The Space Between: The Capitalist Divinity of Art as Explored Through the Work of Barbara Ségal

Abstract

Can the distance between a person and an artwork be measured? The experience of art has long been cited as something akin to a spiritual one. Standing before a work of art within the temple of the museum, the hand or eye of the artist captures an immaterial seed of the sacred. This emotional participation fosters a distance between the sacred object and the person that, I argue, can be measured. This essay will explore via comparison how the marble laundry detergent bottle Dash (1994) and the marble Birkin Bags of the Cathedral Candy Series (2019) by contemporary American artist Barbara Ségal measures that distance. While all the works in question are carved by the masterful hand of Ségal in lush marble, recalling the legacy of classical sculpture in the Western world, they are regarded differently by their audiences. The distance between viewer and Dash and the distance between viewer and the famous stone Birkin Bags are what endow them with the type of experience each one can, or cannot, transmit to a viewer. This distance between the work of art and the person viewing it is one of aesthetic divinity and is doubly amplified in Ségal's work when a high or low commodity is deified in marble.