THE GROOVE

This is the second issue of The Groove, and the second of four email entries exploring the Seven Deadly Sins in art, culture, creativity, and business. If you missed the first one on Lust, you can read it here.

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Love,

Maria

THE GROOVE ISSUE 2 - SEVEN DEADLY SINS: GLUTTONY AND GREED EDITION

Excessive eating, drinking, and accumulation of material possessions have been at the center of human desire since Biblical times. And the sins of Gluttony and Greed have always been a fertile ground for creativity.

Before you move forward, one caveat: I’m not looking to judge people or to express my moral views. This isn’t about right or wrong. The point that I want to make is for you to think through thought-provoking topics while I take pieces of art, history, and culture to highlight humans’ creative responses. These creative responses made money, made history, or both, starting with themes that already existed and where artists and entrepreneurs capitalized on them, giving them their own spin.

Dionysus, the mythological child of Zeus and Semele, mostly known as the Greek god of wine, was also the god of fertility, ritual madness, and festivity, things that seem to go together when one is drunk. Festivals in his honor may have been as old as the 10th century BC. There wasn’t a middle ground for this curly-haired deity, whose cult inspired copious consumption of wine and sex. Anonymous Greek artists painted Dionysus in frescoes and mosaics at least 2,300 years ago, praising his never-ending promises of wine and fun, feeding into gluttony and lust. Later, around 200 BC, when the Romans had taken over Greece and stolen or destroyed all of its cultural and artistic contributions, Dionysus became “Bacchus” and his Bacchanalia became the ultimate orgy, combining more than one deadly sin.

In Medieval times in the early 1500s, that phenomenal Dutch painter that was Hieronymus Bosch finished an oil-on-wood painting that formed four small circles on each corner of the composition, with a bigger circle in the middle divided in seven pieces, each one representing the seven sins: envy, lust, wrath, sloth, pride, gluttony and greed. For the last two, Bosch paints a drunk man swigging from a bottle and a fat man eating exasperatedly, with an equally overweight son at his feet pleading with him to stop. A woman, presumably the wife, comes from the left side bringing more food to the table on a big tray, signifying the sin of gluttony. For the sin of greed, Bosch paints a corrupt judge who is trying to listen to the case argued by one party, while at the same time accepting a bribe from the other.

Later in 1567, another Dutch painter, the great Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted The Land of Cockaigne, and in it, an unflattering but funny depiction of a clerk, a peasant, and a soldier, laying on the floor under a table, presumably suffering the effects of a food coma.

What about all the lush still lifes that were painted in the early 1600s, piling pyramids of orange-crusted round cheese, dozes of bread loaves, and plates overloaded with food, like those painted by Floris van Schooten? Do they promote gluttony or just a sense of balance for the composition in the canvas?

In 1590, Italian painter Jacopo Ligozzi painted greed in his Allegory of Avarice as a lonely pale woman embraced by an angel of death, who’s holding a bag of money in his bony hand, just as she is too. Her back is turned against a scene where another woman is being attacked by a man with a sword, which seems to also point at the sin of pride.

Contemporary artist Barbara Kruger has made a career denouncing consumerism and corporate greed by printing words of warning, like “I shop therefore I am,” in black or white Bold Futura font over black and white images borrowed from magazines. The irony here is that these same images have earned her millions of dollars.

In 1987, Tom Wolfe wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities, one of the most compelling novels about greed with plenty of lust, pride, wrath and envy to boot. The novel was an instant success and a New York Times Best Seller for many months, later becoming a 1990 movie directed by Brian De Palma for which Wolfe got paid $750,000 (that’s about $1.6 million today).

Hollywood loves a story about greed and rewards them accordingly. Like Oliver Stone’s 1987 masterpiece, Wall Street, whose protagonist, Gordon Gecko, played by Michael Douglas, utters the line “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good”. Wall Street grossed more than $84 million in box office and earned Douglas an Oscar for Best Actor. Among hundreds of others, I’d like to highlight two favorites of mine: Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015), both book adaptations that became huge box-office hits and collected several nominations and a handful of Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and BAFTAs.

“I don’t appear as myself but I am all of the Deadly Sins, in a way as you all are too”

Paul Cadmus

This past first week of September, I went to The Met and saw American artist Paul Cadmus’ surrealist-sci-fi-horror series The Seven Deadly Sins, a group of egg tempera on Masonite and cardboard paintings that he created between 1945 and 1949, each measuring 24” x 12”. The one representing gluttony was the last one to be finished in 1949 and shows a quasi-monster humanoid whose body looks like ham covered in lard, and whose stomach has burst open with millions of spaghetti threads coming out of it. It reminded me of those Garbage Pail Kids trading cards from 1985. The one representing greed, which Cadmus titled Avarice, looks like a half-human, half- mythological reptile monster covered in slime. They are social satires of extremes. Cadmus once said of these paintings, “I don’t appear as myself but I am all of the Deadly Sins, in a way as you all are too”.

Cadmus hit the nail in the head: how many of us are ensnared today by gluttony or greed? Our modern world offers infinite choices of cheap, processed, fast, and junk, beautifully packaged food that is abundant and easily found, everywhere. Filled with additives that keep us digging for the last chip because we simply can’t stop. Masters of the ad industry have long known that humans succumb to desire and want things, more and more and more. And now it’s easier than ever: buy online, buy now pay later, split into installments, free shipping, free returns… we keep pressing the buttons and reaching for the sweets in our never-ending search for yet another dopamine hit.

And think about the weight-loss industry that is trying to counterbalance the sin of gluttony but sometimes leans too far the other way: membership programs like weight-watchers, apps that monitor people’s food intakes, diet pills, supplements, meal replacements, sauna blankets, and on and on. In 2018, the weight-loss industry in the United States alone was estimated to be $72.7 billion with a forecast to grow 2.6% annually until 2023. Talk about profiting from a sin!

It’s interesting to see how greed and gluttony fuel both our creative ideas and our economy in more ways than we usually stop to think about.

How have you noticed the exploitation of lust and greed in any form in the past six months?

Thank you for reading this far. Stay safe!

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