Le Ballon: The Masked Ball At The Opera

The social practices of the society living in an age of consumer culture was characterised by its leisure time which found expression in a number of Manet’s paintings such as, Music at the Tuileries, 1862, that denotes a social gathering at a garden, the painting shows a homogenous class as one can conclude by their postures, attire, etc. The faces despite their visibility remain indiscernible. This anonymity of faces is seen in another painting titled The Masked Ball at the Opera, which again denotes a homogenous class. However, in Le Ballon- the crowd represented is varied, there is a beggar boy in the fore-front and behind him one sees a throng sharing a space as well as a frame but there are boundaries that are adhered to, the beggar boy
The homogeneity of a certain class as seen in some of Manet’s paintings suggest to us the privilege of leisure time which isn’t accounted for by labour time due to the change in the economic and market structure. This also brings up the issue of acquired social status, and how one can perform as belonging to a certain social status by acquiring certain social markers. It must however be noted that to no extent does this diminish or dissolve class boundaries, instead the modern city-scape simply provides one with opportunities to transgress them. Charles Baudelaire in one of his writings, titled ‘The Eyes of the Poor’ makes a note of this phenomenon, written from a first person point of view, he writes of a ‘dazzling new cafe’ at the corner of a ‘new boulevard’. He notices certain characters in this crowd, such as ‘fat-cheeked pages, dragged along by hounds’, ‘laughing ladies with falcons on their wrists’, ‘nymphs and goddesses bearing fruit, pates and game.’ Baudelaire is quick to critique this consumer culture, calling it