Saviour of the World
I am usually not interested in classical paintings. They are too heavy, both in composition and allegory, for me. So when I heard that one Leonardo da Vinci’s painting was sold for 450 millions dollars, my reaction was: “kay”. After all, neither the fascination for any thing “da Vinci” and a whopping price tag for an art are surprising in this world.
What interesting is observing the reactions of people to it. A lot are excited: about the record breaking price, about how it was sold for “only” 10k ten year before, about the mystery surround the six hundred years of existing of the painting, the thriller-like tale about its discovery and attribution to Leonardo and of course, about “anything da Vinci”. But there are quite a few who are outraged by the sensationalist marketing tactics of Christie’s or that “money has become worthless”. And many don’t even hide their disdain for the whole affair, calling the work “a Monday morning Leonardo’s”, the painting’s Jesus “hardly can save himself a seat in a bus” or down right questioning the Leonardo’s attribution, as the subject and the composition are too banal for him. All of this are also not surprising either.
I have nothing to justify a comment on this painting and I am not familiar with the world of art. But those reactions are so predictable: the excitement for record, especially money record, the fascination of the “old”, the “forgotten being re-recognized”, the disdain for money, the disdain for art being represented by money (as if you didn’t ask for it)… All of this makes me wonder: Do we change? Sometimes I think progression is always on the way, and we are keeping getting better. But sometimes, I am unsure how much do we actually get better or fundamentally, we are just going round and round.
Perhaps this is because I am still under the influence of the case for not being born where a philosopher argues that “the world would be a better place if sentient life disappeared altogether”, that “life is permeated by badness”, that we should not exist at all. I do not agree with him, at least not with all of what he said. But I am not willing to fight him, not for now. It just has this feeling that his truth is too dark to accept and the opposite is essentially just a shiny illusion.