Wolfe’s basic premise here is that Art critics/theorists single-handedly devolved modern art and made a gorilla like Jackson Pollack’s paintings worth millions. Ugh!! You see, unlike say a book or movie, art doesn’t need the common man’s approval in order to be “good”, “worthy”, or popular.

When I lived in New York, I liked to take dates (including the future Mrs. Jeff) to the Modern Museum of Art. I would bone up on modern art with this book, so I could dazzle my dates with shallow insight, and forced humor; not unlike my reviews, except the reader has the option of clicking elsewhere, my dates (unless they called security) were a captive audience.

It gets a bonus star ‘cause Mr. Wolfe helped git me a woman.



If you said the average pre-schooler could equal Jackson Pollock, I'd have to say you would be right.

Highly enjoyable critique of the origin and content (Flatness!!) of Abstract Expressionism and other Modern Art schools. No more trouble to read than a lengthy essay.

I quite enjoyed this deluge of modern art criticism, precariously trying not to be theory, as that inevitably is what the book aims to arrive at as it's title suggests. This is the first time I have read Wolfe, and I have always liked a bit of savvy, journalistic poking and prodding at artistic painting, so I approached this work in a care-free manner. The book races through the timeline of modern art and notable artists, making digs along the way. Tom, deceptively, writes from the point-of-view of someone baffled by the concept of painting but, in reality, evokes a written opinion piece that reveals a scrupulous, if not cursory, understanding of what he is writing about.

The prose is absolutely brilliant, as always, and the social commentary is 100% correct, but Wolfe's overall argument is unconvincing. He's also wrong on a quite a few historical points -- e.g., Picasso was not languishing in obscurity until 1918 (to say the least). And, incidentally, Picasso had mastered the classical style of painting, which Wolfe confuses with "real art," at the age of fifteen, and certainly could have had a successful career using such a style.

I mean, look -- Wolfe is quite right that plenty of post-WW1 (and especially post-WW2) fine art is uninspired, abstruse theoretical bullshit. Rauschenberg and Serra are probably the most egregious examples that immediately come to mind, but there are many others. The same goes for photography; German critical theory / International Art English didn't infect photography until about 1980, at least, but most monographs published since then are deeply boring, reliant on half-assed theory to justify mediocre work.

But Wolfe is clearly wrong to say that all modern art is a scam perpetrated on an unwilling public and that, somehow precisely due to rejecting earlier conventions and having a theoretical basis, such art has zero aesthetic merit -- perhaps this idea seemed more original or shocking back in 1975, but even typing out the words "all modern art is a scam" reminds me of how tired and dated this line of argumentation is. Hegel had already addressed the topic of theoretical/philosophical art in the early 1800s, even.

Sturgeon's famous line about art -- "ninety percent of everything is crap" -- is as true as ever, but we would all do well to recall that museums are full of second-rate classical paintings, just as ninety percent of MoMA exhibitions are second-rate. Truly good art is rare, and it's not fair to compare the greatest fine art of the past thousand years with all fine art of the past century. Similarly, I'll often read complaints about how many bad films are released each year and how movies used to be so much better, but I wonder if people making these arguments realize that the 1930s and 1940s contained, if anything, even more bad films (as a proportion of total movies released) than the 2010s; it's just that no one bothered to preserve them.

Anyway, more to the point, there's nothing inherently less moving or interesting about theoretical/abstract art -- to me, at least, and certainly to many others -- even if it can be harder to appreciate. Yes, there are scam artists and mediocrities, and maybe in a slightly higher proportion than previous eras, but it certainly isn't ONLY scam artists and mediocrities.

Even Damien Hirst, often literally described by journalists as a con artist -- I was ambivalent about his work until attending his massive exhibition at the Tate in the summer of 2012, where I noticed many people murmuring what I was thinking, namely, that this guy actually had some talent. A white shark floating in formaldehyde sounds like a boring theoretical exercise until you're standing there in front of it; and even the drip paintings were surprisingly impressive, at least to me. Anyway, this is similarly true for Rothko, Richter, et al.; often the work seems theoretical or dry or boring until you actually see it. People have been brought to tears by Rothko's paintings, and rightly so. And even for the purely theoretical art that Wolfe dislikes so much . . . I've experienced more artistic transcendence with some of this stuff than with any number of Caravaggios (and I'm a huge fan of Caravaggio).

I took an art history class as an undergrad and since then I've joked that the real art behind modern art are the stories the artists make up to explain why their works are "art." It turns out Tom Wolfe wrote a short book (long essay?) making essentially the same case back in the 70s.

I'm sympathetic to Wolfe's thesis. Which I guess is not surprising, since my favorite artist is Albert Bierstadt.

Tom Wolfe waxes snarky about Modern Art. He hates everything, but he's funny about it.

Satire at its yummiest.

Soy Historiadora del Arte y este ensayo de Tom Wolfe era justo lo que esperaba. Un escrito satírico, y en cierto modo muy acertado para la época en la que se escribió, sobre las corrientes artísticas del siglo XX, haciendo especial hincapié en la que se desarrollaron en Estados Unidos desde mediados de siglo.
Me ha encantado volver un poco a mis clases de Arte Contemporáneo, recordarlos a todos, sonreír y asentir mientras leía a Wolfe.
No esperéis un manual de arte, o un escrito sencillo. Sé que es el típico libro que odias o amas, pero definitivamente a mí me ha pasado lo segundo.

Es un libro interesante y rápido y fácil de leer que explica los principales movimientos del arte moderno y contemporáneo a las generaciones de las post-guerras. Incluye además muchas anécdotas e historias interesantes y cercanas que enganchan y te hacen comprender mejor cada movimiento.
Lo he leído en apenas dos tardes y me ha aportado bastante y enseñado cosas que desconocía, tanto artistas, como movimientos o cuadros.

I liked this a lot more than Wolfe's anti-modernist architecture screed, From Bauhaus to Our House. It's pretty funny, and it develops a kind of jr. varsity Bourdeiu's Distinction account of the development of abstract painting, pop art, op art, conceptual art, etc. in New York in the 40s–late 60s. That is, artists and collectors are motivated by status and money, not internal demands of art, though they cloak those real motivations in art-speak. Wolfe's story is exaggerated for effect, but I don't think it's completely wrong...the trick is trying to figure out which part is actually helpful, and it's not obvious. My feel for the issues at stake for Wolfe was enhanced by having just read Harold Rosenberg's The De-Definition of Art, which contains some of the essays that Wolfe is making fun of. (I like Rosenberg's criticism more than Greenberg's Kantianism.)

There is a good line about the critic-gods throwing down lightning bolts from Green Mountain (Greenberg) and Red Mountain (Rosenberg).

I went to a senior art show at the U of I and was confused by the cubes of masking tape and bizarre unorganized sketches...at least until I read this book. If you want to understand modern art (notice I didn't say "hate all modern art"), you must read The Painted Word. I don't know how Wolfe can fit so much history, so many artists, and such scathe into this short and oh-so-readable book.

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 100 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 argument is that Wolfe doesn't admit (or perhaps he is really unaware) that the "realistic" nature of the art works he champions is no less dependent on a variety of theories that have either been absorbed into modern Western culture but are by no means universal throughout the world (like perspective and other 3-D modeling techniques) and/or are no longer central to the culture most of us live in and must be learned in art history classes (like the iconography of saints, etc).

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.