revealing any deeper appreciation for the subjects involved, this
approach keeps the viewer at a distance by superimposing a self-con-
scious barrier between the object and its audience. The resulting dislo-
cation could be a possible thematic end in itself, but even that isn’t
pursued. The refracting of planes is superficially invoked because it
lacks any apparent utility. ‘How’ no longer functions in the service of
‘what’, and becomes instead an end in itself.
One only comes away from this approach with an enhanced sense of
the artist’s facility. The true subject of virtuosity is always the artist.
Virtuosos are marksmen, not hunters; they never hit anything more ani-
mated than a bull’s-eye, although they hit the bull’s-eye every time they
take aim. As with circus magicians, the point of the trick isn’t that silk
hats produce rabbits or that bouquets of flowers spring from the ears of
unsuspecting volunteers; the point of the trick is rather the illusion of the
magician’s omnipotence. This is why Picasso was one of the greatest
narcissists of the twentieth century: his work was always only about
himself. All those harlequins and minotaurs and nudes exist solely to
afford the artist an opportunity for line diddling; stylistic variations
merely establish the “fecundity” of their creator. Through dislocation,
Picasso makes the obvious image and the obvious idea seem less obvi-
ous, thus camouflaging his clichés. When it has no affective resonance,
distortion comes to resemble ornamentation: a visual tangent proceed-
ing from a subject but having nothing to do with it. As often happens
with virtuosity, the bits become overly prominent. Any sense of the
woman within the nude in Picasso’s work is eclipsed by the way the eyes
are inverted or a third nostril is added.
Virtuosity also leads to what we might call the savoir-faire syndrome.
In it, the purpose of a work of art is to demonstrate that the artist knows
his trade. This is based on the assumption that if you’re not a profes-
sional, you’re just another punk. The emphasis of art produced by the
savoir-faire syndrome is on surface, techniques employed and materials
used (you get a lot of this at art fairs). We might borrow from Veblen and
describe the results as conspicuous construction. Art that merely vali-
dates the artist only holds one’s attention for so long. You don’t write a
novel simply to prove you can spell. Demonstrating proficiency is the
function of homework, not art.
There is a reductive quality at work in cubism that also becomes prob-
lematic. Again the benefits for the artist are obvious: with all human fig-
ures reduced to the generalizations of geometry, only the artist seems
distinct. Anatomical abstraction is the oldest art form, and there is unde-
niable power in such an elemental approach. But for all its strengths,188 Geoffrey Bent