Tom Wolfe hates modern arr

The Painted Word (1975)



Author Info:
Tom Wolfe
1931-


It is not necessary to read these two books together, but they really do compliment one another and it is when taken together that they make the most powerful case.  The case is that, just as each of us has always secretly suspected, modern art is crap.  In fact, not only is it crap, it is intentionally so, more or less as a calculated insult to our middle brow tastes.  Indeed, while most of us would consider it the purpose of art to convey beauty, modern artists consider art to be merely a tool for political expression.  Logically then, since most of them are, and were, opposed to our middle class, democratic, capitalist, protestant values, modern art is antithetical to virtually everything that most of us believe in.

I say that we have all always intuited that this is true, but it was left to Tom Wolfe, naturally, to declare for one and all that the emperor had no clothes.  He does this most forcefully in the opening lines of Bauhaus, which deals with modern architecture, when he says:
O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth
    where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they
    detested as within they blessed borders today?

But the reasons for the sorry state of the arts are most clearly explicated in Painted Word.  The essay therein was occasioned by a Hilton Kramer review of an exhibition of Realist artists.   On the morning of April 28, 1974, Wolfe picked up the New York Times and read the following by Kramer:
"Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory.  And
    given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to
    lack something crucial--the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our
    understanding of the values they signify."

Kramer's words brought about an epiphany:
All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well - how
    very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along.
    Not `seeing is believing', you ninny, but `believing is seeing', for Modern Art has become completely
    literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

Painted Word is an extended riff upon this theme--the idea that art had become wholly dependent on theory.  His case builds to the stunning dénouement when an artist named Lawrence Weiner presented the following artwork in the April 1970 issue of Arts Magazine:
1. The artist may construct the piece
2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

Concludes Wolfe:
And there, at last, it was!  No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors
    forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more
    frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no
    more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected,
    just "the artist", in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, not even existence, for that
    got lost in the subjunctive mode--and in the moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of
    insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher until, with one last erg
    of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperature...and came
    out the other side as Art Theory!...Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled
    by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the
    Universal Souls.

And it is upon reaching this final state of pure theory that C.S. Lewis pessimistic prediction in The Abolition of Man comes to fruition.  When we as a people, no longer capable of forming coherent judgments about quality, no longer confident enough to differentiate what is good from what is bad, end up being forced to accept any old garbage that is hailed by the critics and forced upon us.

Wolfe is at his wickedly funny, subversive best here, pricking the pretensions of the Art world--artists, critics and patrons alike.  If you want to know why the establishment reacts so angrily to his novels, you need look no farther than these two dissections of the tastes, or lack of such, exhibited by the intelligentsia in Modern Art.  When you pronounce to the world that the opinion makers live in ugly, uncomfortable buildings and decorate their homes with art which is at best a hoax, at worst a pile of trash, you sort of have to expect that the opinions they deliver won't be all that favorable to you.

(Reviewed:29-Nov-99)

Grade: (A+)