The case of Canadian artist Bill Reid once more draws UD‘s attention to one of the animating themes of her blog: The disappearance of the human from the human realm. As Reid (who died in 1998) became more famous, he withdrew more and more from actually making anything, fobbing the sculpting onto copyists whose names never appeared on the work, and who got little money for their labors. Sometimes Reid didn’t even bother with the vision thing. He “copied designs from other sources, instructed acolytes to craft them, then signed the finished products and took the credit–and profits–for himself.”

Once he became really famous, “almost everything was carved, painted or fabricated to a significant degree by other artists and assistants.” As one observer notes — in regard to the images of artifacts in, say, the Smithsonian, that Reid would hand to some hack for sculpting, after which Reid would put his name on the sculpture — “the collector is getting something that Bill never touched.” Describing the “near-fakery” of Reid’s later work in particular, Thomas Hoving remarks, “The soul of the artist is in the finish.”

*******************************

Think of this soulless model in academic terms. Think of the ateliers of law students who write famous Harvard law school professors’ books for them. The labs of young scientists who write famous scientists’ papers for them. Think of much-in-the-news, pharma-subsidized, ghostwriting firms like Scientific Therapeutics Information Inc.

Make room in your imagination for the massive ghost-world of the modern American mind.

Consider the bizarre trajectory of brain-fame in this country, in which the farther you go, the higher you float in a spectrosphere, where, like the artist Stephen Dedalus describes in Portrait of the Artist, you waver above your handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring your fingernails. The artist, says Dedalus, is “like the God of the creation.”

********************************

Go back to that collector. The collector “getting something Bill never touched.” What’s in it for the collector?

Well, you could flatten this out and say that the collector is only in it for the money, and Reid’s name on anything means money. But the word used here is collector, not trader. What is the collector getting by gazing at a Bill Reid fake?

Think of what Matthew Arnold says about the religion of art in secular culture:

There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

Hoving, in other words, is wrong. The etherealized artist or scientist or legal theorist of our day isn’t like the God of the creation. His ghosted ambience is the strongest part of our religion today.

Who will be surprised that our Dear Thought Leaders, bearers of the illusion of an idea, come to think of themselves as divine?

What sort of self-image would you elaborate if billion-dollar companies lavished goods on you merely for your imprimatur on their claims about synthetic hormones?

In our time, the artistic soul, the intellectual spirit, bubbles up as from some Icelandic lava lake. And lo, the glory of the Lord shines round about us.

****************************************

Lords of the journals and the installations; lords too of the empty lecture halls, where – avatars of the new classroom instructor – these emanations vaporize, like some haywire balsamic reduction, all the way up to nothingness.