Какво, мамка му, стана?

Какво се случи с изобразителното изкуство през последния век? Кога красивите тела на класическите скулптури и ренесансовите художници изчезнаха от картините и бяха заместени първо с изкривени, уродливи чудовища, а после с безсмислени абстракции? Кога "картина", състояща се от една червена линия на син фон придоби цена от $60 млн.?

Ако, като мен, си задавате тия въпроси, Том Улф има отговор на тях, само не знам дали ще ви хареса. С огромна вещина и познаване на дълбините и разклоненията на артистичната сцена от началото на 20 в. когато започват тия бих казал изчанчени художествени течения, авторът описва нейната еволюция и роенето на стилове, кой от кой по авантгардни, модерни, за ценители и разбира се, съвършено лишени от каквато и да е естетика - лишени, защото не естетиката е тяхната цел и именно това е причината за разрива между изобразителното изкуство и красивото, започващ горе долу през 1904 г.

Като цяло, изводът от книгата е, че в неистовия си стремеж да се разграничат от "обикновения човек", от "простия буржоа от средната класа" и да го шокират, за да докажат колко са по-възвишени от него, художници и колекционери започват една надпревара на абсурда, надцаквайки се един друг и опитвайки се да се докопат до модерните соарета и партита, на които се събират богатите, докато в същото време се правят на незаинтересовани от материалното истински творци.

Две отпреди известни ми поговорки много добре описват това положение на нещата: "Ако обикновения човек е маймуна, то модерният художник е маймуна, която се опитва да яде банани през задника си." и "Когато богатите хора се съберат си говорят за изкуство, а когато хората на изкуството се съберат си говорят за пари."

My oldest child really enjoyed this book, so I picked it up. It’s quite short, and very pithy. However, I felt like an outsider trying to follow along with a conversation for those already in the know.

That said, for a book first published in 1975, it felt appropriate for our current cultural moment. And I do understand more fully the Modern Art movement.

Takeaway: If Modern Art was so great, why wasn’t anyone buying it?

Please excuse the artist masturbating in the corner. The masturbating writer now wants your attention.

Nothing is more bourgeois than the fear of appearing bourgeois. A. Warhol

Tom Wolfe adapts Hilton Kramer's dictum that theory is what lends art the weight and substance to be talked and written about. In Wolfe's take, theory's mission is to prep art for delivery to the Art World, whose currency is not art but the brands, slogans, memes and styles needed to firmly differentiate its high flying in-group from the outer 99.99% of society at large. Wolfe's tract fairly drips with cynicism. Numerous post-war artists are mentioned, but not very seriously. Art should be more cake than frosting, but The Painted Word is frosting all the way.

I would hate to be satirized by Wolfe. Still … after reading The Free World, this was a refreshing looking at pretension, status, and snobbery in the rarified realm of art criticism.

I received this book as a gift from my husband back in 2000, shortly after finishing my art degree, but I somehow never got around to reading it until now. It's quite short, but I've been chipping away at it in small doses for several months now—which is pretty much the only way I can read Tom Wolfe.

His satire is biting and sometimes hilarious, and some of his quips are worth committing to memory, but he always seems to be a little (a lot?) too much in love with his own high-brow, inner-circle wit. He has a tendency to name-drop whole lists of obscure, urbane people and places—like a hipster teen casually throwing out the names of niche indie bands until one of them finally wins him approval among the unshaven literati underground. In other words, his writing sometimes comes across a little too much like the posers in the art world that he's attempting to skewer. And his are the kind of extended Pauline sentences that make me pity the Audible narrator tasked with getting through them without running out of air.

Nevertheless, this was a fun read, an on-point critique of everything that's wrong with the ugly theory-over-form nonsense that swallowed the modern art world whole, and it left me feeling dangerously, deliciously smug.

A blistering critique of modern art from the master of eloquent sarcasm.

Serie de artículos, no sobre la evolución de la pintura en el siglo XX, sino sobre la crÍtica y la recepción de de dicha pintura. Debe ser por eso que casi se menciona más a ciertos críticos de Arte yankis de la época, que aquí no los conoce ni la madre que los parió, que a los propios pintores de la cosa.

Algunos comentarios mordaces de cuando en cuando pero en general bastante amodorrante. Supongo que para poder disfrutar del gran Tom Wolfe del que todo el mundo habla habrá que emprender "La Hoguera de las Vanidades", pero es que me da taaanto palo...

I'm never sure what to think about "The Painted Word"...or about Wolfe. Is it hilarious? Absolutely. Does he make some wonderfully cynical points as a social satirist? Yes. He always does. But just as with "Bauhaus To Our House", I just find that in the end, there's less than meets the eye. Had "Painted Word" been a novel...things would be different. There's wonderful material here for a comic novel about the art world and art criticism. But as a quasi-history...hmmm. No. Wolfe manages to attack the rise of art theory without ever mentioning the coming of photography--- the key thing that displaced representative art from its traditional place and left left theorists arguing over what art should be. He also manages to overlook the coming of technologies that allowed for easy, near-perfect reproduction of art--- another factor in problematising what Art should be. Anyway--- funny, sharp, cynical. But...blinkered, and all the more so if you're someone who thinks that a lot of late 20th-c. art had merit. All things considered, Steve Martin did it better in "An Object of Beauty."

Igazán kellemes olvasmány, jó kis vigyorgásokkal, s ez, ha figyelembe vesszük, hogy esszéről van szó, nem kis dolog! :)
Ajánlom sok szeretettel okulás és élvezkedés céljából.

Tommy my guy, if you keep busting out such sexy satirical jokes you’re going to break my heart for never writing an art text book.

Wolfe’s satire can be at times edgy for my taste but that being said his translation for the art vomit of the last century masterfully does it service and explains how conflated (contradicting?) it is.

I don’t know man, I think we just kept taking wrong turns after Bloomsbury.