Scandal

I was just looking at Sargent’s “Portrait of Madame X”. When it came out the scandal around this painting was sufficient to drive its painter from France and to make its subject, the popular socialite Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, withdraw permanently from Paris society.

Today the same painting is seen as an important work, with an honored place on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In our day and age, it is distinctly not scandalous.




 

I am trying to imagine what work of art today might end up following a similar historical trajectory. Specifically, what aesthetic creation is out there today that scandalizes people, to the extent that it has the power to ruin careers and reputations, yet will one day be seen as an important and eminently respectable work of art?

Of course the future is notoriously difficult to predict. Still it is fun to imagine.

So here is a game to play: Pick any work of currently scandalous creation, and declare it to be a respectable work within some imagined future. From that seed, you might be able to construct an entire forward cultural trajectory.

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