The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

Following the spirit of this project, let’s enter the courtroom to attend the trial of art.

150 years ago artist James McNeill Whistler finished his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. A not very concrete (not to say, yet, abstract) description of a party with fireworks in the Cremorne Gardens of London’s Chelsea. Stains, trance-like brushstrokes, a few golden dots and the timid entry of light into a primarily black oil painting. It was several decades ahead of Vassily Kandinsky’s radical abstraction, but who knew that in 1874. Certainly not the critics.

John Ruskin did not like that painting at all. And he wrote it down: “I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face…” Whistler, not a fan of negative criticism (tell that to Oscar Wilde), decided to take action. Not by painting a bigger picture, or by throwing a bucket of paint at Ruskin. He sued him in court for defamation.

The trial has gone down in history as an exercise in analyzing the “honor of the artist” compared to the work of the critic. And the first won. Ruskin was sentenced to pay a farthing to Whistler. Since then, the latter would wear the farthing on his watch-chain.

The judge agreed with Whistler, establishing a precedent, a very disturbing jurisprudence. Critics could no longer should give a negative opinion about a work of art, since that opinion damaged the good name of the creator. The press of the time published their parallel trial, which was damning for both contenders, as this comic strip demonstrates:

Judge:

-Bad critic, for using that language…!

-Silly painter, for taking him to court for that…!

A few years later, James Whistler returned to the fray, publishing The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, repeating the mantra that those who dedicate themselves to criticism do so because they are incapable of being good artists: “What greater sarcasm can be conveyed by Mr. Ruskin tells himself to preach to the young what he cannot accomplish!” he wrote. “Why, dissatisfied with his own conscious power, should he choose to become the kind of incompetence who talks for forty years about what he has never done?”

The truth is that criticism lost the trial, but not the judgement.

The writer specialized in Whistler, Linda Merrill, describes[1] that the artist at that time had a poor financial situation, motivated by the debts acquired in the construction of a house in the best neighborhood of the city. For her, the artist’s motivation to take the critic to trial responds to an economic need: he believed that his victory in court would help him meet the needs of his high standard of living. Beyond shoring up his status as untouchable. Far from making up for it, the halfpenny cost him dearly. The triumphant artist ended up bankrupt. Bankruptcy of its economy, and its prestige. Contrary to Ruskin’s, which, in the long term, was elevated as a precursor of critical thinking faced with the pomp and machinery of the artist-product.

[1] A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin, 1992.

Paul Thomas Murphy analyzed the trial and concluded: “Who won Whistler vs. Ruskin? Neither did. Or, rather: both did.” Murphy’s book[1] delves into the position of Whistler, who was more focused on achieving recognition than on his art. He also adds the fact that for Ruskin the darkness of Whistler’s work was tangential to his concern for a “black cloud” (the critic was one of the first to show sensitivity to the environment and London pollution).

Critic Jonathan Jones wrote that “Ruskin represented high modernism, and Whistler stood up as the first in a tradition of ‘low modernism’ that runs through Duchamp and Dalí to the present day.”

Nocturnal in black and gold: the falling rocket, by the way, did not win “the judgment of history”; Today almost no one remembers it. Whistler did transcend his era by inaugurating an archetype: that of the boastful artist, obsessed with keeping his honor clean, being the center of media attention, with stoking critics, and with becoming a “brand.” And John Ruskin, thanks to his defeat, has been identified as the critical antagonist of that type of artist.

But that archetype is magnetic. Social networks have supported his figure; artists who spend more time – and money – on gaining followers than on working on their art. They monopolize power and contacts that they do not hesitate to use as a battering ram against those who do not genuflect before them. That they transmute into haters against those who argue against them. They request the cancellation of those who dare to criticize them.

The art world has become polarized, leading to a ghettoization that has nothing to do with artistic talents. More like with personal adhesions. Given this, the criticism oscillates between those who work for an intranet, a corporate ventriloquist magazine of the Whistlerian artist, or the critic who gladly pays the quarter of a penny, and continues with his own thing: the argument, the analysis devoid of personal interests, and to the constant answer to the permanent question:

To who does my criticism serve?

[1] Falling Rocket: James Whistler, John Ruskin, and the Battle for Modern Art (2023) de Paul Thomas Murphy.