Mervin Jules: The Art Lover (1937)

Gallery Notes:
An admirer of 19th-century French artist Honoré Daumier’s social caricatures, Mervin Jules satirizes the myopic gaze of a bourgeois connoisseur scrutinizing a painting. The painting-within-a-painting depicts workers demonstrating against the backdrop of a smoke-filled industrial landscape. The subject memorializes the infamous 1937 Little Steel strike, during which police fired on unarmed unionized steelworkers and their sympathizers protesting low wages and poor working conditions. Jules executed this painting during a formative time when he was studying with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League and employed by the silkscreen unit of the Works Progress Administration.

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"Let such mysteries be."

Not all Decencies contain the same quantity of sincerity. Some seem more phony than actual. Some seem counterfactual. I mention this not to encourage paranoia, for minor discrepancies are probably nothing to lose much sleep over. For one reason or another, or for no discernible reason at all, some will pretend to be acting Decently when they actually aren’t. The motive probably doesn’t matter. The insincerity says much more about them than it ever could about you, and what it says about them will probably remain unspoken, even if you were to break ranks and ask after the disconnect. These acts most often remain uncommentable. You might be able to convince yourself that something smells fishy, but the fish rarely admits to any deliberate deception, or even inadvertent. This often means they’re not aware of their inauthenticity. So be that.

I speak here of that niceness that seems out of context. The syrupy soliloquy. The overly exuberant story. The appreciation that somehow seems overbearing. The welcoming greeting that doesn’t feel all that welcoming. I suspect that every culture maintains a few of these pseudo Decencies for use when necessary. When called to praise an enemy, for instance, when you’d rather that enemy not notice where your true sensibilities lie, these are Crocodile emotions, like Crocodile Tears, that seem deep down insincere. It’s often the case that everyone present understands the underlying nature of these performances. We sense when someone’s shining our shoes. It’s often most advantageous to go along with the Duncency, since everybody already understands how utterly unimportant this performance will prove to be. These can almost always be totted up as benign performances.

They are tests, though, exams assessing your own perception. The deception’s rarely skilled enough to escape detection, though it’s seldom conclusively terrible enough to absolutely confirm its presence. Anybody can easily talk themselves out of these shadowy perceptions, for they often only trouble distant intuitions. They seem to pose no apparent or immediate danger. This passive presentation can encourage anyone to slip back into dozing through these interactions, to show up absent. So entranced, one lobs off a subtle but essential part of these performances. If you ache for superficiality, there’s really never any pressing need to acknowledge the Crocodile emotions working the room. The full appreciation, though, strongly suggests that you not get into the habit of deliberately ignoring even shadowy corners of your intuition. Those spider senses are there for reasons perhaps beyond your present ability to appreciate them, but failing to acknowledge them can result in ultimately losing addressability to them, and they’re essential.

I prefer to acknowledge Duncency as an open yet unacknowledged secret in the room. If everyone’s in on it, it doesn’t really amount to much of a secret. The hostess who attends a little too joyously might seem phony, but she’s disclosing as much as she feels safe to share in that moment. Whatever’s missing remains tacitly accounted for without ever requiring explicit mentioning. No rule insists on full disclosure, and we each protect a few private parts through simple, relatively innocent misrepresentation. I won’t pretend that bad actors who hone these performances to turn apparent Decency into malign advantage don’t exist. I know of no defense against such actors other than to abandon belief in the widespread, reassuring existence of some baseline Decency in this world. So what if that’s fiction? If it works well enough, it works. Full disclosure or insisting upon some absolute authenticity wouldn’t reflect the more informing reality. Not everybody’s equally capable of Decency, but that difference rarely matters. Even the unskilled can try.

Let the Minnesota Nicenesses lie. They amount to little more than tiny white lies between acquaintances. Some small volume of misrepresentation shouldn’t undermine whatever trust a relationship contains. It might be that they didn’t ask you how you were feeling because they were particularly interested in how you were feeling, but because they didn’t want you to suspect how little they cared. Big whoop! No headline, no news. Neither of us is especially stupid. We both know there’s something the other struggles to disclose, perhaps even to themself. If we ignore the signals or insist upon fully decoding them, we could render each other as stupid as we sometimes feel. Duncency begins when we insist upon definitive answers to fuzzy questions, or when we ask questions that hardly warrant even a fuzzy answer. We are private persons reaching across voids. Nobody’s responsible for explaining how or why their relationships work. Let such mysteries be.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Decency, #PureSchmaltz