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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 to a vast urban development plan in the postwar years, then suburban sprawl, and even a little gentrification in the prettier parts with a view of the city.

That this was Argenteuil’s fate was not entirely clear in the late nineteenth century. It was a liminal space, to which the railway brought both factories and tourists, work and leisure, and sooner or later one had to yield to the other. For a while, it seemed destined to be a playground, a spectacular version of nature, made of parks and leisure zones. It framed the city with a more or less woody border. For the artists of the avant-garde, the suburb is a special zone, where the modern mix might be detected. “A landscape which assumed only as much form as the juxtaposition of production and distraction (factories and regattas).”⁸

Manet’s Argenteuil, les canotiers (1874) is a big picture, made for the Salon. A couple sit by the riverside, boats behind them, and in the background, the factories on the other shore of the river. (The river, a vivid blue, is not quite as nature painted it. The color came from indigo dumped by a chemical factory upstream.) He looks at her; she stares into nothingness. Bored, perhaps, or indifferent, or blandly masking feelings for which there is no longer any public form or language. She is fashionably dressed, but the dress does not become her. She is uneasy.

Clark makes much of the disjointed quality of the picture. “Manet found flatness rather than invented it.”⁹ Her straw hat really is flat, a disc pinned at the back into a cone. “It is a simple surface; and onto that surface is spread that wild twist of tulle, piped onto the oval like cream on a cake, smeared on like a great flourishing brush mark, blown up to impossible size. It is a great metaphor, that tulle, and it is, yes, a metaphor of painting.”¹⁰ It is the brushy top half of The Death of Marat—domesticated.

Leisure can be a key site where the abstract workings of capital present themselves to the realm of sensation. “The subcultures of leisure and their representation are part … of a process of spectacular reorganization of the city which was in turn a reworking of the whole field of commodity production.”¹¹ The landscape of leisure emerges as the symbolic field for the conflicts of a spectacular identity. At stake are the forms of freedom, of accomplishment, naturalness, individuality.

These were traditionally bourgeois attributes, but the new middle class claimed them as their own. Canotiers is an image of leisure that doesn’t quite prove leisurely. The woman in her boating outfit and hat does not quite seem at ease. Leisure is not quite the free time it is supposed to be. Capital is already producing its own specific disappointments. In 2006 Anousheh Ansari, a successful telecommunications entrepreneur, spent A$20 million on a tourist trip—into space. But all she could think to do when she got there was look at the view and eat chocolate.¹²

Leisure becomes a site of tension, just like work. It is work. Manet’s last painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), stocks all the ambiguities of the new, spectacular version of the popular. It’s a scene from a café-concert, or what now might be called a nightclub. But in the late nineteenth century it was still something of a novelty, with its fake marble under electric light, its singers in ostentatious gowns, singing simple pop songs that are poor in melody but rich in inflection. Clark’s claim for it is that the “café-concert produced the popular.”¹³ The café-concert generalized the instability of class. It made class contingent, a matter of passing, and called forth an art of mixture, transgression, ambiguity, in which the new middle class are the heroes, always angling for a way to exploit its edges.

This new middle class was creating a new class consciousness, which stressed what separated it from the proletariat, even if that claim struck the bourgeoisie, and its cultural functionaries, as ridiculous: “their probity was awful, their gentility insufferable, their snobbery outright comic.”¹⁴ And yet the avant-garde painters loved them, in their way. Their very ambiguity made them the perfect figure for the times. Modernist art tried to take its distance from the middle class and its entertainments, but artists are paradoxically fascinated by them. This usually served bourgeois interests. A characteristic of Situationist aesthetics and politics, with a nod back to Courbet, is to borrow modernism’s contempt for the middle class, but for proletarian purposes.

Clark: “The middle class of the later nineteenth century, and even in the early years of the twentieth, had not yet invented an imagery of its own fate, though in due course it would do so with deadly effectiveness: the world would be filled with soap operas, situation comedies, and other small dramas involving the magic power of commodities…,” not to mention the pilot for the NY Confidential reality TV show. “But for the time being it was obliged to feed on the values and idioms of those classes it wished to dominate; and doing so involved it in making the idioms part of a further system in which the popular was expropriated from those who produced it—made over into a separate realm of images which were given back, duly refurbished, to the people thus safely defined.”¹⁵ This inchoate spectacle learns to feed on, and transform, popular expression, extracting and selecting images. Hence the utility of modernism as a counter-project based on contempt for the result. But it is not as if there is a pure popular art that pre-exists its spectacular fate. The Situationist move is not to discard inauthentic pop in favor of an authentic popular, rather it is to appropriate the modernist critique of the popular as the basis for a new aesthetic and political project.

Clark: “It is above all collectivity that the popular exists to prevent, and doing so means treading a dangerous line.”¹⁶ It’s the same line that threads through The Death of Marat and Liberty Guiding the People. The representation has to engage the real desires, frustrations, boredoms of its public. Yet it has to arrest these affects and make of them nothing more than spectacle. “Those who possess the means of symbolic production in our societies have become expert in outflanking any strategy which seeks to obtain such effects consistently; but they cannot control the detail of performance, and cannot afford to exorcise the ghost of totality once and for all from the popular machine.”¹⁷

Armed with the techniques of the avant-garde, one can follow in Courbet’s footsteps and re-appropriate the appropriators. The middle class are specialists of the image. “Popular culture provided the petit bourgeois aficionado with two forms of illusory ‘class’: an identity with those below him, or at least with certain images of their life; and a difference from them which hinged on his skill—his privileged place—as consumer of those same images.”¹⁸ This is the power of the middle class over the proletariat, its marking itself off both by its distance from the popular, and its possession of the power to mark that very distance. Hence the popularity in the early twenty-first century of reality shows in which workaday proles compete to become designers or chefs.¹⁹ Becoming middle class means command of the surfaces of what now constitutes the popular, from a well-plated dish to kitchen renovations.

The middle class may be exempt from the rigors of manual labor, but it nonetheless encounters new kinds of labor, affective labor, cultural labor, for which it is hard to sustain much enthusiasm. Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère shows a woman working behind a bar, fashionably made up. “The face she wears is the face of the popular … but also of a fierce, imperfect resistance to any such ascription.”²⁰ It might also be the face of someone whose feet ache. The other’s leisure is her labor. It can’t but provoke a certain boredom. Behind her is a mirror, which famously does not quite reflect the scene we see in front of it. The effect is cinematic. The mirror shows a moment before or after the one we see in front of it. There are two alternating moments, the act of serving, and waiting to serve. Which comes first? It doesn’t matter. The picture is an alternation of these two moments, of working and waiting, and neither with any pleasure. She is, in a word, a waitress.

Once upon a time New York nightclubs catered to the aristocracy of the fabulous, to those with the looks, the style, or the connections to gain admittance to the world of the night.²¹ That all changed with the invention of bottle service. Buy a table for some astronomical sum, and mere money will admit you to this world which once excluded the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, with their real jobs and neat suits. Sucking the credit cards out of their wallets became the main game, and the nightclubs became big business. Nightclubs ceased producing their own special kind of celebrity, and became dependent on attracting the sports and entertainment stars of their day. The nightclub became, in other words, just an enterprise dependent upon the spectacular, rather than one of its prime engines of efflorescence.

The game became one of attracting celebrities, who might in turn attract the bankers and hedge fund men for the VIP rooms. The general admission crowd down on the dance floor would be largely for decoration. The kinds of mixing of the classes that both troubled and thrilled Manet’s contemporaries will now be carefully vetted. Managing such intercourse calls into being new kinds of labor. Rachel Uchitel was a VIP concierge director. She was an ambassador of client desire, making sure the big names and big spenders came to her club and kept on coming. “People say ‘Oh Rachel, she’s such a star fucker,’ that I only hang out with celebs. No. I hang out with successful people. I hang out with people who matter, and I’m honored to.” Uchitel became famous in her own right for fifteen seconds in connection with a famous sporting identity. The attention was not exactly welcome. Uchitel: “I have big breasts, yes. But I’m really offended by the notion that I used my sexuality.”

Or anybody else’s. For one of the roles of a VIP concierge director is to introduce people who matter to women they may find attractive. “It’s not our job to get anybody laid,” Uchitel insists.²² But it was her job to populate the VIP rooms with women as attractive as they are discreet. Models, perhaps. Or almost-models. And it is the job of club promoters to bring these almost-models in. The contemporary nightclub, in other words, is a sophisticated machine for the highly selective mingling of money and sex. Or perhaps just the promise of sex, and sometimes just the promise of money. Whether the girls put out or the boys shell out is none of the club’s concern.

The nightclub is now a long way from the café-concert, with its only partially organized traffic between money’s desires and desire’s money. Manet glimpses the beginnings of a spectacular industry that has since been perfected. Now that the threat of the dangerous classes seems half a world away, at least from a New York nightclub, the danger to guard against is not that the rabble might reject the desires on offer, but that it might rather embrace them with too much gusto. Leisure, sex and suburbia are no longer marginal sites within which new kinds of spectacular economy grow. They are the very center and essence of that spectacular economy.