Luke Syson: How I learned to stop worrying and love "useless" art

Two years ago, I have to say there was no problem.

Two years ago, I knew exactly what an icon looked like.

It looks like this.

Everybody's icon, but also the default position

of a curator of Italian Renaissance paintings, which I was then.

And in a way, this is also another default selection.

Leonardo da Vinci's exquisitely soulful image

of the "Lady with an Ermine."

And I use that word, soulful, deliberately.

Or then there's this, or rather these:

the two versions of Leonardo's "Virgin of the Rocks"

that were about to come together in London for the very first time.

In the exhibition that I was then in the absolute throes of organizing.

I was literally up to my eyes in Leonardo,

and I had been for three years.

So, he was occupying every part of my brain.

Leonardo had taught me, during that three years,

about what a picture can do.

About taking you from your own material world into a spiritual world.

He said, actually, that he believed the job of the painter

was to paint everything that was visible and invisible in the universe.

That's a huge task. And yet, somehow he achieves it.

He shows us, I think, the human soul.

He shows us the capacity of ourselves

to move into a spiritual realm.

To see a vision of the universe that's more perfect than our own.

To see God's own plan, in some sense.

So this, in a sense, was really what I believed an icon was.

At about that time, I started talking to Tom Campbell,

director here of the Metropolitan Museum,

about what my next move might be.

The move, in fact, back to an earlier life,

one I'd begun at the British Museum,

back to the world of three dimensions --

of sculpture and of decorative arts --

to take over the department of European sculpture and decorative arts, here at the Met.

But it was an incredibly busy time.

All the conversations were done at very peculiar times of the day --

over the phone.

In the end, I accepted the job

without actually having been here.

Again, I'd been there a couple of years before,

but on that particular visit.

So, it was just before the time that the Leonardo show was due to open

when I finally made it back to the Met, to New York,

to see my new domain.

To see what European sculpture and decorative arts looked like,

beyond those Renaissance collections with which I was so already familiar.

And I thought, on that very first day, I better tour the galleries.

Fifty-seven of these galleries --

like 57 varieties of baked beans, I believe.

I walked through and I started in my comfort zone in the Italian Renaissance.

And then I moved gradually around,

feeling a little lost sometimes.

My head, also still full of the Leonardo exhibition

that was about to open, and I came across this.

And I thought to myself: What the hell have I done?

There was absolutely no connection in my mind

at all and, in fact, if there was any emotion going on,

it was a kind of repulsion.

This object felt utterly and completely alien.

Silly at a level that I hadn't yet understood silliness to be.

And then it was made worse --

there were two of them.

(Laughter)

So, I started thinking about why it was, in fact,

that I disliked this object so much.

What was the anatomy of my distaste?

Well, so much gold, so vulgar.

You know, so nouveau riche, frankly.

Leonardo himself had preached against the use of gold,

so it was absolutely anathema at that moment.

And then there's little pretty sprigs of flowers everywhere. (Laughter)

And finally, that pink. That damned pink.

It's such an extraordinarily artificial color.

I mean, it's a color that I can't think of anything that you actually see in nature,

that looks that shade.

The object even has its own tutu. (Laughter)

This little flouncy, spangly, bottomy bit

that sits at the bottom of the vase.

It reminded me, in an odd kind of way,

of my niece's fifth birthday party.

Where all the little girls would come either as a princess or a fairy.

There was one who would come as a fairy princess.

You should have seen the looks.

(Laughter)

And I realize that this object was in my mind,

born from the same mind, from the same womb,

practically, as Barbie Ballerina. (Laughter)

And then there's the elephants. (Laughter)

Those extraordinary elephants

with their little, sort of strange, sinister expressions

and Greta Garbo eyelashes, with these golden tusks and so on.

I realized this was an elephant that had

absolutely nothing to do with a majestic march across the Serengeti.

It was a Dumbo nightmare. (Laughter)

But something more profound was happening as well.

These objects, it seemed to me,

were quintessentially the kind that I and my liberal left friends in London

had always seen as summing up

something deplorable about the French aristocracy

in the 18th century.

The label had told me that these pieces were made

by the Sèvres Manufactory,

made of porcelain in the late 1750s,

and designed by a designer called Jean-Claude Duplessis,

actually somebody of extraordinary distinction

as I later learned.

But for me, they summed up a kind of,

that sort of sheer uselessness of the aristocracy

in the 18th century.

I and my colleagues had always thought

that these objects, in way, summed up the idea of,

you know -- no wonder there was a revolution.

Or, indeed, thank God there was a revolution.

There was a sort of idea really, that,

if you owned a vase like this,

then there was really only one fate possible.

(Laughter)

So, there I was -- in a sort of paroxysm of horror.

But I took the job and I went on looking at these vases.

I sort of had to because they're on a through route in the Met.

So, almost anywhere I went, there they were.

They had this kind of odd sort of fascination,

like a car accident.

Where I couldn't stop looking.

And as I did so, I started thinking:

Well, what are we actually looking at here?

And what I started with was understanding this

as really a supreme piece of design.

It took me a little time.

But, that tutu for example --

actually, this is a piece that does dance in its own way.

It has an extraordinary lightness

and yet, it is also amazing balanced.

It has these kinds of sculptural ingredients.

And then the play between --

actually really quite carefully disposed color and gilding, and the sculptural surface,

is really rather remarkable.

And then I realized that this piece went into the kiln

four times, at least four times in order to arrive at this.

How many moments for accident can you think of

that could have happened to this piece?

And then remember, not just one, but two.

So he's having to arrive at two exactly matched

vases of this kind.

And then this question of uselessness.

Well actually, the end of the trunks were originally candle holders.

So what you would have had were candles on either side.

Imagine that effect of candlelight on that surface.

On the slightly uneven pink, on the beautiful gold.

It would have glittered in an interior,

a little like a little firework.

And at that point, actually, a firework went off in my brain.

Somebody reminded me that, that word 'fancy' --

which in a sense for me, encapsulated this object --

actually comes from the same root as the word 'fantasy.'

And that what this object was just as much in a way,

in its own way, as a Leonardo da Vinci painting,

is a portal to somewhere else.

This is an object of the imagination.

If you think about the mad 18th-century operas of the time -- set in the Orient.

If you think about divans and perhaps even opium-induced visions of pink elephants,

then at that point, this object starts to make sense.

This is an object which is all about escapism.

It's about an escapism that happens --

that the aristocracy in France sought

very deliberately

to distinguish themselves from ordinary people.

It's not an escapism that

we feel particularly happy with today, however.

And again, going on thinking about this,

I realize that in a way we're all victims

of a certain kind of tyranny

of the triumph of modernism

whereby form and function in an object

have to follow one another, or are deemed to do so.

And the extraneous ornament is seen as really,

essentially, criminal.

It's a triumph, in a way, of bourgeois values rather than aristocratic ones.

And that seems fine.

Except for the fact that it becomes a kind of sequestration of imagination.

So just as in the 20th century, so many people

had the idea that their faith

took place on the Sabbath day,

and the rest of their lives --

their lives of washing machines and orthodontics --

took place on another day.

Then, I think we've started doing the same.

We've allowed ourselves to

lead our fantasy lives in front of screens.

In the dark of the cinema, with the television in the corner of the room.

We've eliminated, in a sense, that constant

of the imagination that these vases represented in people's lives.

So maybe it's time we got this back a little.

I think it's beginning to happen.

In London, for example,

with these extraordinary buildings

that have been appearing over the last few years.

Redolent, in a sense, of science fiction,

turning London into a kind of fantasy playground.

It's actually amazing to look out of a high building nowadays there.

But even then, there's a resistance.

London has called these buildings the Gherkin, the Shard, the Walkie Talkie --

bringing these soaring buildings down to Earth.

There's an idea that we don't want these

anxious-making, imaginative journeys to happen in our daily lives.

I feel lucky in a way,

I've encountered this object.

(Laughter)

I found him on the Internet when I was looking up a reference.

And there he was.

And unlike the pink elephant vase,

this was a kind of love at first sight.

In fact, reader, I married him. I bought him.

And he now adorns my office.

He's a Staffordshire figure made in the middle of the 19th century.

He represents the actor, Edmund Kean, playing Shakespeare's Richard III.

And it's based, actually, on a more elevated piece of porcelain.

So I loved, on an art historical level,

I loved that layered quality that he has.

But more than that, I love him.

In a way that I think would have been impossible

without the pink Sèvres vase in my Leonardo days.

I love his orange and pink breeches.

I love the fact that he seems to be going off to war,

having just finished the washing up. (Laughter)

He seems also to have forgotten his sword.

I love his pink little cheeks, his munchkin energy.

In a way, he's become my sort of alter ego.

He's, I hope, a little bit dignified,

but mostly rather vulgar. (Laughter)

And energetic, I hope, too.

I let him into my life because the Sèvres pink elephant vase allowed me to do so.

And before that Leonardo,

I understood that this object could become part of a journey for me every day,

sitting in my office.

I really hope that others, all of you,

visiting objects in the museum,

and taking them home and finding them for yourselves,

will allow those objects to flourish in your imaginative lives.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)