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marfknox
SFN Die Hard
USA
3739 Posts |
 Posted - 09/25/2005 : 13:01:37
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 A classmate lent me The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, published in 1975, and boy, if you ever want some actually intelligent criticism and questioning of the establishment of modern art, this is it!
The beauty of this book is that Wolfe doesn't usually attack the art – though occasionally he does accuse artists of allowing themselves to be too influenced by popular theory – he really attacks the establishment.
And he does so in a hilarious way. For instance, Wolfe starts out explaining the “mating ritual” between the bohemian artists, “boho”, and high society that can financially back and establish the artist, the “monde”. He talks about how to be successful, an artist must first be an honest boho, live amongst the other bohemians and adopt true anti-bourgeois values. This is called the “boho dance”. But once an artist has attracted the monde with his dance, he must “doubletrack”, which means learn to gleefully hobnob with the elite and enjoy his success, despite being a hypocrite.
And this mating metaphor is just the beginning. This book oozes sarcasm of the best and most vicious sort. Just check out this passage, about how pop art, according to the theorists, was supposed to be about “flatness”, rather than how the subject matter related to real life:
“In short… the culturati were secretly enjoying the realism! –plain old bourgeois mass-culture high-school goober-squeezing whitehead-hunting can-I-pop-it-for-you-Billy realism! They looked at a Roy Lichtenstein blowup of a love-comic panel showing a young blond couple with their lips parted in the moment before a profound, tongue-probing, post-teen, American soul kiss, plus the legend ‘We rose up slowly…as if we didn't belong to the outside world any longer…like swimmers in a shadowy dream…who didn't need to breath…' and—the hell with the sign systems—they just loved the dopey campy picture of these two vapid blond sex buds having their love-comic romance bigger than life, six feet by eight feet, in fact, up on the walls in an art gallery.”
(The Lichtenstein in question: http://www.postershop.com/Lichtenstein-Roy/Lichtenstein-Roy-We-Rose-up-Slowly-1964-2631347.html)
How can you not love writing like that?
This book rocks.
[Edited to add book links - Dave W.]
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"Too much certainty and clarity could lead to cruel intolerance" -Karen Armstrong
Check out my art store: http://www.marfknox.etsy.com
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