Abstract
Among the artist Paul Gauguin’s many strange adventures in Tahiti, he recalls that of being thought of a useful human being. A young native had watched him carving a figurine and finally declared that he, Gauguin, ‘was useful to others’. Gauguin could hardly believe his own ears: ‘I believe Totefa is the first human being in the world who used such words towards me.’ Hadn’t Gauguin been taught to regard art as wonderfully detached, beautifully impractical, a rebuke to utilitarian philistines everywhere? And yet he was charmed by this odd new idea—let’s call it the Totefa Hypothesis: that art and artists might be useful components of society.
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Notes
- 1.
Gauguin, Noa Noa, p. 18.
- 2.
On cities, Hall (1998) and Mumford (1961).
- 3.
Wright (2000), p. 52.
- 4.
See Sanderson (1995).
- 5.
Braudel (1981), vol. I, p. 511.
- 6.
On how ‘bourgeois’ became a pejorative, Huizinga (1968).
- 7.
Nietzsche [1889], p. 92.
- 8.
McCloskey (2007, 2011); a third volume is forthcoming.
- 9.
Schama (1987).
- 10.
Elias [1939].
- 11.
In Robb (2007), p. 222.
- 12.
Théophile Gautier, ‘Preface’, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835).
- 13.
Notably: Dissanayake (1998); Dutton (2008); Boyd (2009); Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution (2011); Gottschall (2012); Etcoff, (2000); Caroll (1995); Storey (1996).
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Maleuvre, D. (2016). Introduction. In: The Art of Civilization. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94869-7_1
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