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
ands 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+)
Websites:
See also:
Tom Wolfe (
7 books reviewed)
Art
Tom Wolfe Links:
-ESSAY: The Building That Isn't There (TOM WOLFE, 10/12/03, NY Times)
-ESSAY: The Building That Isn't There, Cont'd:
One of the most important buildings in the history of 20th-century architecture will soon be vaporized. (TOM WOLFE, 10/13/03, NY Times)
-AUDIO: A TimesTalks Event: Tom Wolfe
(NY Times, 3/08/03)
-QUESTIONS: Tom Wolfe:
Following his participation in the TimesTalks series on March 8, the author answered NYTimes.com readers' questions. (NY Times, April 24, 2003)
-ESSAY: REVOLUTIONARIES: how the Manhattan Institute
changed New York City and America (Tom Wolfe, January 30, 2003, NY Post)
-PROFILE: Status Reporter: Tom Wolfe's advice: Escape the "parenthesis states" and explore America (JOSEPH RAGO, March 11, 2006, Opinion Journal)
-INTERVIEW: Mummy Wrap: an interview with Tom Wolfe (George Neumayr, 1/10/2005, American Spectator)
-ESSAY: Bush's Official Reading List, and a Racy Omission (ELISABETH BUMILLER, 2/07/05, NY Times)
Modern, All Too Modern: Tom Wolfe's new novel, largely reviewed as a satiric report on the sexual mores of today's college students, is fundamentally about the nature of the human will.: a review of of I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (S. T. Karnick, Books & Culture)
-REVIEW ESSAY: Tom Wolfe - A Clear Eye for Human Biodiversity (Steve Sailer, January 02, 2005, V-Dare)
-REVIEW: of I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (Dana B. Vachon, American Conservative)
-REVIEW: of I am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe (Ken Masugi, Claremont.org)
-REVIEW: of I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (Priya Jain, Salon)
-REVIEW: of I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (S. T. Karnick, Books & Culture)
Book-related and General Links:
-ESSAY:
Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, and Modernism
-FEATURED
AUTHOR: Tom Wolfe (NY Times Book Review)
-ESSAY:
TOM WOLFE, MATERIAL BOY (Rand Richards Cooper, Commonweal)
-REVIEW:
of From Bauhaus to Our House (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, NY Times)
-REVIEW:
of From Bauhaus to Our House (Paul Goldberger, NY Times Book Review)
-Bauhaus
Weimar (1919-25) and Dessau (1925-33)
-Bauhaus:
History\ Ideologies\ Achievements\ Typogaphy
-
Bauhaus School: 1919 - 1933 (Germany Today)
-Article:
A century in the Arts: From Modernism to Madonna, and beyond:
'All that is solid melts into air.' (Ed Siegel, Boston Globe Staff)
-Tom Wolfe: A
Man in Full
-ESSAY
: FREDERICK HART, b. 1943 : The Artist the Art World Couldn't See :
His Vietnam War memorial was like his other work - a success with
the public and thoroughly ignored by the critics. (TOM WOLFE, NY Times
Magazine)
-ESSAY:
Disciplines: What do a Jesuit priest, a Canadian communications theorist,
and Darwin II all have in common? (Tom Wolfe, Forbes)
-etext:
THE LAST AMERICAN HERO by Tom Wolfe
-ESSAY:
TOM WOLFE (Richard A. Kallan)
-ESSAY:
Don Dapper: Tom Wolfe conquers windmills on Brown's battlefield (Amanda
Griscom)
-INTERVIEW:
"TOM WOLFE AND HIS CRITICS" (Firing Line)
-Article: by TOM WOLFE
SORRY,
BUT YOUR SOUL JUST DIED (Forbes)
-Caricature
from The Atlantic
-CBC
Interview
-INTERVIEW
(Steve Hammer NUVO Newsweekly)
-Tom
Wolfe: The Satirist of Society (Caitlin Allen, Brighton High School)
-Creative
Nonfiction: Writers and Their Works
-TOM
WOLFE'S NEW JOURNALISM PICKS
-NEW
JOURNALISM by Dave Selden, Jr.
-Parajournalism
II: Wolfe and The New Yorker (DWIGHT MACDONALD, NY Review of Books)
-Profile:
Tom Wolfe, in 'Full' flower (USA Today)
-REVIEW
of Ambush at Fort Bragg (Salon)
-REVIEW:
Tom Wolfe's sour note (Timothy Noah, US News and World Report)
-REVIEW:
of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ROY COHN By Sidney Zion Dangerous Obsessions
(Tom Wolfe, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of CECIL BEATON A Biography. By Hugo Vickers SNOB'S PROGRESS (Tom Wolfe,
NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of THE LAST LAUGH By S.J. Perelman THE EXPLOITS OF EL SID (Tom Wolfe,
NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
Tom Wolfe's Rooftop Yawp His crackling novel deserves to be news. But America
is better than Wolfe's Atlanta. (George F. Will, Newsweek)
-REVIEW:
A Man in Full (Tom Walker, Denver Post Books Editor)
-REVIEW:
Georgia on His Mind: Tom Wolfe takes on the New South in 'A Man in Full'
(Malcolm Jones Jr., Newsweek)
-REVIEW:
Wolfe takes full measure of 'Man' (Deirdre Donahue, USA Today)
-REVIEW:
of A Man in Full (Sven Birkerts, The Atlantic)
-REVIEW:
A Riot of Egomania (Ty Hudson, Yale Review of Books)
-REVIEW of A Man in Full:
From
he-man to holy man (Salon)
-REVIEW of A Man in Full,
The
White Stuff (jeffrey eugenides, Voice Literary Supplement)
-REVIEW:
A Man Half Full (Norman Mailer, NY Review of Books)
-REVIEW:
of A Man in Full By Tom Wolfe. (Michael Lewis, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
J. Peder Zane: Far from empty, not quite full (News and Observer)
-REVIEW:
BookBrowser Review
-REVIEW:
Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic (Jordan Hoffman)
-REVIEW:
Tom
Wolfe still has the right stuff, despite snub by left-wing literary set
(Chuck Moss, Detroit News)
-REVIEW:
The culture's lone Wolfe The chronicler of radical chic and trophy wives
captures the nineties in his new novel (Gene Edward Veith, World)
-ESSAY:
TOM WOLFE (Richard A. Kallan)
-ESSAY:
Don Dapper: Tom Wolfe conquers windmills on Brown's battlefield (Amanda
Griscom)
-REVIEW:
of The Right Stuff (USAF site, Eric D. Brown, Capt, USAF)
-REVIEW
of Ambush at Fort Bragg (Salon)
-The
Birth of Way New Journalism (Joshua Quittner, HotWired)
-In
Gonzo We Trust: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson as Popular Culture Icon An Essay
for Popular Culture: Explorations in Theory and Practice SoSc 4990.06 By:
Rev. Dominic Ali for Professor Joe Galbo April. 26, 1993
-REVIEW:
of Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. By
T. J. Clark (Robert W. Jenson, First Things)
-ESSAY:
Video Junk Is On Its Way to the Whitney Biennial (Hilton Kramer, NY
Observer)
-ESSAY:
Bauhaus: Design or Dogma? (Hugh Aldersey-Williams, New Statesman)
