only in the form of the city that it appeared as what it was, a shaping spirit, a force remaking things with ineluctable logic—the argument of freight statistics and double entry book keeping. The city was the sign of capital: it was there one saw the commodity take on flesh—and take up and eviscerate the varieties of social practice, and give them back with ventriloqual precision.”34 The city becomes the figure that both reveals and mystifies capital at work. Modern art becomes the art of this city, and, unknowingly, the keeper of at least a few capital secrets.
4 The Spectacle of Modern Life
Things have their seasons, and even certain kinds of eminence go out of style.
Baltasar Gracián
Modern art is good at symptoms. It is good at recording the perceptual effects of a certain kind of transformation of sensation, but not always so good at the diagram of forces that animates those appearances. Modern art invents a whole city of images of the city as images. Clark: “This, I should say, is the essential myth of modern life: that the city has become a free field of signs and exhibits, a marketable mass of images, an area in which the old separations have broken down for good. The modern, to repeat the myth once more, is the marginal; it is ambiguity, it is mixture of classes and classifications, it is anomie and improvisation, it is the reign of generalized illusion.”1 The separation of public and private life, and the invasion of both by the commodity form, is coming but is not yet perfected. The artist who worked this seam most assiduously was close to the Impressionists, but borrowed much from Courbet: Édouard Manet (1832–83).
The late nineteenth century is the time of the construction of the middle class as an entity separate from the proletariat. Manet shows with extraordinary clarity the sites in which it was produced: pop culture, the leisure industry, and suburbia. Three pictures, and three women’s bodies, encapsulate this emerging spectacular regime, starting with Manet’s Olympia (1863). By the 1860s, the bourgeoisie was used to the idea of an avant-garde. It had decided to be ironical about it. Manet still managed to find the weak point in bourgeois indifference.
The problem was not that Olympia was an image of a prostitute. It was not unusual for Salon pictures to be of prostitutes, but the acceptable image of the prostitute was the courtesan. The courtesan was what could be represented of prostitution. Money and sex could meet in private, in the brothel, or in the spectacle, in the representation of the courtesan. But the prostitute could not be made public. The courtesan is the acceptable image of modern desire. She was supposed to play at not being a prostitute. She was supposed to be the false coin in the realm of sexual purity. She was supposed to almost but not quite pass for respectable. She was what in twenty-first-century parlance offered something more than a mere hooker’s hand-job. She is the ancestress of the girlfriend experience.2
The girlfriend experience was the invention of a pimp by the name of Jason Itzler. Other escort services offered the porn-star experience, where the client was supposed to receive something like the most perfectly commodified sex for his money. Itzler spotted a gap in the market for something else: “I told my girls … we have to provide the clients with the greatest single experience ever, a Kodak moment to treasure for the rest of their lives. Spreading happiness, positive energy, and love, that’s what being the best means to me. Call me a dreamer, but that’s the NY Confidential credo.” The women who worked for his NY Confidential were supposed to repeat a mantra to themselves before meeting their client, to the effect that he was actually her boyfriend of six months standing, whom she had not seen for three weeks.
Itzler found the perfect vehicle for such a service in 2004: Natalia McLennan, a former Canadian tap-dance champion. “I’m a little money making machine, that’s what I am,” recalls McLennan. “Yes, he sold the shit out of me, but he sold me as myself, someone anyone can be comfortable with, someone who really likes sex. Because the truth is, I do. I loved my job, totally.” But, says Itzler, “If she ever did it with anyone for free, it would have broken my heart.”
Both Itzler and McLennan seem conflicted about the nature of their business. McLennan: “Maybe it sounds crazy, but I never felt I was in it for the money.” Itzler: “I thought I could save the world if I could bring together the truly elite people.” Itzler even tried to turn NY Confidential into a reality TV show.3 While hardly worthy of comparison to a Manet—and these days what is?—like Olympia the NY Confidential TV pilot blurred the boundaries of public and private, sex and love, money and gift. Itzler went to prison as much for a category mistake as a crime.
The name, for a start, is a joke: Olympia was a popular trade name for prostitutes. The brothel, like the Salon, put desire under the rubric of a classical goddess. Olympia undoes the category of the courtesan, or tries to. She is not a courtesan passing as a lady, but a hooker passing as a courtesan. Or rather, “she” is an artist, and artist’s model—Victorine Meurent—passing as a hooker, passing as a courtesan.4 This Olympia challenges the playful relation of money and desire. On its long road to disenchantment, the bourgeois lost faith in God, but it still believes in desire.
If even the image of prostitution escaped from the spectacle it would be an embarrassment. It implies that money has cuckolded even desire. “The fear of invasion amounted to this: that money was somehow remaking the world completely … Such an image of capital could still not quite be stomached.”5 At least not in 1860; by 1960, things would be different, the frontier of what could not be stomached would be elsewhere, but was likely still being played out across women’s bodies.
The official nude was supposed to be about something other than the naked body of desire. Olympia pictures also the disintegration of a genre. “If there was a specifically bourgeois unhappiness, it centered on how to represent sexuality, not how to organize or suppress it.”6 The nude became embarrassing. Olympia gave female sexuality a particular body, rather than an idealized and abstract one. It gave female sexuality not just a body to look at, but one that returned the viewer’s gaze, and in returning it, created a space for a self reserved from the purchaser’s look. The look it confounded was the look of both the art lover and the john.7
Argenteuil is about twelve kilometers from the heart of Paris, and by the early twenty-first century was one of its most populous suburbs, easily reached via the Transilien railway line. In the late nineteenth century it was still partly farmland, given over to grapes and the white asparagus named after it. The railway came in 1851. The market gardens gave way to factories, which were extensively bombed during the war, leading