2PROLOGUEunveiling, the sculpture quickly became the target of extremely negative
commentaries, with critics labeling it “repulsive,” “vicious,” “frightful,”
and a “threat to society.” Famously, art critic Elie de Mont said, “I don’t
ask that art should always be elegant, but I don’t believe that its role is to
champion the cause of ugliness,” while a correspondent from the English
journal Artist bluntly asked: “Can art descend lower?”^1 These surprising
responses are indicative of the social role that sculpture was expected to
play at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States.
Needless to say, matters have changed a great deal since. After all, our
generation is more or less at ease with the notion that a tipped-over uri-
nal is the real conceptual matrix of much contemporary art. This is the
universal premise upon which we can accept dead sharks in formalde-
hyde, an unmade bed surrounded with litter, and a photograph of a cru-
cifix suspended in urine as art. The cuteness of Degas’s little dancer is the
result of our changed perspective. So, why did her appearance unsettle
fin de siècle Parisians, and how could she be possibly relevant to the pres-
ence of taxidermy in contemporary art?
First of all, in popular culture, impressionism has been mollified to fa-
cilitate a consumptive mode of capitalist imaging that has stripped the
movement of its political edge. Substantially castrated, impressionism has
become the bourgeois mode of the “unproblematically pretty.” The post-
card, the calendar, and the chocolate box lid are its most readily available
mechanical reproduction display formats. Yet, impressionism meant
much more to the discourses and practices of classical art that dominated
the nineteenth century. The movement’s defiance of the classical canon
was informed by the temporary rise to power of workers during the es-
tablishment of the socialist Paris Commune in 1871. Its ties to realism, the
movement that in the 1850s brought artists to paint the present in which
they lived, rather than idealized images of idealized pasts, is visible in
Manet’s influence on the group. Paintings like Olympia (1863) a nd A Bar
at the Folies-Bergère (1882) deliberately and abruptly yanked the utopia-
nism of classical art from within. Olympia assaulted classical art from a
contextual standpoint: it lifted the veil of decorum to reveal the prosti-
tute behind the Venus. The honesty and simplicity of this shocking op-
eration upset Parisians because it exposed the hypocrisy embedded in the
deep stratifications of naturalized gender and social hierarchies. A Bar at
the Folies-Bergère (fig. P.2) mined the foundation of classical realism, chal-