Book Review : A Cultural Tapestry on a Slim Thread

Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, the Metropolitan, the White House, and the Merchandising of the New Aristocracy by Debora Silverman (Pantheon: $16.95)

Over the last half a dozen years, the Metropolitan Museum in New York put on a number of spectacular costume shows, ranging from Ch’ing Dynasty robes through France’s Belle Epoque and up to the contemporary horsy motifs of Ralph Lauren.

They were successful but not altogether esteemed. They seemed to have more to do with the museum’s promotional and fund-raising side than with its service to art. They were organized not by the museum’s curators but by its Costume Institute, run by Diana Vreeland, former Vogue editor and one of fashion’s splashiest publicists.

You could say that these shows had something of the same relationship to the Metropolitan as the black-and-gold Harvard chair has to Harvard. There was more than one note of commerce to them. Fashion--clearly within a museum’s purview--took on the air of a fashion show. The long-deceased Paris house of Worth could hardly benefit from a display of 1900’s dresses; but Yves St. Laurent and Ralph Lauren could very clearly benefit from the cachet of back-to-back shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A Sense of Discomfort

A faint aura of institutional discomfort could be sensed among the chinking turnstiles. Philippe de Montebello, the Met’s director, made a point of giving enthusiastic credit for the shows to Vreeland. It was a Continental touch; a warm embrace angled so that the recipient is seen to be held at arms’ length.

Museums have money problems, and in the United States, public funding provides only a fraction of their expenses. All kinds of supplementary strategies are required, from the assiduous cultivation of the old rich to elaborate boutiques that sell King Tut replicas, “voluntary” admission fees, spectaculars whose fees are higher and no longer voluntary, and renting out evening space for parties.

The parties, the glitz, the dazzlement of combining art’s sanctity with the venial pleasures of modishness can undoubtedly help a museum’s patron list. What you don’t do for virtue you may do for fun and for your name in the society column. But some uncomfortable questions were raised. How far can a museum bend backwards without falling supine? Is it proper for the company that sells St. Laurent his fabrics to help pay for his Met show? Is it proper for the Met not only to provide Lauren with a showcase in exchange for his money, but to put his logo on its publicity material?

Debora Silverman, a cultural historian, has written a book that addresses these kinds of questions, among other things. The best parts of “Selling Culture” examine the Vreeland shows at the Met, appraise--devastatingly but convincingly--their merits, and go on to express her own and others’ doubts about the fudging of lines between institutional culture and commerce.

Emphasis on Style

The emphasis of the shows, she writes, was always on magnificence and display; on the lavish style within the various enclosed world of the Manchu emperors, the Bourbon court, fin-de-siecle Paris, or the customer’s of the contemporary high-fashion industry.

There was little regard for industry--the Ch’ing Dynasty mastered 400 years and there was no attempt to date the robes any more precisely than that. There was no wider context; no mention of the symbolism of design and ornamentation on a Chinese gown or a Versailles costume; no exploration of the economic, social or aesthetic background; no indication, for example, that Bourbon lavishness was set against a mood of growing Enlightenment skepticism and middle-class anger.

There was no guillotine in the 18th-Century show, Silverman complains, and no Major Dreyfus in the Belle Epoque exhibit. She finds frivolity and a let-them-eat-cake attitude in the spirit of the shows as well as in their subject matter. And she goes after Vreeland as the personification of such an attitude that she describes as the glorification of “decadence, narcissism and sadism.”

Silverman on Vreeland grows very fierce, indeed. She draws on the latter’s memoirs, as well as on the exhibits, to document the decadence; something that is not hard to do since Vreeland herself seems rather proud of it. What the author misses is the irony, the note of self-caricature. When Vreeland met a Nazi scientist who boasted of the lethal rays he was experimenting with, her comment was: “Oooh, I can hardly wait. You Germans are so busy--such busybodies.” Silverman sees sadism in the remark; to others it will seem that Vreeland was, in Waugh-like style, putting the man down.

If the author is heavy-handed in her passages on Vreeland, she overloads disastrously what might have been an interesting speculation on the links between the ostentation of the Met-Vreeland alliance, and the spirit of Reaganism.

Paralleling Attitudes

A parallel can be made between the “If-you’ve-got-it-flaunt-it” attitude of New York cafe and fashion society in the ‘80s; and the swing of the Reagan pendulum away from social redistribution and the deserving poor, and back to capital accumulation and the deserving rich. On the art side, you can wonder whether the price of cutting back government support is to sell out your culture to Philip Morris and the dressmakers.

But Silverman inflates her notion into a thesis that tries to do far too much. True, Nancy Reagan spent a good deal of money on china and redecoration during her husband’s first term. Certainly, there was a now-it’s-our-turn attitude among some of the Reagans’ wealthy friends. There was some socializing, as well as considerable clothes-buying with a Galanos, an Adolfo, a Bill Blass, an Oscar de la Renta.

The De la Rentas may have borrowed “Living well is the best revenge” from the Gerald Murphy beautiful-and-damned set of the 1920s, and made it the centerpiece of a notoriously fatuous New York Times article about the New Elegance. But this hardly makes it the central motif of the Reagans or even of the Reaganites. Similarly, for Silverman to assert, on the weakest of grounds, Vreeland’s affinity for sadism, and to link it with the Reagans because both of them know the same couturiers, is making a cotton thread do the work of a steel cable.