‘The Scream’ at the commerce of art

I’ LL come clean: I’m an art lover, true, but I’m not by any stretch of the imagination knowledgeable about the subject. In a social gathering where it is being discussed, I prefer to listen — and perhaps learn. Clearly, any affected interjections on my part would simply highlight my ignorance, perhaps even my insecurity. In a case like this, silence is indeed golden.

Earlier this week, while on a visit to New York from Washington, my hometown, I learned a lot about the art world, and its unseemly link to our commercialized social values, when the news came out that the famed 1895 painting, “The Scream,” by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, was bought by a bidder at Sotheby’s for $20 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever to sell at auction, anytime, anywhere. The buyer remains anonymous, but who on earth is willing to fork out 20 million dollars (hardly loose change, by anyone’s standards) in order to hang a painting above his fireplace. But then “The Scream” is hardly your run of the mill painting. It is the second most recognizable artwork in the Western world after the Mona Lisa.

It shows an agonized figure, staring directly at the viewer, with its hands clasped to its head and with its mouth, contorted with keening despair, emitting a scream. Look long enough and you can almost hear it filling the swirling landscape, the fjord in Ekenberg, outside Oslo. The image is one of the most disturbing — and telling — to come out of the history of modern art. It depicts impending psychic calamity, shattered nerves, even cosmic doom. It’s difficult to fully explain (the subject is too capacious for this column to attempt an explanation) the allure that the image continues to exercise on the imagination in modern times. It’s an unforgettable, dense image whose power to shock remains undiminished to this day.

Perhaps “The Scream,” which Munch released roughly three

Fawaz Turki

For outside of Sotheby’s, there was excitement of a different kind, this one projected by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators (“We are the 99 percent”) who feel that art ̶ and this column concurs with the notion ̶ is created out of a human need for expression and communication, and commercializing it leads to its degradation, or to an elitist form of culture available only to those who can afford its high costs.

decades before Westerners lunged at each other like suicidal maniacs in an all-consuming war, provided the Euro-american world with a prescient view of the manifold horrors soon to come their way. Or perhaps, judging by the way it has become a transnational, transcultural touchstone for out times, “The Scream” depicts that peak of anxiety, a soul’s final breaking point, in any human community’s confrontation with dread, helplessness, despair and, well, the unspeakable — at Auschwitz and Hiroshima, at Deir Yassein and My Lai, at Dresden and the Gulag.

Munch wrote poetically, actually even teleologically, about what inspired him to paint his masterpiece: “I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood red. I stopped and leaned against the railing, deathly tired, looking out across the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fear, and I sensed a great, infinite scream pass through nature.”

And therein lies, really, the mystery and enduring appeal of “The Scream,” an art work where the artist transformed the act of screaming into one of feeling, where a moment in objective reality was transposed on canvas.

But not everyone in New York last Wednesday was bedazzled when a painting and 20 million dollars changed hands between an auction house and an anonymous bidder. For outside of Sotheby’s, there was excitement of a different kind, this one projected by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators (“We are the 99 percent”) who feel that art — and this column concurs with the notion — is created out of a human need for expression and communication, and commercializing it leads to its degradation, or to an elitist form of culture available only to those who can afford its high costs.

As one of the protesters, who reportedly “screamed” in unison upon hearing the news that “The Scream” had just gone under the hammer to a bidder with 20 million dollars to spare, told a New York Times reporter: “It exemplifies the ways in which objects of artistic creativity become the exclusive province of the 1 percent.”

But, hey, this is New York, a city that has the adversarial current running in its blood stream, where the avant-garde in the arts — whether in theater and dance, in literature and music, in ideological theory and intellectual innovation — has long triumphed as a retractive force against traditionalist norms. After all, it was in feisty New York where, in the late 1960s, the “new” was born, the New Journalism, the New Left, the New Rock, and the rest of it. So why shouldn’t an art lover there — an obscenely loaded one, to be sure — fork out a stupendous 20 million dollars for an iconic painting, and a group of idealist protesters confront him, and the art world he inhabits, for their excesses?

And, yes, you ask, what was a hick from sedentary Washington doing in the Big Apple to begin with? Well, to see something New Yorker “new”— a production of Macbeth, a dance performance in its entirety called “Sleep No More,” presented as “immersive theater,” where the audience is not there to watch a play, but is itself the play. The cost of the ticket, $85. Train fare, $56. Coffee at Penn Station, $1.85. Not exorbitant enough for the folks from the Occupy movement to come after. I am, after all, a struggling writer, from and of the 99 percent, who is driven to contemplate “The Scream” moments he often encounters in his own life.