A Discussion on Art

“Come get your Yellow Book now, just printed, hot off the printing press!” the vendor at the train station shouted at the customers who showed the slightest interest, perhaps, even the smallest glace, at the brightly-colored yellow books propped up and stacked against the shelves.

“Is this the first volume, sir?” a flustered man asked the vendor, as he feverishly looked across the stall to the incoming train, wailing to a halt and pouring out customers. He gripped his leather briefcase tightly, the gold pendants shining. 

“Don’t be silly, it’s not April anymore, it’s July! It’s the new volume, and it’s longer than the last!” the vendor assured him, pointing to the women known as Madame Rejane on the front cover. The dark black ink sets a provocative contrast to the illuminating bright mustard color, giving a slight indication of the radical contents inside. 

“I don’t know if I care to read this…. this morally perverse book that calls itself an art,” the man tells the him. “It’s making a mockery of the bourgeois culture, its ridiculing morality, and its spitting in the faces of real, authentic artists, with taste and elegance” the man angrily told the vendor, his face burning a bright red from the heat of the summer and his offended virtue. 

“Well sir, it’s a hit, the people love it, or they love to hate it, either way, it’s published everywhere, even in the colonies of Africa, even all the way across the Atlantic in America,” the vendor shrugged his shoulders. 

“God how could they, with their inappropriate politics – look, here they have women’s bodies on display, the outline of her gown, the traces of her legs, her bloomers, just like that!  Total disregard I tell you,” the man said as he flipped to page eighty-five in the ‘picture’ section of the finely printed white pages.

The title ‘The Comedy-Ballet of the Marionettes’ was written in typography, in small lettering across the middle of the page, delicately numbering the three separate lithographic prints. The page had no superfluous details, and no clutter, looking clean and clear compared to the squished columns of text displayed on the newspapers sitting across the stall.

He held the pages up to the man as if waiting for the vendor to jump back in horror, “Aubrey Beardsley, now he’s trouble,” the man said, shaking his head. “Where is the seriousness? Art is not comedy! It’s modest, it’s respectable” he mumbled again before handing the book back to the vendor.

“But could art be comedy, sir? The Yellow Book is avant-garde, it’s fresh, it’s different, it’s experimental, it pushes the boundaries of art, your art, it re-creates, it offers its own culture” the vendor said raising his brow, almost to elicit a response from the disgruntled man.

The man looked at him with disgust “Tomfoolery! Nonsense! You see, these periodicals do it on purpose, they make it controversial!” he shouted, bringing one hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, shaking his head. “It’s a shame to say but literature is not for the working class, for your people. It’s completely inappropriate! It goes against the conservative culture, against our values, for what? For beauty? For pleasure? This book is corrupting our society with sexuality and aestheticism!” the man says exasperated, before aggressively stomping away.