My holiday in France now over, we took a train over the Rhine for Baden-Baden, from whence the plane back to merry old Albion flew. We arrived at around half-two, and our plane took off at around half-six, giving roughly two hours to see Baden-Baden before we needed to have returned for the flight. I looked for attractions in Baden², and found the Faberge museum, located in a city centre, but bus ride from the station. Brilliant. Real Fabergé eggs too, they advertised. Here, in Baden-Baden-Baden! I was quite surprised, but we made the journey anyhow.
Entering, we saw the steep €21 entrance fee. Steep, but when next was I to see a Fabergé egg? Ever since watching Detective Conan Movie 03, they've had a lustre, a lustre of the old Romanov's of Russian grandeur, of an old lost order. Tickets paid, we attempted to put our bulky luggage in their cloakroom. A German lady barked her little English, getting more and more frustrated as we didn't understand her instructions. Very German. And we entered, looking at the various trinkets made by Fabergé and his jewellers.
Then I saw the egg. Turning the corner, it shone radiant, and I came towards it almost teary. It was the 1904 Easter Anniversary egg, and, with its small portraits of the Romanovs circling, looked just like the "Memories Egg" of Conan Movie 03. So incredibly beautiful. My eyes traced the bejewelled contours, its fine gold seams, and small portraits, its memories, of an old age. I fell for it. Art is a kind of romance, where the piece is maiden to the knight, in whom he sees all kinds of projections and fantasies. Much like the film, I saw the lost beauty of the Romanov age, the tragedy of their loss, the delicate, tender relationships they once had. I imagined, circling the piece for some time, and felt as if I was in the Romanov age.
My girlfriend, pseudonymously RiceIsNice, was looking at a separate egg, the Karelian Birch egg. She happened to know this egg was a missing egg, and had never been found. She did some digging, with the help of an AI assistant, and she discovered this egg, and all of the Fabergé eggs at this exhibit were Fauxbergé, or in other words, forgeries. It was strange all the exhibits were in Russian, not German. This museum was run by a Russian oligarch, and many of these eggs were eggs he 'came across' over the past couple decades. He had had a real Fabergé egg, the Rothschild egg, smuggled it out of Britain without paying taxes - taxes still to be settled - only to have Putin confiscate it from him to decorate the Kremlin. Poor guy.
And indeed, I fell for it. To expect this museum to have several real Fabergé eggs in √Baden-Baden-Baden-Baden should have raised an alarm or two, but the lost time or money didn't bother me much at all. What bothered me was that I felt emotionally cheated. My heart fell for this piece, this sweet maiden, only to discover she was a tart. But was she a tart, this beautiful egg which inspired so much emotion in me? What is the purpose of art, what is the purpose of this museum?
Adam Curtis in his documentary Hypernomalisation, uses the eponymous Soviet term 'hypernomalisation' to describe the state of the modern West. The phrase originates thus. In Russia everything sad on television, in the newspapers, and even person to person on the street is a lie, and no one knows what's really going on - there's a kind of atmosphere of fiction in which everyone breathes, where no one has the voice to call out the emperor's nudity. This sense, I felt here. No one cares whether they were real - in fact they were real, didn't you see the certificates? There's a postmodern sense, a sense that their authenticity is meaningless. It takes a team of experts to determine authenticity - and for such a term as Fauxbergé to exist, experts determining real from fake are in need. But what if those experts were not servants of truth, but instead servants of power? Instead of looking for the telltale signs of a forgery, as those scholars who've sworn the Socratic oath would, they give their expertise to affirm the highest bidder. We have not descended into such a world in the West, but how easy would it be! It only takes a minority with state support to set up fake academic work undermining that which currently stands. Like an infection, it could sweep through every discipline, this corrupt seed of disinformation by which all else is informed. Perhaps it's already happened. Any fringe group would say so. So the Climate Deniers say, so the Graham Hancock Finno-Korean mud-flooders say, so the Young Earthers on carbon dating would say. Perhaps we all believe it a little bit. Perhaps we all want the world to be more interesting than the scientific clergymen make it out.
My emotions weren't fake, perhaps, since art has a purpose. Art is meant to make you feel something. And though I was misadvertised, and though the item was likely a fraud, I did feel all that wonder, all that feeling, as if it were real. Whilst the item was ersatz, the feelings were genuine. The art piece acted as it ought to have, as a vector, as a portal to another world. But once I knew the sordid truth of my alleged maiden, the projection onto her was broken, and no more could I fantasise upon the gold and glitter. The quality of the item could be identical, the craftsmanship could be superior, but it isn't 'the one'.
~
It's a sentiment I've discussed on this blog before, this sense of particularity, of truth, of uniqueness. We like to imagine things interchangeable. Those who've had a break-up are reminded, "There are many fish in the sea", but the heart-broken individual can't understand, since he fell in love with 'the one', not any old person. No one can be like them again. Particularity is the beating heart of the human experience, the sense that this is not that, that this is the only once, that this dress was worn by Marilyn Monroe, that this was
the spot where the English Civil War began: these feelings aren't arbitrary, these feelings
are the human experience.
NFTs were all the rage, and then all the meme, a few years ago. The purpose of them was to be 'non-fungible' to be unique and irreplaceable. In real life, however, it takes no blockchain nor algorithm for non-fungibility to exist, since material reality imparts an inherent non-fungibility to all things. It's quite simple. No one thing can be in two places at once, and no two things can be in one place at once - they're unique. However, in industrialised society, every step has been taken, and every invention has pointed towards, a kind of fungibility between all things - essentially the Human Instrumentality of Evangelion - where no two items or no two people can be distinguished. The carpenter could make you a desk, bespoke, one-of-a-kind, but Ikea will do their utmost to give you a desk identical to every other of the series. A painting is a unique item, expressing the will and whimsy of the artist, dependent on the weather or the day he painted, but with the digital age, for a cheap price, every pauper can have a print of the Mona Lisa in their house. And as the produce of the world becomes fungible, so too do the producers. The carpenter can put far more of their soul into a work than someone working at Ikea. And even more than that, the carpenter has to develop a great number of skills. Through his carpentry, he shapes and sands not just his work but his character, an avenue unavailable to the Ikea factory worker of industrial society. When you can't express yourself in your work and, more importantly, you can't grow and hone yourself in your character through your work, you begin to feel like an ant in an ant hill. You begin to feel like a cog in a machine. It isn't a nice feeling. And the products made are often not very nice either.
It isn't just our belongings, but the people in our lives, our friends and family, who are unique in this non-fungible way. Through our connection to them, our shared memories of care and hardship, we develop irreplaceable relationships. I couldn't replace my mother with a lady of the same personality, temperament, and memories - such a premise belongs to a horror author. Because it isn't for my mum's personality, her temperament, or even her memories that I love her - it is because she is my mum. Such a sentiment it is difficult to put into words, perhaps it is impossible, since our language, bound by the fetters of propositional understanding, can't express the 'is-ness' and uniqueness of a person. There is an ineffable quality, an unutterable quality, not shared nor expressed, giving my mum her value to me. And by value, I do not mean something quantifiable like money or for exchange, as if there were some kind of leaderboard or stock market, but something wholly qualitative. This is what love is. Love is not for beauty, love is not for value, love is not to some other end, but towards that ineffable is-ness. If my favourite mug were to break, I would be sad, because I love it. If someone were to use it, I would be a little irritated, because I love it. It's just a mug. There are many fish in the sea, and many mugs in T. K. Maxx. But that is the nature of love. It latches on to the uniqueness, the being.
A real Fabergé egg too has an is-ness. Not a personal relationship, like the example of my mug or my mother, but a society-wide relationship of people enchanted by its grandeur. The eggs bear the weight of all those cultural projection, all those romantic fantasies and unrequited loves; but the fake I saw buckled. It's not that its build was poor, its form misshapen, nor its materials cheap: such an observation requires an expert's eye. But it had that sense of my mother being replaced, or my mug exchanged. It may look the same, but the fires of my love had been quenched.