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View all 9 comments. Jul 05, Cheri rated it really liked it Shelves: Wonderful little witty book about a specific moment in art history. I'm normally not a great Tom Wolfe fan, but the book does ring true, even though it does simplify things greatly. If one likes the art that Wolfe takes apart, you might find yourself inclined to dislike the book without giving what he's saying enough consideration.

He makes some absolutely valid points and more importantly, he hints at a broader trend - the rift between the public viewer and the insular art world. Here, I think Wonderful little witty book about a specific moment in art history. Here, I think he really was prescient about what has come to pass. One only has to look at the decline of the importance of the visual artist in society to see some of the effects of that rift. If you asked the man on the street in the 50's and 60's to name a few great living artists, you were likely to hear the names Picasso or Dali, even Pollack after his Time magazine cover.

Try and do that now. His inference that critics are afraid of being the guy who thought Renoir painted from the ash can, or called Turner's paintings a mess, is a reality, having heard some contemporary critics say just that.

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Wolfe's funny, easily read book touches on some real and vital issues in the art world. And this from someone who studied Art History, loves Jackson Pollack and a great deal of "Manifesto" art. Jan 15, John Orman rated it really liked it. I am writing a much longer and more detailed review than usual because I plan to attend a local book club's upcoming meeting to discuss this nonfiction book.

Tom Wolfe's small but potent book charts the course of Modern Art. The stylistic writing is as witty and provocative as Wolfe's earlier book "Radical Chic. The critic had basically stated that to view art witho I am writing a much longer and more detailed review than usual because I plan to attend a local book club's upcoming meeting to discuss this nonfiction book. The critic had basically stated that to view art without a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial for art appreciation.

Wolfe restated the argument as "now it is not 'seeing is believing', but 'believing is seeing,' for Modern Art has become completely literary: Again and again, Wolfe refers to the differences between the elitist Modernists with their hip followers, and the common folk perceived as the bourgeoisie: On into Pop Art, "a new order, but the same Mother Church. Even a skewering of Op Art, in which "real art is nothing but what happens in your brain. Finally, toward the end of the twentieth century, Wolfe believes that "Modern art was about to fulfill its destiny: I ran across this recent segment in an interview of Wolfe: He equips one for intellectual name-dropping, the very discourse of the upwardly mobile cocktail-party society of arrivistes for whom Wolfe reserves the greatest measure of his contempt.

Quite a tour de force! Feb 16, Herb rated it did not like it Shelves: Wolfe's argument in this short, entertaining, and completely wrong-headed polemic is based on the idea that the non-representational art of the last or so years is a hoax because it can only be appreciated by those who have learned and agree with various abstract theories.

Wolfe is much more supportive of various flavors of representational art of the same period and the preceding centuries because he thinks this art can be appreciated without depending on theories. The basic fallacy of this Wolfe's argument in this short, entertaining, and completely wrong-headed polemic is based on the idea that the non-representational art of the last or so years is a hoax because it can only be appreciated by those who have learned and agree with various abstract theories. The book is, as I mentioned earlier, entertaining.

Wolfe is almost always fun to read. But that doesn't mean that he knows a lot about his subject here. View all 3 comments. Feb 15, Jenna rated it liked it. I'll need to hear other perspectives before I can decide whether I'm wholly convinced by Wolfe's argument. His main argument is that Modern Art sucks because it is fueled more by Art Theory than by the spirit of Art itself. He directs most of his satirical ammunition at the time period from Abstract Expressionism onward, arguing that during this epoch the Artists unwittingly became adjuncts of the Art Theorists, rather than the other way around the way it should be.

Wolfe also tries to better d I'll need to hear other perspectives before I can decide whether I'm wholly convinced by Wolfe's argument.

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Wolfe also tries to better delineate the shifting relationship between Art and Literature. In other words, Wolfe thinks modern artists, in their self-loathing, began to worshipand to try to imitateliterature of a sort: He sets a phrase down on the page, then tries to one-up himself with the next phrase, and then the next, until his sentence is a looong ascending staircase composed of increasingly outrageous phrases His is a crowded writing style and one that draws heavily on the scientific vocabularies of our day , but it is also entertaining and clear.

Tom Wolfe rips the pish out of art critics using their own chosen weapon - the word. This was probably about round 6 of a 12 rounder between painting and theory. Up to this pont Theory had been winning every round and it looked like painting was going to have to throw in the towel and abandon the title. Wolfe stepped into Painting's corner and this round was a decisive winner.

Nobody seems to know what the final outcome of the Championship bout was And as for Theory and Critics? Well, they are still there underpinned and supported by the whole government-supported Art establishment and Art School hegemony attempting still to usurp the work of art for the description of the work of art - that is to hijack the artist by intellectualising something that is not - fundamentally - an intellectual process.

Jul 16, Kathe Umlauf rated it it was amazing. A clear and concise easy to read book about why much contemporary art has become the vast wasteland that it is. Why is dumb, empty, meaningless, talentless art esteemed in certain galleries? There is a war of values and wills taking place in a culture that has lost it's philosophical moorings. Contemporary cultural values have been influenced by the Existentialism and relativism of the 's and art follows.

The now subjective world of art making, selling and buying has become the playground of A clear and concise easy to read book about why much contemporary art has become the vast wasteland that it is. The now subjective world of art making, selling and buying has become the playground of those personalities in NYC who can bully, persuade and posture the most convincingly.

Visual art no longer speaks for itself, but needs an interpreter and justifier to speak for it, something like the Emperor'S New Clothes fable.


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A must read for any thinking artist. Jan 13, Nick Gibson rated it it was amazing. I don't have the education to review this from an art criticism or art history perspective, but Tom Wolfe's argument here meshes with and reinforces similar perspectives from Odd Nerdrum and Roger Scruton.

And Wolfe does so in his own lightning prose style. It's not the main point of the book, but it stood out to me that Wolfe attributes Modern Art - as a culture, as a religion, as a movement - to a kind of bourgeois guilt. That is, the shame of the Western secular elite over their own economic s I don't have the education to review this from an art criticism or art history perspective, but Tom Wolfe's argument here meshes with and reinforces similar perspectives from Odd Nerdrum and Roger Scruton. That is, the shame of the Western secular elite over their own economic success and comfort in a world broken by two World Wars.

Beginning in the s these elites patronized the anti-bourgeois vanguard artists as an act of atonement, even though this bohemian vanguard sought to destroy anything e. The idea is that people in a post-Christian moral economy are desperately seeking a release from guilt. The moral economy has retained a legalistic morality but has eliminated any mechanism of salvation, atonement, absolution, forgiveness. This is the same argument that some are putting forward to explain the rise of identity politics with being a loyal ally to the victimized as the analog to supporting bohemian artists.

To see it here, in , is evidence in support of Wolfe's prescience. I could not get into Wolfe's style. Jul 16, Elizabeth Kadetsky rated it liked it. Wolfe does have a zounds-slap-lightning way with phrases! Nevertheless I was inspired to rea Wolfe does have a zounds-slap-lightning way with phrases! Writing in , Wolfe seems to have already had the similar smart insight about contemporary art in the Serra vein, which is that it is fundamentally about consumption, abstracted from the essence of visual experience. Updike might say this more elegantly. Wolfe's essays are among my guilty pleasures as a reader.

The Seventh Avenue garment industry gad cranked up and slapped the avant-garde into mass production. Oct 30, Sara rated it liked it Shelves: This was a very interesting read - Tom Wolfe talks about how modern art moved away from being a visual experience and started to be a reaction of what the critics were saying and it all culminated with conceptual art I happen to like conceptual art, but I agree that it is less "artistic" in the classic sense of the word. Among the many artists he grills, Wolfe practically skewers Jackson Pollock and says that his art was a mere creation at the request of what the galleries wanted and that lead This was a very interesting read - Tom Wolfe talks about how modern art moved away from being a visual experience and started to be a reaction of what the critics were saying and it all culminated with conceptual art I happen to like conceptual art, but I agree that it is less "artistic" in the classic sense of the word.

Among the many artists he grills, Wolfe practically skewers Jackson Pollock and says that his art was a mere creation at the request of what the galleries wanted and that leads to one of the more interesting points in this book - that art is the art form that is least influenced by the general public's demand. There is a very tiny group of people that patronize art unlike movies and music and so it is their whims that dictate the creation, popularity, and sale of it.

Aug 28, Dfordoom rated it it was amazing Shelves: A glorious hatchet job on modernist art. Wolfe's main point is that most schools of modernist art cannot be appreciated unless you first understand the theory behind them, which makes the art itself pretty much irrelevant. It's all about the theory. Wolfe is delightfully vicious and highly entertaining. May 14, Kate rated it did not like it. Tom Wolfe has mastered the art of being shocked and horrified at the mundane and obvious. This book has the character of a child that has discovered some new situation and, misconstruing it, lets forth a torrent of outrage without insight.

His assault on 'theory' only demonstrates the necessity of substance to fill out style. Mar 20, Mark Taylor rated it really liked it. Tom Wolfe takes on the art world! Tom Wolfe critiques the leading theories in contemporary art! Tom Wolfe tells you all about the different stages of being an artist, from the Boho Dance to the Consummation which ensures critical success!

Tom Wolfe takes on the mysteries of abstract art! The receptionist is one of those girls you see at practically every gallery, the fine-boned, sleek, mini-skirt wearing type, just out of college with a B. They can never tell, so they keep coming back for more! He wonders to himself, why is it so damn flat? So he walks out of the gallery, with his hat and his walking stick, and he ponders.


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He makes his way to the nearest bookstore and finds their art section. He starts reading criticism. He reads Clement Greenberg, the patron saint of Abstract Expressionism. And then he learns about flatness! The sacred integrity of the picture plane! Wolfe becomes determined to peel the layers of the onion that is contemporary art. The Painted Word is a slim little volume, just pages in my Bantam reprint paperback, but the book packs quite a punch. In the opening pages of the book, Wolfe tells us how he got interested in writing about art theory.

Wolfe focuses most on the theories of the three leading art critics of that era: Meh, it was too figurative, too literal. And those artists were getting their ideas from pop culture and comic books! Serious art came from deep inside your soul! And the way they made their art-using commercial art techniques like silk screening! This theory did not exactly endear Wolfe to artists. But was he right? Was that just the way their work was naturally headed, or did ideas from critics like Clement Greenberg influence the direction of their work?

Abstract Expressionism was deeply serious, and scornful of any kind of pop culture influences. Johns and Rauschenberg were important influences on Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who both started creating paintings based on comic strips and newspaper photographs.

Warhol and Lichtenstein married high and low culture in their Pop Art paintings and silk screens in a way that was abhorrent to most of the Abstract Expressionists. The Painted Word follows American art through the dominant movements from until Leo Steinberg had to do some rhetorical backflips to make Jasper Johns fit into the flatness box.

He basically said that it was all okay because Johns had picked objects to paint like flags and targets that were already flat to begin with! In one of the most brilliant parts of the book, Wolfe writes about how critics had to be constantly ahead of the game: To be against what is new is not to be modern. Not to be modern is to write yourself out of the scene.

Not to be in the scene is to be nowhere. No, in an age of avant-gardism the only possible strategy to counter a new style which you detest is to leapfrog it. You abandon your old position and your old artists, leaping over the new style, land beyond it, point back to it, and say: How flat can you get? How abstract can you get? How many traditional pictorial elements can you completely eliminate from your work and still have a painting? Robert Rauschenberg beat the Minimalists at their own game a decade before they came on the scene: At the end of the book, Wolfe shows us the only logical conclusion to these theories: In this way, Wolfe says, the game has come full circle: The Painted Word caused a great critical furor when it was released, and critics of all stripes attacked Wolfe.

He discussed the reaction to the book at length in his interview in The Paris Review: The things that I was called in print were remarkable. In fact, there were so many, I started categorizing them. I always thought it was a very strange sort of insult because it cast contemporary art as pornography and I was the child.

In various forms this metaphor was repeated by several different reviewers. Robert Hughes used it. He had the full image, the six-year-old, the grunts and groans, the pornographic movie and the rest of it. In the Times John Russell referred to me as a eunuch at the orgy. I think he was afraid that too many of his readers would be overstimulated by the thought of a six-year-old at a pornographic movie. So I became a eunuch at an orgy. Because of the similarity of the sexual metaphors, I was curious about this and was told later on that there had been a dinner in Bedford, New York, shortly after The Painted Word came out.

The subject of The Painted Word came up and Motherwell supposedly said, You know, this man Wolfe reminds me of a six-year-old at a pornographic movie.

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Actually that was one of the points I was trying to make in The Painted Word—that three thousand people, no more than that certainly, with roughly three hundred who live outside of the New York metropolitan area, determine all fashion in art. Wolfe appeared on William F. In their criticisms they would appear to score on one point.

I say they would appear to score because it is true that there is no internal evidence in The Painted Word that Tom Wolfe is himself a connoisseur of art or that he has read deeply into art history, though he may have done so and decided for editorial reasons not to encumber his thesis with that knowledge.

And I think in a way this is what has gotten under the skin of more critics and art historians than anything else. The first exclamation point comes at the end of the second sentence in the book. As every art-history student is told, the Modern movement began about with a complete rejection of the literary nature of academic art, meaning the sort of realistic art which originated in the Renaissance and which the various national academies still held up as the last word. Literary became a code word for all that seemed hopelessly retrograde about realistic art.

In time, literary came to refer to realistic painting in general. The idea was that half the power of a realistic painting comes not from the artist but from the sentiments the viewer hauls along to it, like so much mental baggage. They make up a little story about him. What was the opposite of literary painting? Art should no longer be a mirror held up to man or nature. A painting should compel the viewer to see it for what it is: Artists pitched in to help make theory.

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They loved it, in fact. Georges Braque, the painter for whose work the word Cubism was coined, was a great formulator of precepts: The aim is not to reconstitute an anecdotal fact but to constitute a pictorial fact. Artists repeat it endlessly, with conviction. As the Minimal Art movement came into its own in , Frank Stella was saying it again: It really is an object What you see is what you see.

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Such emphasis, such certainty! In any event, so began Modern Art and so began the modern art of Art Theory. You can be sure the poor fellow never dreamed that during his own lifetime that order would be reversed.

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They have been emboldened by what has looked to them, as one might imagine, as the modern art of Art Theory gone berserk. The realist school that is attracting the most attention is an offshoot of Pop Art known as Photo-Realism. One of the things they manage to accomplish in this way, beyond the slightest doubt, is to drive orthodox critics bananas. One can almost hear Clement Greenberg mumbling in his sleep: Leo Steinberg awakes with a start in the dark of night: Bechtle for 20, pounds at auction in London.

Have the collectors and artists themselves abandoned the very flower of twentieth-century art: The Photo-Realists assure the collectors that everything is okay, all is kosher.

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And so on, through the checklist of Late Modernism. The Photo-Realists are backsliders, yes; but not true heretics. Any orthodox critic, such as Kramer, is bound to defend the idea that a work of art can speak for itself.