Rotten Riches

James 5:4–6 highlights the economic injustices on the back of which the prideful rich, condemned in the preceding lines, have accumulated their wealth: ‘Behold, the wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out’. Justice and righteousness are often associated in Scripture with the recognition and defence of the materially poor. Those whose voices go unheard by the representatives of political and economic power ‘[reach] the ears of the Lord of hosts’.

Historically, the production of art was linked closely with the rich and powerful, who had the funds to make commissions; and yet many artists chose nevertheless to depict the lives of the poor in their work. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565), Diego Velázquez’s The Waterseller of Seville (1618–22), and Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885) all spring to mind. Depicting the poor does not, of course, necessarily mean fighting for them: under the sentimentalizing gaze of the rich, their lives can become quaint decoration for the walls of large houses. But today, the street artist Banksy is a pre-eminent artist not only of but also for the poor.

Sweeping it Under the Carpet is explicitly about democratizing not just the locations but also the subjects of artworks, about giving recognition to those who do not usually receive it, who labour under unfair and unequal systems—echoing the passage from James. Banksy has commented, ‘In the bad old days, it was only popes and princes who had the money to pay for their portraits to be painted. This is a portrait of a maid called Leanne who cleaned my room in a Los Angeles motel’ (Bull 2011: S20).

A melancholy but politically meaningful irony is that Leanne’s recognition would only be temporary. Two versions were painted in London: one in Chalk Farm on the wall of a performance venue (shown here), one in Hoxton on the exterior of a commercial gallery. Both have since been painted over. Banksy’s medium is part of his message in this sense. By showing Leanne about to hide her sweepings under a carpet, the work suggests how the wealthy and powerful sweep issues of social injustice and inequality ‘under the rug’, in the very way his street art, which highlights these issues, gets painted over.

References

Bull, Martin. 2011. Banksy Locations and Tours Volume 1: A Collection of Graffiti Locations and Photographs in London, England (Oakland: PM Press)

In 2007, Damien Hirst set 8,601 pavé diamonds weighing 1,106.18 carats into a platinum cast of a human skull dated to 1720–1810, acquired from a London taxidermist (the work incorporates the original teeth). The result—entitled For the Love of God—is a work of startling, indeed sparkling, ambiguity.

Positioning itself in a long tradition of memento mori artworks, this sculpture serves as a reminder of the transience of life and the mortality of the viewer. Yet it is also made from materials of extreme durability. The letter of James says to the rich, ‘your riches have rotted … your gold and silver have rusted’ (vv.2–3), but Hirst’s platinum and diamond skull is exceptionally resistant to decay. Does it thus achieve a kind of victory over death? Platinum and diamonds are also highly valuable. For this reason the diamond trade has its own special association with violence and death. Is the work a celebration or denigration of wealth? Does it signal the sublimity or the emptiness of earthly riches?

Hirst has said of death, ‘You don’t like it, so you disguise it or you decorate it to make it look like something bearable—to such an extent that it becomes something else’ (Hirst in Burn 2008: 21). But death is relentless, even when hidden beneath a mask of diamonds.

There is a layer of religious ambiguity in the work’s title. ‘For the love of God’ is an expression of exasperation—it has the air of mild blasphemy. But it is an invocation of the divine all the same. Maybe even a prayer.

The deceitfulness of wealth is a regular theme in Scripture. Like Hirst’s diamond skull, the passage from James calls attention to the emptiness of earthly riches in light of the transience of life. Both the biblical text and the sculpture ask where true wealth is found, whether in spiritual or material goods, and by extension, where we should invest our time, attention, and devotion while we live and breathe.

References

Burn, Gordon. 2008. ‘Conversation’ in Beautiful Inside My Head Forever Sotheby's 15 and 16 September 2008, vol. 1 (London: Sotheby’s)

Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting depicts in delicious detail Jean de Dinteville (on the left), French ambassador to the court of King Henry VIII, and his friend George de Selve (on the right), the young Bishop of Lavaur. The men are clad in sumptuous robes, and stationed either side of two shelves laden with myriad curious instruments, musical and astronomical. In the foreground, a distorted (anamorphic) image of a skull can be identified if viewed from a point to the right of the picture (from which vantage point the distortion is corrected). A silver crucifix is just visible, emerging from the curtain in the top left corner.

Commissioned at great cost and exactingly made, the picture situates its two subjects within the slow march of time and decay—within a world where humans scramble for knowledge, peace, and order, while knowing death and salvation to be outside their own control. 

The letter of James announces to men in the business of trade and travel, that ‘you do not know about tomorrow’ (James 5:14). Everything is subject to the will of the Lord; to boast in one’s plans is futile.

At first glance, the proliferation of instruments in the painting (a celestial globe, a portable sundial, and various other instruments used for understanding the heavens) might speak to the ambassadors’ confident pursuit of control, since these devices indicate practices of measuring and navigating the earth, and of calculating the time. Yet this impression is dislodged by the Lutheran hymnal on the bottom shelf, which evokes the unwieldy religious conflict preoccupying these Christian men in 1533, in the advent of Henry VIII’s break with Rome (Foister et al. 1997: 40). Their apparent confidence is also undermined by the distorted human skull in the foreground of the work, which—unlike the beautiful and richly detailed objects above and around it—is not so easily grasped and enjoyed by the human senses. 

By thus relativizing what is material and temporal while reminding us of death, this strange skull, slipping in and out of focus, provokes the question in the passage from James 4:14: ‘What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes’.

References

Berger, John et al. 1972. Ways of Seeing (London: BBC)

Foister, Susan, Ashok Roy, and Martin Wyld. 1997. Making and Meaning: Holbein's Ambassadors (London: National Gallery London)