Art Without Class
Democracy needs more snobs in high places.
Peter Carey’s Olivier, a mid-1800s French aristocrat from Parrot and Olivier in America, cannot bring his betrothed home to France.
She wants to wed him there. Destination wedding. He will not let her. His parents are snobs.
This woman of home-grown American nobility and worth is lacking in what European elites would call “class.”
Class, in their view, comes from generations of refinement, built upon the recurrent layers of war, peace and prosperity. Class is wealth and wisdom in abundance.
Class appreciates the arts.
“In a democracy there is not that class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts. Without that class, art is produced to suit the tastes of the market, which is filled with its own doubt and self-importance and ignorance, its own ability to be tricked and titillated by every bauble.
If you are to make a business from catering to these people, the whole of your life will be spent in corrupting whatever public taste might struggle toward the light, tarnishing the virtues and confusing the manners of your country.”
-Olivier de Garmont
Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey (2010)
My word. Do we have a shortage of snobs in high places?
Parrot and Olivier in America is a fictionalized version of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
During Tocqueville’s travels to America in the 1830s, he observed as much:
“Under wage labor, the art advances, the artisan declines.”
My word.