art and provenance
a Fabergé egg made for the Russian royal family in 1890 cost, in todays prices, £300,000 - this at a time when the vast majority of the country's people were impoverished peasants working themselves to the bone. it's a simple fact that the egg was paid for with the blood of the poor.
the egg, like all the Fabergé eggs, is an intricate piece of finely bejewelled craft work. to many people, and presumably to the tsarina who recieved it, it is or was a beautiful object.
but how is beauty judged here? presumably by completely ignoring the provenance of the piece and it's place in Russian social history as a statement of contempt for the suffering of the people whose taxes, labour and deprivation paid for it.
beauty here is judged in terms of the object's exquisiteness, it's preciousness, its monetary value, the shallow sheen it carries with it from royal ownership and ultimately its sensual and superficial properties. it relies on visual rather than intellectual experience - that, and an ignorance of history.
a Fabergé egg made for the Russian royal family in 1890 cost, in todays prices, £300,000 - this at a time when the vast majority of the country's people were impoverished peasants working themselves to the bone. it's a simple fact that the egg was paid for with the blood of the poor.
the egg, like all the Fabergé eggs, is an intricate piece of finely bejewelled craft work. to many people, and presumably to the tsarina who recieved it, it is or was a beautiful object.
but how is beauty judged here? presumably by completely ignoring the provenance of the piece and it's place in Russian social history as a statement of contempt for the suffering of the people whose taxes, labour and deprivation paid for it.
beauty here is judged in terms of the object's exquisiteness, it's preciousness, its monetary value, the shallow sheen it carries with it from royal ownership and ultimately its sensual and superficial properties. it relies on visual rather than intellectual experience - that, and an ignorance of history.
above: russian peasants and a Fabergé egg made for the Russian royal family, both 1890
but in any real sense this is a truly ugly piece of work, a lump of metal and enamel forged out of the cruelty of a powerful elite towards its weak subjects. it is a grotesquery. a travesty. an injustice. greed and hate in the shape of an egg. when you look at Fabergé's work you are effectively looking at a rather attractive murder weapon and for this reason beauty becomes informed by provenance. it is no longer just a beautiful object. it is lless than that because it carries ugly associations which cannot be dissociated from the object or the experience of seeing it.
in my own work, i produce many of the same superficial qualities that can be seen in a Fabergé egg - metallic shine and reflective surfaces in a decorative, bejewelling fashion. my works are a little less fine than Fabergé's, but then i wasn't born into a goldsmithing family and apprenticed from an early age nor did i inherit a factory full of craftsmen. but i like to think that in my own hurried and daubing way i am producing jewels.
the important difference between my work and that of the Fabergé machine is that mine comes with laudable provenance. it isn't bloodsoaked, at least not directly. i use recycled and found materials - foil, card, wood, lost and broken pieces of costume jewellery - and produce pieces which sell for prices that equate to less than the hourly minimum wage. it is in the tradition of peasant art.
the use of reflective surfaces is a response to a primal thing i think. you don't need to be an educated 21st century aesthete to wonder happily at such things. there are also loving childlike qualities in the joy of reflected light. children delight in using glitter and i am sometimes aware of the connections to my younger self making christmas cards as i produce this art.
judge for yourself whether work coming from bloodied, cruel origins can ever produce beauty. if it does then this must simply be a testament to our own depravity, a triumph for animalistic sensuality over compassionate judgement and understanding informed by aesthetic sensibility.
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