Raphael's Tapestries

There are many reasons to begrudge the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain this month. The fact that he looks like a conspiring alien hiding inside a badly fitting man-suit immediately disinclines me towards him, although there is a strange mixture of melancholy and mania in his heavy-lidded eyes which I find disturbingly hypnotic. More disturbing, of course, is his implication in the world-wide Catholic conspiracy to cover up endemic child abuse within the church. But it’s not all doom and gloom you know! For the pope comes bearing gifts: the Raphael tapestries depicting scenes from the lives of Peter and Paul, which usually hang from the walls of the Sistine Chapel, have been loaned to the V&A museum to be displayed, for the first time, alongside the artist’s original cartoons, and their delivery to Britain has been timed to coincide with the pope’s visit. But it gets better: the exhibition is free.

And yet the news left me underwhelmed. After all, the cartoons are always on display; as for the tapestries – well, I just can’t get excited about tapestries. Whereas paintings (with a little help from restoration work) seem to age gracefully, their faded hues conferring distinction, like flecks of grey hair on handsome man, tapestries don’t seems to age so much as wither away. There is something wan and tubercular about their paling threads, their once-bright colours succumbing to consumption, too bright still to be considered – as the faded monochrome of an ageing sketch might be – as spectral, they linger in their not-quite-brightness like an etiolated star, the white dwarf of many a country house. Or perhaps I read too much into chromatic decline...

But free is free, and Raphael is Raphael, and certainly if these tapestries are ever going to be actually enjoyed by the public then it will be here in this exhibition at the V&A rather than in the Sistine Chapel, in the hallowed ground of which the phenomenology of viewership is one of fatigued touristic ennui. For before seeing Raphael’s tapestries in the Sistine Chapel you inevitably wander through the Vatican’s superabundance of treasures, carried along with the tide of tourists until you’re numbed into a plodding passive state by aesthetic overload and the incessant dazzling flash of cameras. Eventually you’re spat out into the chapel itself to stand shoulder-to shoulder, cheek-by-jowl with the gawping hordes, everyone craning their necks upwards in agonised admiration of Michelangelo’s sublime ceiling – which, for all its familiarity, for all the expectation and the mad rush and crush of visitors (up to 20,000 in a day!), still fails to disappoint. But as for the tapestries? Only the determined push and shove their way around the outskirts of the chapel to take a peek at where they hang from the walls; only the superhuman are then able to actually take their time appreciating them!

Yet when these tapestries were first made they were considered more precious than Michelangelo’s ceiling. To look at them now, I personally find it difficult to discern this past lustre of theirs. And this is why old tapestries in general fail to excite me: they constitute an unsatisfying lack – an imagine-what-once-was that is somehow devoid of the sublimity which that imagining achieves in the case of architectural ruins. However, for this reason seeing these tapestries next to the cartoons is gratifying, since the paintings (faded though they are) allow one to reconstruct what it was that Raphael was aiming for. But still I found myself more drawn towards the small preliminary sketches of the apostolic scenes than I did the woven wall hangings... The appeal of tapestries apparently eludes me still.

The Capitalist (use of) Sentiment

What role does sentimentality play in capitalist culture today? We need look no further than the X-Factor – a new series of which has just started, with its standard combination of hyper-sentimentality and cruel spectacles of ostracism, all underpinned by the ruthless pursuit of profit (which finds its pantomimic personification in the figure of Simon Cowell). The programme can be seen as epitomising the role which sentiment plays in the West with regard to the accumulation of capital. Take, for instance, the stage in the show when each judge retires to one of their many mansions with a group of contestants. After having sang, the hopefuls are then given a one-on-one session with the judge in which they are told whether or not they pass to the next round. Those who are rejected are understandably upset, but interesting here is the role which the judge Cheryl Cole/Tweedy normally plays in these scenarios. She – who is effectively inflicting this misery – commiserates dramatically with them, even sharing in their tears! In doing so, Cheryl attempts to highlight that she is a mere instrument enforcing the immutable laws of the programme, and as such not only is she exempt from blame for inducing this misery, but she should in fact be celebrated as a good person for attempting to partially ameliorate the upset which she herself has caused (and which is a fundamental aspect of the programme from which she profits hugely). This, then, is the role of sentiment in capitalist society: it is a conscience-pleasing mask underneath which the pitiless extraction of profit can be performed. For who is it really that is comforted during the maudlin embrace of Cheryl and her cast-off? It is Cheryl.

But sentimentality in the X-Factor is also a mask for the contestants, who upon entering the programme’s symbolic universe are expected to effuse saccharin gratefulness while articulating a sufficiently piquant life story to stimulate the sentimentality of the public. It seems that the contestants have to compensate for the banal selfishness of their idiotic dreams with these ritualised spectacles of mawkishness, in which is supposedly displayed an ‘identity’ through which a connection with the viewing public can be formed. The typical identity usually amounts to each singer’s idealised expression of their own myopic preoccupation with fame – but within this world the pathological pursuit of stardom is treated with respect. Although to ‘really, really want this’ is not in itself enough to get ahead in the competition, it is certainly enough to constitute an identity for the contestant, with this wanting-but-not-having of fame being considered fairly poignant by contestant, crowd and judges alike. Interesting here, though, is that for the contestant sentimentality functions in much the same way as it does for Cheryl – as an empty gesture of connectedness which conceals the ugliness of an ego gorging itself on wealth and fame.

In the X-Factor format the wider dynamics of the capitalist (use of) sentiment are thus apparent. Sentimentality transposes an ideal of beneficent selfhood onto the essential selfishness of the capitalist personality, imbuing the rampant individualism of society with a feel good sense of emotional – but not material – communism. For while in reality capitalism is an amoral, inhuman system that proceeds according to its own internal logic of growth and profit, terrifyingly indifference to the real-life concerns of people, the communal sentimentality which simultaneously cloaks and combats that system creates a sense of shared humanity within the fractiously iniquitous area of the social. Think, for instance, of the charity advert and its reliance on sentimentality to make the rich western public give money to the poverty-stricken Other – just as the X-Factor contestant must be made accessible by sentiment, so too it seems must the African be sentimentally subjectivised in order to receive charity. Sentimentality, with its privileging of virtues such as sympathy and its prioritising of the emotional over the political, therefore offers a way to rhetorically suture capitalism’s fragmentation of real-life relations – both global and local – between people living in radically different levels of material comfort.

But this suture of relations is only rhetorical – as Zizek has written, ‘Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation...the developed countries “help” the undeveloped with aid, credits and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue, namely their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped’. Furthermore, Zizek argues that capitalism is in fact fortified by the partially palliative nature of charity, since capitalism ‘needs extra-economic charity to sustain the cycle of social reproduction’. Sentimentality thus not only makes life tolerable by acting as a sympathetic counterweight to the pitiless machinations of capital, but in fact also aids the very perpetuation of capitalism: without the counterweight, capitalism would crash into the ground.