Or conceivably, "Aaargh!" or possibly something very close to this approximation. Memory fails to recall exactly how a scream of anguish or of pain was represented, in those 'long-ago' comics that were so popular in the days before technology upped and stole the show.
Edvard Munch's 'Scream' has just been sold for £74,000,000. I write 'Scream', whereas what I should, more accurately have written, is one of Edvard Munch's 'Scream's' has sold for £74,000,000. An astounding amount of money in anyone's books, you'd think. Seventy-four million pounds, or one-hundred-and-nineteen-point-nine million dollars. This happened in a fast-bidding battle that lasted around ten minutes; a speedy affair that does not suggest, to me, someone agonising, with a calculator, over whether he can afford, maybe, another twenty quid. I tried displaying this sum in dollars on my calculator, but it doesn't have enough digits to represent the final amount!
As an enthused art student I can recall gawping, spellbound, at one of the originals- sadly, not the one with the inscribed poem- and, in response, 'The Scream' managed, somehow, to reach out and encapsulate the tiniest whisp of my soul, which remains forever Munch's. Simple- almost naive, in the manner that was so crucial to the work of Chagall- and almost certainly understated, yet unequivocally mind-blowing. It was around that time that I began to discover the immensity of that arguable gulf that lies between 'Art' and 'technical proficiency', not that the two are mutually exclusive, if only it were that simple.
Somewhat ironically, the aforementioned 'gulf' is rendered that much greater by virtue of its invisibility or partial invisibility; that undefinable 'gulf' between art and other things pertaining to art. As a general rule the 'gulf' is essentially unrecognised by anyone who has ever used the term, "I know what I like," in justification of an 'artistic' preference. Although, even this is, at best, vague and more than a touch pretentious to here contest. Either way the 'gulf', or some sort of similar divide, seems to exist. Conceivably the boundaries of such are less than clear, or remain subject to an element of flux, or could be argued slightly wider or less so according to certain qualified interpretations but, even to contest the existence of such a thing is, in a sense, an admission of its possible existence.
I would tentatively prefer to think of this 'divide' as being in a state of almost constant flux; sometimes more clearly defined, at others far, far less so. Thus leaving all manner of 'art works' teetering somewhere in the realms of nervous uncertainty.
When one version of 'The Scream' was stolen, in 1994, the 'gulf' was perhaps a little bit more evident. By the time that a second version of 'The Scream' had also been purloined the 'gulf' had become far more amorphous and ill-defined. And, give or take the odd minor fluctuation in the general public's perception of 'what is art', the trend toward greater obscurity has pretty much continued, right up to the present day.
I blame advertising and the wider exploitation of art, for the purposes of- what else could it ever be?- making bucket-loads of cash. Rather like that meticulously crafted piece of Baroque music that has been hacked to buggery in order to boost the sale of some soap product, or that spine-tingling breath of perfect music for ballet that has been nail-botched on to some god-awful piece of so-called TV entertainment, the visual arts have been judged as ripe for exploitation. I'm sure we can all number more than a few of the ways in which Munch's 'Scream' has been inappropriately used.
Thus the 'gulf' becomes yet more ill-defined. Could it be argued, for example, that 'The Scream' has become so commercial that the process has almost, by some sort of cultural osmosis, exhausted and cheapened this (once) great masterpiece? Writing purely for myself, I could still stand and gawp at (even a relatively fine copy of) Munch's work but, to appreciate 'The Scream' in the same manner as before, I'd have to work jolly hard at scything through all of that vulgarisation that has become encrusted around the edges, rather like mould or water damage that might affect a misplaced but otherwise cherished object.
I much prefer to hope that it's not possible for all of that peripheral baggage to have somehow demeaned any piece of art, or to have mysteriously detracted from its artistic credentials. But, dating back to that seminal moment, when art began to shift, irretrievably, from the confines of religious icon and into the far wider world of aesthetic and/or cerebral 'thing', the impact of 'a history', upon an object, has also altered. Certainly, a painting that has, everyday, been viewed by queuing thousands, dating back decades, should have been imbued with a greater provenance than one that has been squirrelled away, unseen by a discerning soul, locked in some investor's vault for several decades, but this will often transpire not to be the case.
And, much in this manner, how several decades of sitting (quite possibly) in an investment banker's vault might affect 'The Scream's' monetary value, to a tiny minority of, almost certainly artistically bankrupt, billionaires, and how this same incarceration might affect the same work's artistic credentials, could be judged to have seriously diverged. Either way, those wishing to unearth the art beneath the hype might need to approach certain art works with one very sturdy metaphorical excrement shovel.
What might the anonymous, and possibly only, viewer of 'The Scream' be thinking as he- it's almost certainly a 'he'- stands (will it be) in awe of the work? Will it be, "Wow, seventy-four million quid; all mine!" or will a tiny inkling of the inner machinations of the deceased artist's mind mesh, inextricably, with the 'soul' of the new 'owner'? We could, of course take serious issue with either of these words (soul and owner) on any number of points. Will the thoughts that are generated within the aura of the work somehow interfere with the manner in which others might one day view it? "See that, Beyonce-Starshine; that 'painting' was once owned by the world's richest man. Now, are you gonna give daddy one of those raspberry-flavoured sherbet-screams?"
Given the short poem that is inscribed upon 'The Scream's' frame, we might safely assume that, whatever precisely Edvard Munch had in mind when he created the iconic work, it almost certainly wouldn't have been to boost t-shirt sales, or increase the production of ceramic tat or to create yet another print-your -own-money avenue for Hollywood. And, I would like to think that, being a man who chose to communicate largely through his art, he wouldn't much have cherished the idea of his work sitting in a darkened vault, clicking virtual-digital-zeros into the bank balance of one man, with whom a short conversation on the shared perceptions of art might have been neigh on impossible.
Of course, money doesn't necessarily exclude artistic appreciation, but it certainly doesn't enhance it. At best, it merely affords one an enormous leg-up, onto the platform of publicly broadcast 'insight' (I say insight) into the work of art, thus almost certainly cheapening the art considerably for the wider, not-necessarily-discerning, public.
In my humble opinion 'The Scream', or one of them, has just been stolen for a third time. This time, more elaborately planned, more expensively undertaken, but sadly, and highly probably, far more irretrievably than on either previous occasion.
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