Herb's review of The Painted Word (original) (raw)

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Herb's Reviews > The Painted Word

The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe

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The Painted Word
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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.

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Reading Progress

February 16, 2014 – Shelved

Comments Showing 1-6 of 6 (6 new)

message 1: by Negri (new)

Negri Finally, out of the twenty or so top reviews yours is the only one to pull an Emperor-has-no-clothes on this snarky, supposedly Emperor-has-no-clothes type of book.

Mark Dunn another entertaining book is "Panic Among The Philistines"

Jon You don't see a difference between the uninitiated looking at some blobs and the uninitiated looking at painting of a picnic on a meadow?

Adam Georgiou Jon gets it. You can get scientific about this. Take 100 people, from different cultures, ages, demographics (in your head, you can attempt to run this experiment with people from different times, too) Put them in front of the blobs, 100 in front of the picnic, 100 in front of a brick wall of no importance. Ask them to describe the significance of each. How they feel. What they think.

Are the blobs and the picnic and the wall, all presented to the uninitiated, all going to invoke the same indifferent or invented reactions? No. Because liking a picnic isn't subjective. It's based on eating food with friends on a nice day, and that isn't theory it's humanity.

Elizabeth Root I have read a number of books attempting to explaining modern art, and I still don't get it. Some pieces, while visually pleasing, don't strike me as being meaningful in the same sense that representational art is. I also dont understand why these are "fine art," as opposed to lowly graphic art, in case one believes in that distinction.

Some like Ad Reinhardt's black squares (which I saw in person -- I don't recommend reproductions) have no meaning that I can see. Most of what I have read about them tell me that Reinhardt must have had a reason for covering his black canvases with individual squares instead of simply rollering the entire canvas, but they haven't explained what.

Japanese art is stylistically very different from Western art, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy it or basically understand it.

While I might not understand religious art as well without a understanding of the iconography, I can still appreciate it. I can also easily find a book clearly explaining the iconography, which is more than I have been able to do for abstract art. Sub-Saharan art sometimes seems very inaccessible to westerners, but although I am sure that I don't fully understand the bronzes of Benin, they are still moving. I also found a wonderful book, that I was very drawn to, that put other pieces that seemed more opaque next to people that they were portraits of, or people who resembled them, and I felt that I was beginning to - for one thing, it seemed to me that they focused much more on facial structure than on detail. What would a I set next to a Jackson Pollock painting that would help me understand it?

Man from Dystopia Talk about fallacies...

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