Early in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the suavely poisonous Anthony Blanche delivers the following pronouncement to Charles Ryder:
“I have told Cocteau about you. He is all agog. You see, my dear Charles, you are that very rare thing, An Artist. O yes, you must not look bashful. Behind that cold, English, phlegmatic exterior you are An Artist. I have seen those little drawings you keep hidden away in your room. They are exquisite. And you, dear Charles, if you will understand me, are not exquisite; but not at all. Artists are not exquisite. I am; Sebastian, in a kind of way, is exquisite; but the Artist is an eternal type, solid, purposeful, observant—and, beneath it all, p-p-passionate, eh, Charles?”
Although Anthony Blanche is not the most reliable raconteur—it is later revealed, for example, that what he claims was a “grand passion” with the Duchess de Vincennes was, in truth, only the adventure of being stuck in a lift—there is an interesting core of intermittent and flickering truth to his observation on Art and Artists. The first problem with Blanche’s Law, however, is that sometimes Artists are, indeed, exquisite; how often, though, does the Exquisite Artist produce art that is not, in and of itself, really that exquisite? I find this short passage a convenient launching place for the consideration of just how varied the landscape of “exquisiteness” really is.
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