By Victor Greto
Poor Fay Weldon.
Critics and the literary community haven’t left her alone since it was announced that a jewelry company called Bulgari commissioned her to write a novel that featured its products prominently in the book’s plot.
Even if it wasn’t discovered this way, the title of the book, The Bulgari Connection, would have eventually given the game away.
This is not an issue of a postmodern literary novelist using commercial products as irony or satire, critics say – even though the discussion has not centered around whether Weldon’s novel is any good.
This is just crass commercialism, they say, and plainly not funny. It is a blow to the integrity of artistic expression. Is nothing sacred?
No. Thank goodness.
Or thank Fay Weldon.
She’s brought us all back to reality, to the historical realization of how and why much of art has always been created.
It’s only been for a couple of centuries that artists have held a romantic assumption that they created art for reasons that overflowed from inner creativity, with barely a nod at outside, material concerns.
That idea only started sometime during the 18th century, when artists could support themselves for the first time on the open market by selling what they produced through publishers and were no longer beholden to a single rich or aristocratic patron.
What an illusion, and how belittling the romantic attitude is toward the greatest artists of the past, including Shakespeare, who did more sucking up to an aristocrat named Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield (title long enough for you?), than Weldon ever would deign to do with Bulgari.
A good third of his sonnets were written to this guy for his approval, as well as other, longer poems.
Macbeth was written at the behest of King James I, Shakespeare’s company’s patron.
Those poems and that play are pretty good, despite the bard selling out that way.
Or how about Sandro Botticelli, the Italian Renaissance painter, who was so beholden to the Medici family – rich bankers who ran the northern Italian city-state Florence off and on for centuries – he painted family members in several of his paintings, most notably the Adoration of the Magi.
In that picture, he painted the Medici patriarch, Cosimo – looking a bit old and drawn – kneeling in front of the baby Jesus. He even surrounded the Holy Family with a crowd of colorful, strutting courtiers, clearly there to be seen, not to see.
Talk about blasphemy. Talk about selling out.
Since we’re in Italy during the Renaissance, how about Michelangelo letting himself be forced to paint a ceiling for four years because his patron, the pope, wanted him, a sculptor, to do it.
The whims of the rich and famous.
I mean, how low can you go?
There are thousands of other examples, of course, because art isn’t made in a vacuum, any more than wealth is.
They need each other to survive. Wealth needs art to make it feel legitimate; art needs wealth so the artist may eat, get paper on which to write, make money so he or she can write or paint or sing some more.
It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s the way it works.
This is, of course, why the greatest art is often the most subtle and ironic of all human expression.
There’s enough irony in the sonnets and in his plays aimed at his patrons and those who paid to get into the Globe theater to tickle Shakespeare’s creativity.
And in Botticelli’s painting, the Adoration, check out the figure standing to the right and in that cool-looking gold robe. That’s the artist himself, looking out at you, the viewer of the painting, with the most sardonic expression you’ll ever see in fine art.
His look says, “Do you believe this crap?”
Yep, I do.