The Doctor, Romana and Duggan run across Paris, looking singularly unworried. Romana smiles, the Doctor holds her hand. Failing to get a taxi, the Doctor cries out “Does no one care about history?”
Our heroes run to the Ship. The bystanders continue to shrug. And at that moment; when the stakes have never been higher...
We pause for a celebrity cameo.
In 1977 there had been a rather concocted controversy about Tate Gallery’s spending a great deal of public money on a minimalist installation, consisting of a pile of bricks and nothing else. It was sufficiently big news that John Craven covered it. The young lad in Children of the Stones threatens to sell the wreckage of his bike to the Tate Gallery. Even today the word "pileofbricks" is sometimes invoked by the kinds of people who think that Western Civilisation has been in permanent decline since the death of Michelangelo.
As our heroes jump into the TARDIS, we hear a snippet of conversation between two connoisseurs who have mistaken it for a piece of modern art. One of them takes an essentially formalist line:
“Divorced from its function and seen purely as a piece of art, its structure of line and colour is curiously counterpointed by the redundant vestiges of its function."
But the other is more interested in it conceptually:
“And since it has no call to be here, the art lies in the fact that it is here.”
These would both have been perfectly sensible comments to have made about, say Equivalent VIII (the pile of bricks) or Fountain (the urinal). Either you are looking at the shape of the object: paying attention to what it looks like in a new way because of the new context. Or else you are amused by the paradox of something which is not art being exhibited as if it were.
But these perfectly sensible comments are being made by JOHN CLEESE, one of the most recognisable actors on British TV. Many people say that they find him funny even when he isn't doing anything particularly amusing. I used to think that the scene was hurriedly added to the script when it turned out that Cleese was filming Fawlty Towers in a nearby studio and was game for a laugh: but in fact the cameo had always been part of the script, with a number of celebrities in the frame. Because BASIL FAWLTY is speaking the words, we are apt to regard them as intrinsically ludicrous. But I wonder how we would have read the scene if it had been Alan Bennett or Jonathan Miller in the role?
When the Doctor went to the Louvre, he said that the Mona Lisa was one of the greatest treasures in the universe; when he finds out that people are plotting to steal it, he says innocently that it is a very pretty painting. Duggan tells him that there are at least seven millionaires who would buy a stolen Mona Lisa even though they could never show it to anyone -- as a "very expensive gloat".
Scaroth has forced or persuaded Leonardo to make multiple copies of the picture. Presumably, all seven paintings are equally "pretty" -- as, indeed, would be any high quality reproduction. But the men on Duggan's list are only incidentally interested in its prettiness: what they attach a monetary value to is its rareness and authenticity -- not to look at, but to have. The existence of multiple copies put the whole notion of “authenticity” into question. Would the art collector view each painting as equally valuable because Leonardo painted all of them? Or are they all equally worthless since none of them are unique? [1] In the event, all the paintings but one are destroyed: but the surviving portrait, which is returned to the Louvre, is one of the ones on which the Doctor wrote the words “this is a fake” at the time of Leonardo. So it is simultaneously an obvious fake and quite definitely authentic. The Doctor sticks to his original position: it makes no difference because the whole point of art is to look at it.
Romana, without realising it, blows the whole argument out of the water. On Gallifrey, art is produced by computers. (In Invasion of Time and Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords have quite a lot of very ornate upholstery, but little representative art.) The Doctor would presumably say that art counts as art if it is pretty, but not otherwise: we can reserve judgement on whether a computer could ever in fact create something as pretty as the Mona Lisa. This would also be Elenor Bron's view: Time Lord art would have value if it had the formal properties of art. To Scarlioni's customers, such art, however pretty, would be infinitely reproducible and therefore completely valueless. But on John Cleese's view, it would become art once we put in an art gallery and treated it as art.
The last thing we see is Duggan buying a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa: and we are left asking — what is the status of this cheap, mass produced, piece of cardboard?
Doctor Who was ostensibly a children's show. Did Adams or Williams envisages children discussing the nature of art in the playground on Monday morning? Or were they intended to say, in effect "Here are a couple of silly grown ups talking complete gibberish -- which is, after all, what all modern art and all art criticism really is?" Is it intrinsically funny that anyone should talk in an informed way about modern art, or about any art at all? Or perhaps the thought was that we would be so busy saying "Hey -- isn't that Basil Fawlty" that we wouldn't notice what was actually being said.
Did Williams or Fisher or Adams realise that City of Death offered a pre-emptive debate about the validity of AI artwork? Perhaps not: but the interruption of an end-of-the-world space opera by an irrelevant pair of art aficionados is a clever piece of construction. The scene has no call to be there: the art lies in the fact that it is there.
[1] Paintings which were once quite valuable because they were painted by Rolf Harris are now quite unsaleable for the same reason.
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