And should we protest because the Giovanni da Bologna stands fairly close to the Laocoön, when in our own museums the same thing happens? Shall we protest, on the contrary, because the imitation of the Renaissance loggia, which is acceptable, is near the Grand Canal villa, which is crude? But what would happen to the visitor who, a thousand years hence, visited these mementoes, ignorant of a Europe long since vanished? Something like what happens to the visitor in today’s Rome when he walks from the great insurance company’s Palazzo in Piazza Venezia, past the Victor Emmanuel monument, down Mussolini’s Via dei Fori Imperiali, to the Colosseum and then to the patches of the Servian walls trapped inside the Termini railroad station.
The condition for the amalgamation of fake and authentic is that there must have been a historic catastrophe, of the sort that has made the divine Acropolis of Athens as venerable as Pompeii, city of brothels and bakeries. And this brings us to the theme of the Last Beach, the apocalyptic philosophy that more or less explicitly rules these reconstructions: Europe is declining into barbarism and something has to be saved.
This may not have been the reasoning of the Roman patrician, but it was that of the medieval art lover who accumulated classical reminiscences with incredible philological nonchalance and (see Gerbert d’Aurillac) mistook a manuscript of Statius for an armillary sphere, but could also have done the opposite (Huizinga says that the medieval man’s sensitivity to works of art is the same that we would expect today from an astonished bourgeois). And we don’t feel like waxing ironic on the piety mixed with accumulative instinct that led the Ringlings to purchase the entire theater of Asolo (wooden frame, stage, boxes, and gallery), which was housed in the villa of Caterina Cornare from 1798 (and welcomed Eleonora Duse) but which was dismantled in 1930 and sold to a dealer in order to make room for a “more modern” hall. Now the theater is not far from the fake Venetian palazzo and houses artistic events of considerable distinction.
But to understand the Last Beach theme we must go back to California and to the Forest Lawn-Glendale cemetery. The founder’s idea was that Forest Lawn, at its various sites, should be a place not of grief but of serenity, and there is nothing like Nature and Art for conveying this feeling. So Mr. Eaton, inventor of the new philosophy, peopled Forest Lawn with copies of the great masterpieces of the past, David and Moses, the St. George of Donatello, a marble reproduction of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, complementing it all with authentic declarations from
Italian Government fine arts authorities, certifying that the Forest Lawn founders really did visit all the Italian museums to commission “authentic” copies of the real masterpieces of the
Renaissance.
To see the Last Supper, admitted at fixed times as if for a theater performance, you have to take your seat, facing a curtain, with the Pietà on your left and the Medici Tombs sculptures on your right. Before the curtain rises, you have to hear a long speech that explains how in fact this crypt is the new Westminster Abbey and contains the graves of Gutzon Borglum, Jan Styka, Carrie Jacobs Bond, and Robert Andrews Millikan. Apart from mentioning the fact that the last-named won a Nobel Prize in physics, I won’t even try to say who the others are (but Mrs. Bond is the composer of “I Love You Truly”). If it hadn’t been for Westminster Abbey, many characters we consider historic today would have remained insignificant barons: In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.
Very well. Before revealing to the dewy eyes of the audience the stained-glass reproduction of the Last Supper, the Voice tells us what happened to Mr. Eaton when he went to Santa Maria delle Grazie and realized that the joint action of time and human wickedness (it was before the Second World War) would one day destroy Leonardo’s masterpiece. Gripped by a sacred fever of preservation, Mr. Eaton contacts Signora Rosa Caselli-Moretti, descended of an ancient family of Perugian artisans, and commissions her to make a glass reproduction of Leonardo’s masterpiece. Not the way it looks now in Santa Maria delle Grazie, but the way we suppose it must have looked when Leonardo painted it, or rather—better—the way Leonardo ought to have painted it if he had been less shiftless, spending three years and never managing to complete the picture.
At this point the curtain rises. And I must say that, compared with the wax reproductions scattered all over California, this work by Signora Caselli-Moretti is a piece of honest craftsmanship and would not look out of place in a nineteenth-century European church. The artist also had the good sense to leave the face of Christ vague, sharing Leonardo’s own fear in dealing with the icon of the Divine; and, from behind the glass, the cemetery management shines various lights that render every nuance of the sun (dawn, noon, dusk) in such a way as to demonstrate the mobility of the face of Jesus in the play of atmospheric variations.
All this machinery to reproduce the Past at Forest Lawn is exploited for profit. But the ideology proclaimed by Forest Lawn is the same as that of the Getty Museum, which charges no admission. It is the ideology of preservation, in the New World, of the treasures that the folly and negligence of the Old World are causing to disappear into the void. Naturally this ideology conceals something—the desire for profit, in the case of the cemetery, and in the case of Getty, the fact that it is the entrepreneurial colonization by the New World (of which J. Paul Getty’s oil empire is part) that makes the Old World’s condition critical.
Just like the crocodile tears of the Roman patrician who reproduced the grandeurs of the very Greece that his country had humiliated and reduced to a colony. And so the Last Beach ideology develops its thirst for preservation of art from an imperialistic efficiency, but at the same time it is the bad conscience of this imperialistic efficiency, just as cultural anthropology is the bad conscience of the white man who thus pays his debt to the destroyed primitive cultures.
But, having said this, we must in fairness employ this American reality as a critical reagent for an examination of conscience regarding European taste. Can we be sure that the European tourist’s pilgrimage to the Pietà of St. Peter’s is less fetishistic than the American tourist’s pilgrimage to the Pietà of Forest Lawn (here more accessible, tangible at close range)?
Actually, in these museums the idea of the “multiple” is perfected. The Goethe Institut recently remade in Cologne Man Ray’s spiked flatiron and his metronome with an eye; and since
Duchamp’s bicycle wheel survives only in a photograph, they reconstructed an identical one. In fact, once the fetishistic desire for the original is forgotten, these copies are perfect. And at this point isn’t the enemy of the rights of art the engraver who defaces the plate to keep low the number of prints? This is not an attempt to absolve the shrines of the Fake, but to call the European sanctuaries of the Genuine to assume their share of guilt.
The City of Robots In Europe, when people want to be amused, they go to a “house” of amusement (whether a cinema, theater, or casino); sometimes a “park” is created, which may seem a “city,” but only metaphorically. In the United States, on the contrary, as everyone knows, there exist amusement cities. Las Vegas is one example; it is focused on gambling and entertainment, its architecture is totally artificial, and it has been studied by Robert Venturi as a completely new phenomenon in city planning, a “message” city, entirely made up of signs, not a city like the others, which communicate in order to function, but rather a city that functions in order to communicate.
But Las Vegas is still a “real” city, and in a recent essay on Las Vegas, Giovanni Brino showed how, though born as a place for gambling, it is gradually being transformed into a residential city, a place of business, industry, conventions. The theme of our trip—on the contrary—is the Absolute Fake; and therefore we are interested only in absolutely fake cities. Disneyland (California) and Disney World (Florida) are obviously the chief examples, but if they existed alone they would represent a negligible exception. The fact is that the United States is filled with cities that imitate a city, just as wax museums imitate painting and the Venetian palazzos or Pompeiian villas imitate architecture. In particular there are the “ghost towns,” the Western cities of a century and more ago.
Some are reasonably authentic, and the restoration or preservation has been carried out on an extant, “archeological” urban complex; but more interesting are those born from nothing, out of pure imitative determination. They are “the real thing.” There is an embarrassment of riches to choose from: You can have fragments of cities, as at Stone Mountain near Atlanta, where you take a trip on a nineteenth-century train, witness an Indian raid, and see sheriffs at work, against the background of a fake Mount Rushmore. The Six Guns Territory, in Silver Springs, also has train and sheriffs, a shoot-out in the streets and French cancan in the saloon. There is a series of ranchos and Mexican missions in Arizona; Tombstone with its OK Corral, Old Tucson, Legend City near Phoenix.
There is the Old South
