ART AND POLITICS

The Austerlitz mural project has been a daunting task. Ever since my dear friend Currado Malaspina accepted the commission it has been one misadventure after another.

Designed as a massive 30 foot wide variation on his famous Palimpseste series, Currado has employed a small army of young assistants to complete the picture on time.

The problem is that his heart is simply not in it. He no longer craves the respect and recognition he once did as a younger man. He is also relatively well-off, considering that a typical work fetches somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty to seventy-five thousand euro.

He seems to be just going through the motions and he's consigning more and more of the creative work to his most trusted aids.

As a result the quality of the draftsmanship has markedly suffered but as Malaspina rightly points out, this was also the case with Rubens.

I suppose what is most disappointing is that the City of Paris is equally ambivalent. Commissioning Currado in the first place began as just a political payoff, an act of craven, insider cronyism where some lower-level bureaucrat did some creative accounting in order to placate a government minister who happens to share a mistress with Malaspina. The result is that nobody is happy and for the foreseeable future there will be a large blemish of a picture greeting the innocent commuters of a perfectly adequate though over-lit Metro station.