I was glad to see Greg McElhatton’s critique of Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert (NBM), the second in a series of graphic novels inspired and sponsored by the Louvre. It’s a fascinating project, and I’m glad that NBM is offering the books in English. Unfortunately, I can’t share Greg’s enthusiasm for this installment.
It’s obviously a matter of taste, but I think the most effective satire comes at least partly from a place of affection. It’s a quality I find singularly lacking in Mathieu’s descent into the bowels of the museum and the psyches of its caretakers. While Mathieu cleverly (perhaps too cleverly) examines the contradictions and quirks of curatorial scholarship, there’s no flip side in evidence… no acknowledgement that these cultural repositories provide a vital resource and that the people who toil in them might do so out of a love for that culture.
It’s as though Mathieu’s critical lens is as myopic as the one he ascribes to the Kafkaesque bean-counters who absurdly and ineffectively tend and catalog the museum’s holdings. They’re just counting the dots in a Seurat painting instead of standing back and absorbing the cumulative effect, plodding down an obsessive-compulsive path that’s both endless and futile. It’s a bleak assessment and ultimately, I think, a false one.
Of course, art is subjective, and it’s entirely possible that I’m misinterpreting Mathieu’s intent, or that I’m responding too severely to a level of satirical rigor that’s just not to my taste. I certainly share Greg’s appreciation of Mathieu’s skill as an illustrator and of the Louvre’s evident commitment to freedom of artistic expression. It’s just that Mathieu’s argument as I see it is shallow and too easily contradicted. The mere fact that the Louvre conceived of this graphic novel project, a synthesis of the contemporary and the classic, is telling enough, isn’t it?