Iziashchnoe iskusstvo sozdavat' sebe vragov

James Whistler's "The Elegant Art of Making Enemies" (1834-1903) is a compilation of the artist's most ridiculous reviews and his most stinging responses to them. The book was based on the protocol of the scandalous case Whistler v. Ruskin, held on November 15, 1878 and became the first public discussion, albeit in legal terms, of the question of price, symbolic and financial, art. Whistler wanders bon mots, wittily polemical, finishing each stinging note as the most difficult offset board, thus creating a kind of "etchings in prose." "The Elegant Art of Making Enemies" is a kind of manifesto of the anti-Victorian movement, the first ever attempt by an artist to defend his pioneering art from ignorant and vulgar criticism, to defend independence in the emerging before our eyes a new world of art based on sales.