ATTENTION NAME DROPPERS

By Paul Gray

THE LITTLE STATUE OF A NAKED Cupid blushed unseen, or largely so, for some 90 years in the same spot: a mansion on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue designed by Stanford White. In the 1950s the building was sold to the French government and became a quasi-public space entered daily by employees and visitors. There the Cupid still stood, looking like nothing more than a piece of Gilded Age gimcrackery.

Last week the selfsame statue had velvet ropes placed around it as protection from a throng of photographers. Flashbulbs popped, TV lights poured out their bluish-white certification of celebrity. If marble could think, this particular chunk of it must have wondered what on earth was going on.

The explanation, of course, is that an authority on 16th century Italian sculpture saw the Cupid statue in a different light one day and decided, after much study and research, that it was an early work by...Michelangelo. Once a sufficient number of other experts had given their support to this attribution, the announcement was made that transformed, at least tentatively, a bit of bric-a-brac into the only Michelangelo sculpture on U.S. soil.

Nor is Michelangelo the only old master to make headlines in this new year. In mid-January a professor at Vassar College proclaimed that the 578-line A Funerall Elegie, printed in London in 1612 and signed "W.S.," was actually written by...William Shakespeare. This assertion came with an elaborate computer analysis of the vocabulary of Shakespeare's plays written shortly before the elegy, and some other scholars were impressed enough with this evidence to jump on board as well. Shortly thereafter, copies of the elegy could be downloaded from the Internet.

It is easy to see why people who make their living studying Michelangelo and Shakespeare should be agog at the possibility of more material to occupy their attention. But perhaps the marble Cupid's imaginary puzzlement may be shared by flesh-and-blood mortals with no vested career interests in the matter. What indeed is going on here?

Neither the Cupid nor the elegy is intrinsically different now, in the full glare of worldwide publicity, than a few weeks ago, when both enjoyed obscurity. The only thing that has changed is the attitude we are expected to bring to these objects. What we could safely ignore or overlook before now commands our reverent attention because the names Michelangelo and Shakespeare have been attached to them.

This injunction is peculiar and hard to disobey, given the gradual development in Western art of the maker overwhelming the made. Michelangelo became "Michelangelo" because his contemporaries, and then posterity, recognized the genius displayed across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and in such of his statues as David and Pieta. A similar process transformed Shakespeare into "Shakespeare." In both cases, magnificent achievements led to posthumous idolatry.

A major beneficiary of this trend was Rembrandt, whom Romantic writers in the early 1800s seized upon as an exemplar of the artist as Prometheus. As the demand for Rembrandts grew, so, mysteriously, did the supply. It is therefore worthwhile to note that several weeks before the Michelangelo and Shakespeare attributions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, just two blocks north of the house in which the little Cupid stands, came to the end of its "Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt" exhibit. This show reflected the labors of the Rembrandt Research Project, an Amsterdam-based group of experts on Dutch painting that since 1968 has relentlessly whittled down the number of paintings once attributed to Rembrandt (more than 700) by roughly one-half. Galleries and museums that found their prized possessions devalued to forgeries or to works carried out by Rembrandt's assiduous apprentices have not been altogether pleased with the RRP's verdicts. And those who came to see these now discredited paintings may feel a little like the cartoon characters who walk off the edge of a cliff and continue stepping along until they look down. Uh-oh, no support here. Crash!

Well, do we need the ballast of expert opinions and attributions to inform and justify our tastes in art or literature or music or--in the late 20th century--in all the electronic entertainment available at the push of a remote-control button? The snap answer is, hell no, we don't. But that is not really true. Aesthetics, for all the millions of words that have been written on the subject, remains an inexact science. We cannot say why a painting once supposed to be by Rembrandt loses face when its connection with the master is disputed or disproved, even though it looks just the same as it did when we admired it before. Nor can we understand the sudden compulsion to look anew at and find merit in the alleged Michelangelo Cupid and the reputed Shakespeare elegy. For all we supposedly know about it, art remains a mystery to us, forever beckoning, forever withholding its inner secrets. The best we can do is to keep our eyes open, aware that that neglected statue or that neglected poem could, if seen in the right way, blossom into a masterpiece.