The Painted Word
by Tom Wolfe
List Price:
Our Price: $5.95
You Save: $8.05 (58%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.25 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Tom WolfeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-10-05
ISBN: 0553380656
Number of pages: 112
Publisher: Bantam
Book Reviews of The Painted Word
Book Review: "The Painted Word" by Tom Wolfe
Summary: 4 Stars
A Review of Tom Wolfe's "The Painted Word"
Tom Wolfe's rhetoric is at times overpowering but like beautifully complicated music (Bach?) it is a symphony for both the brain and the heart. Wolfe is saying that as art loses its goal to communicate it becomes lousy art, if art at all. He implies that "art for art's sake" is a false concept, and I agree with him. He attacks pretentiousness in both artist and art lover and correctly labels it a game.
Wolfe's title is a word play in two respects. (1) The modernists invent their genres and make them more important that the art itself. (2) Art must have a subject, just as a sentence must have a subject.
The phrase "Art for art's sake" can be used in an adjectival way meaning devotion, obsession, degree of love for the activity of art, and that's fine with me. But there must be more to art than excited devotees. Otherwise, every fanatic, let alone every hard working man who loves his job, would be a creator of art in some form or another. And the crudeness of our world, albeit with beauty scattered about here and there, tells us that is not the case. Of course, beauty and tenderness can exist and not be art. For art does not become art simply because someone says it is.
Much modern art is good and beautiful and meaningful in its dealings with color and form. And a painting might indeed deal solely with color and form, and not with reality. For they are legitimate subjects. On the other hand, an artist's desire to bamboozle is not enough. I love some modern art, and some not, the same as with the other genres. So when is modern art a thing I can accept? When it communicates a subject, even form and color alone; and when it is honest and makes no claims that are not there.
There is a difference between paint-artists and writers in how they perceive their own art juxtaposed others, and how they assign value. Most writers move about, back and forth, and are influenced by all forms, all styles, all of history, and they are capable of learning from the past. They might read Proust one day and Joyce the next, Emily Dickinson and then Virginia Woolf, Goethe and then Vonnegut, Rushdie and then Shakespeare. Take a look at James Joyce's great novel "Ulysses." It depends on the Greek myths, a vastly different kind of writing than his own, but without Homer Joyce's novel would be less than we have now. At the very least, it would be a different novel with a different message.
An exaggeration, even if grotesque, might be characterization, and might be art. James Joyce was aware of that.
On the other hand, more than a few paint artists are bitter in their historical perceptions, hating the art outside their own genre. The Impressionists (whom I especially love) had a vigorous abhorrence for what came before them, and the abstractionists hate everything and everybody but themselves, even denying that their art has to have a subject. "Flatness" is not a subject, it is a technique. A question - why can't I pour paint onto a canvas drip by drip, like Jackson Pollock, and make art out of it? What skill, artistic or otherwise, is involved in that? And what would my spills and splashes communicate?
And then there is the world of hanger-oners and art critics who speak and write in an insane insiders' language, pretentious wanna-be-nabobs living in intellectual temples, wobbly dirty white towers, who feel compelled to tell us what to think, what to love, what to read, what to look at, what to marvel at. And if we disagree they tell us we are bourgeoisie philistines, poor brain and heart limited creatures, incapable.
Tom Wolfe has written a wonderful and humorous look at the sometimes ridiculous world of modern art. Agree with him or not, you will be entertained.
Like Tom Wolfe, I am bemused and irritated by the art reviews in The New York Times. A review of rusted pipes and broken fixtures on display at an art show pushed me over the edge. So I wrote a review of my own and sent it to them. They completely ignored me as I knew they would. My review was of my cat's litter box. Here it is -
A Review of Menace in Simple Things
My love of art and my disdain for the many tortured reviews of art that I stumble across more often than is good for my mental health has led me to write a review of my own. The subject of my analysis is - to say the least - as profound as elephant dung on a Madonna, twisted plumbing, rusting scrap metal, empty white canvasses, or a crucifix inserted into a jar of human urine, objects that are taken quite seriously on the daily art pages of our great American newspapers and in their Sunday supplements. But please, do not take my subject too seriously, for my cat does enough of that for all of us.
A few days ago I happened upon my cat just as he was leaving his litter box after taking a poop. A friend was with me and as he observed my interest in the affair he asked, "You act as though you know what this is all about. I don't get it." Sensing a crisis I suggested that a search through Britannica or The New York Times Arts and Leisure Section might be helpful.
"I can do that." he said, and abruptly left me to my musings. It seemed threatening that I found myself alone with my cat's poop.
The poop seemed to be arranged in a stripped-down manner that made it appear to be on a lighted stage that integrated its various themes into an art form - if you will - that has its roots in Minimalism, and that merged the entire piece into a distinct theatricality. It seemed to have its sources in childhood, a numinous presence having the effect of a domestic twilight zone. Ordinary chunky things were combined in weird ways.
The result was a spooky, dead narrative, perhaps even an autobiographical content. Domesticity - poisoned, entrapped disrupted - was its main theme. And no artist better captured a sense of Foucault's romance with oppression than my cat. At the same time, there was room in the poop for humor, however sardonic, and a strain of poetry that would become more evident with time.
All these morphological riffs loosened up the obtuse, adamant solidity of the poop and suggested a wealth of associations - baptism, slaking thirst, warming, cooling, healing, and of precious things gone down the drain and lost.
It is important to understand the metaphorical dimensions of my cat's poop. But it is not always easy to do that. As time goes on, and the cultural climate that produced this poop moves backward, a new and grand brew of pessimism and nostalgia delivers a shock. But can it be - will it be - a heavy-handed emphasis on a more flexible medium?
Perhaps baby poop next time.
I think I'll go to Macy's and buy me a white suit.
Joseph A. Psarto
440-835-5179
jpsarto@juno.com
Art History Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Art History Books
Learn to Paint Oil Pastelsby Jacqueline Black
HarperCollins; Published: 1993-07-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $28.91
Oil Painting (Collins Artist's Guides)by ANGELA GAIR (EDITOR)
COLLINS; Published: 1998; Paperback; Book
Collins Artist's Guide: Making Pictures Pb (Artists Guides)by Angela Gair
Harpercollins; Published: 1997-07; Paperback; Book
Colour Mixing: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started (Collins Learn to Paint Series)by Judy Martin
HarperCollins UK; Published: 1998-06-01; Paperback; Book
Price in other shops:
Learn to Draw Dogs Pbby David Brown
Harpercollins; Published: 1996-02-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.95
Garfield Sits Around the House (Garfield (Numbered Paperback))by Jim Davis
Ballantine Books; Published: 1984-10-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.99
Sargent's Veniceby Richard Ormond, Warren Adelson
Yale University Press; Published: 2006-12-10; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $383.98
Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernismby Timothy J. Clark
Yale University Press; Published: 1999-03-11; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $35.10
Price in other shops:
Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Artby Phoebe Hoban
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1999-09-01; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.94
Price in other shops:
The Illustrator in America: 1860-2000by Walt Reed
Collins Design; Published: 2003-07-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $339.10
Similar books summaries and other product reviews
All Souls: A Family Story from Southieby Michael Macdonald
Beacon Press; Published: 2007-11-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.48
Price in other shops:
Romanticism and Art (World of Art)by William Vaughan, William Vaughn
Thames & Hudson; Published: 1994-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.46
Price in other shops:
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Artby Don Thompson
Palgrave Macmillan; Published: 2010-04-13; Paperback; Book
Best price: $10.39
Price in other shops:
Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got Thereby David Brooks
Simon & Schuster; Published: 2001-03-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.00
Price in other shops:
Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Formby Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, Denise Scott Brown
The MIT Press; Published: 1977-06-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.00
Price in other shops:
Placing Aesthetics: Reflections On Philosophic Tradition (Series In Continental Thought)by Robert E. Wood
Ohio University Press; Published: 2000-03-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $30.00
Price in other shops:
Styles, Schools & Movements (Second Edition)by Amy Dempsey
Thames & Hudson; Published: 2011-02-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $16.17
Price in other shops:
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchersby Tom Wolfe
Picador; Published: 2009-07-21; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.09
Price in other shops:
From Bauhaus to Our Houseby Tom Wolfe
Picador; Published: 2009-11-24; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.99
Price in other shops:
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Testby Tom Wolfe
Picador; Published: 2008-08-19; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.98
Price in other shops: