Undemocratic Art: The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe

Book Review
The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe
First Published in 1975 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
This Edition Published in 1999 by Bantam Books (Random House, Inc.)

"The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in Modern Art, the notion that the public scorns, ignores, fails to comprehend, allows to wither, crushes the spirit of, or commits any other crime against Art or any individual artist is merely a romantic fiction, a bittersweet Trilby sentiment. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened. The public that buys books in hardcover and paperback by the millions, the public that buy records by the billions and fills stadiums for concerts, the public that spends $100 million on a single movie—this public affects taste, theory, and artistic outlook in literature, music, and drama, even though courtly elites hand on somewhat desperately in each field. The same has never been true in art."

Welcome to the art world according to Tom Wolfe, where the author reveals how modern art became famous and how its peculiar styles changed over time just as modern architecture did in his following book, From Bauhaus to Our House.

How was it that some artists, such as Jackson Pollock, made it, while others who in some eyes were more talented never did? Wolfe writes,

"So it was that the art mating ritual developed early in the century—in Paris, in Rome, in London, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and not too long afterward, in New York. As we've just seen, the ritual has two phases:

1. The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn't care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.


2. The Consummation, in which culturati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards—and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity."

What tied the Boho Dance and Consummation together were the art critics, whose words in large part determined which styles were successful. And so first came Abstract Expressionism, then Pop Art, then Minimalist Art, and finally Conceptual Art, all within a span of less than 30 years. What is amazing about this phenomenon is how the style that was "in fashion" changed, and how quickly the superseded style was forgotten and viewed as contemptuous.

"...with Abstract Expressionism and what came after it, they had to have…the Word. There were no two ways about it. There was no use whatsoever in looking at a picture without knowing about Flatness and associated theorems."

"How manfully they tried! How they squinted and put their fingers under their eyelids in order to focus more sharply (as Greenberg was said to do)…how they tried to internalize the theories to the point where they could feel a tingle or two at the very moment they looked at an abstract painting…without first having to give the script a little run-through in their minds. And some succeeded. But all tried! I stress that in light of the terrible charges some of the Abstractionists and their theorists are making today against the collectors…calling them philistines and nouveaux-riches, status strivers who only pretended to like abstract art, even during the heyday of the 1950s. Which is today: You were nothing but fat middle-class fakes all along! You never had a true antibourgeois bone in your bodies!"
...
"The clincher was Steinberg’s own confession of how he had at first disliked Johns’s work. He had resisted it. He had fought to cling to his old values—and then realized he was wrong. This filtered down as a kind of Turbulence Theorem. If a work of art or a new style disturbed you, it was probably good work. If you hated it—it was probably great.
That was precisely the way Robert Scull discovered the artist Walter De Maria. Scull was walking down Madison Avenue on Saturday afternoon when he stopped in a gallery and saw some drawings that were mostly blank. They were pieces of drawing paper framed and hung, and down in one corner would be a few faint words, seemingly written by an ailing individual with a pencil so hard, a No. 8 or something, that the lead scarcely even made a line: ‘Water, water, water’ Scull hated these drawings so profoundly, he promptly called up the artist and became his patron. That brought De Maria his first recognition as a Minimal artist."

And so the "human comedy" continued... On a more serious note—if one is to analyze the phenomenon from a broader social and biological perspective—it is another example of how gullible humans are to peer pressure and how most of us want to be part of the new and cool trend. In the case of the cosmopolitan art world, the goal is to be part of le monde:

"the social sphere described so well by Balzac, the milieu of those who find it important to be in fashion, the orbit of those aristocrats, wealthy bourgeois, publishers, writers, journalists, impresarios, performers, who wish to be 'where thing happen,' the glamorous but small world of that creation of the nineteenth-century metropolis, tout le monde, Everybody, as in 'everybody says'…the smart set in a phrase…'smart,' with its overtones of cultivation as well as cynicism."