Essay by Anthony Merino, Class of 1988

Pablo Picasso's ceramic vase straddles Modernist and Post-Modernist modes of connoisseurship. In his seminal essay, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), Walter Benjamin heralded that the age of reproducible images would liberate objects from their aura. Aura is the superstition that invests some objects as sacred. In this, Benjamin assumes that markets have the power to create appetites. Markets create the demand for the sacred. The shift isn't from presence to absence, but rather when the object gets invested. All objects bought or sold have two distinct periods: production and distribution.

One of the inventions of modernism—in the epoch sense, defined as the point Proto-Renaissance artist Giotto (Giotto di Bondone 1266/7-1337) painted perspective in a fresco, was the invention of the myth of the author. The object mimics the sense of the sacred by being the plastic manifestation of the maker's genius. An example would be when James Turner first started out doing forgeries, now these are worth more than the originals. Since Turner's intent was to make the work indistinguishable from the original, it is only the myth of his genius that creates the higher sense of value.

Once an artwork is made, it gets distributed. Manufacturing an object obliterates any sense of authorship. But manufactured objects get invested with aura through their distribution. Consider that in 2006 Rawlings manufactured over 2,000,000 baseballs annually. On September 23rd, Chris Capuano threw a ball which Barry Bonds hit out of the park, breaking Henry Aaron's record. Being innately superstitious, humans invest-this ball, which is identical to every other ball manufactured, gets invested with aura. The absurdity of this ball not being the chew toy for a collie, much less fouled off the previous inning, creates its sense of aura.

Picasso's Yan Face resonates with elements of both modes of connoisseurship. In the modernist sense, Picasso tantalizes the viewer with slight references to his genius. The deceptively simple images obscure two hallmarks of Picasso painting. First, Picasso flicks lines and brushstrokes with supreme confidence. The quick gestures are gracefully exact. Picasso welds his brush like a fencer. By using black slip on red earthenware, Picasso references Greek red vessel ceramics. Again, many of the artist's works contain erudite references. The face even has a few cubist elements, where profile and straight on depictions merge. On the other hand, the form itself is almost kitsch. There are, or at least were, thousands of exact duplications of this form. Only by coincident does this work get culled from the pile.

Yan Face appeals to both the Modernist and Post-Modernist sense of connoisseurship. Benjamin asserted that the Market created the appetite among humans to distinguish some objects as sacred. Picasso proved this appetite is far more innate than construction.