With Practice an Art Historian Can Be Truly Objective True False
You cannot lose, you cannot win: the present includes the past and the future.
~Marshall McLuhan
I
In the summertime of 1970, Television set-Ontario filmed Tom Wolfe in conversation with Marshall McLuhan on the backyard of McLuhan'due south home in Toronto's Wychwood Park. Towards the end of their amicable chat, Wolfe complimented his friend on the uncanny accuracy of his predictions from the early on 1960s. In response, McLuhan joked: "I've ever been very careful not to predict anything that had not already happened." This was non false modesty, since one of McLuhan's intellectual strengths was his ability to place significant cultural developments in their most incipient, germinal form. And from our 21st-century perspective, it is articulate that Wolfe shared this talent, for the tentative trends and tendencies he described in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s are now reaching fruition.
We are approaching the first ceremony of a landmark event in the art globe. Although information technology seemed shockingly new last year, it represents the culmination of a trajectory described past Wolfe half a century ago: the de-materialization of art. On March 11th, 2021, a momentous auction was held by Christie'southward. It was a dramatic departure from precedent, partly because its realized cost was a record-breaking $69,346,250, merely mostly because the lot that allowable this fortune was not a painting by Vincent Van Gogh, or even a sculpture by Jeff Koons, but a purely digital artwork by an creative person with no prior sale record. Everydays: The First 5000 Days exemplified a brand-new aesthetic genre: it was a Non-Fungible Token (NFT), created past Mike Winkelmann, who works under the pseudonym "Beeple." Neither of these names meant a matter to the art globe a twelvemonth ago. They do now.
The artwork, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, is non only the most expensive NFT ever sold, but besides the third most expensive artwork sold by a living creative person, and the first NFT to be sold at a fine art sale house.#NFT moving-picture show.twitter.com/HEZU4zIG6t
— Lucas NFT😈 (@itzMikeLucas) March 4, 2022
The thought that a blockchain inscription by a complete unknown could be worth so much money caused widespread cerebral dissonance. Inside a week, the term "NFT" leapt from the esoteric realm of specialist soapbox direct into the mainstream. As if in reference to Beeple's title, NFTs became the stuff of everyday. Responses ranged from commemoration to lamentation. Digital-art partisans hailed the sale as finally leveling the financial score with painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Optimists deemed NFTs truly democratic: they enabled anyone to produce art easily and cheaply, allowing artists to monetize their piece of work unimpeded by the art world's established gatekeepers.
More cautious commentators pointed out that such a flatulent sale sale amounted to an expedited strategy to cement the new medium'due south bona fides. Beeple had skipped the traditional, time-consuming paths to artistic prominence: being added to museum collections, reviewed in scholarly literature, or curated into important shows. The market's instant reaction to the sale aligned perfectly with the instant gratification offered by NFTs: excogitate/mint/sell, no need to buy paints or order stretcher confined. Meanwhile, the conspiratorially minded insisted that the new artform was only a placeholder for cryptocurrency, a mode to turn culture into a financial instrument, and fifty-fifty vice versa.
However, everyone agreed that art had entered a new era. The tectonic shift seemed as massive as the 20th-century modernist revolution heralded past abstruse painting'south challenge to figurative representation. Beeple'south triumph triggered a bonanza in which a handful of people made fistfuls of money. This market euphoria impeded a sober evaluation of the NFT's aesthetic implications. A year later, however, we may have attained sufficient altitude to take a broader perspective on the place of NFTs in the history of modernistic art. As nosotros do, it is difficult to avoid the impression that Tom Wolfe saw something like NFTs approaching over the distant horizon, and that his work predicted their cultural impact with a prescience and perspicuity that deserve wider acknowledgement that information technology has withal received.
Two
As we have written elsewhere, the novelty of NFTs has been much exaggerated. In fact, they are the logical conclusion of a long historical process which was identified almost 50 years agone in Wolfe'due south notorious satire of aesthetic modernism, The Painted Word (1974). Wolfe's extended essay adumbrated modern art's inexorable bulldoze toward abstraction. It described a revolt against object-based, realist art, which began in the centre of the 19th century and continued throughout the 20th, moving from Cubism through Abstract Expressionism, and culminating in the frequently entirely abstruse genre of Conceptual Art. Wolfe emphasized the continuity of these developments, pointing out that Abstract Expressionism "was a reaction to Modernism itself … an brainchild of an abstraction, a pattern of the blueprint, a diagram of the diagram."
During this process, the physical manifestations of an artwork gradually ceded their significance to the abstract theory it exemplified. The New York Times critic Hilton Kramer complained that realism lacked the "crucial" element of "a persuasive theory," without which he quite literally could not "see a painting." Co-ordinate to Wolfe, by the 1960s, abstract theories had get the whole point of art: "the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text." In his view, the rise of theory (which took identify in literature besides as in the visual arts) was a betrayal of the original, 19th-century modernism, which had largely eschewed theory as a matter of principle. As the painter George Braque declared: "The aim is non to reconstitute an anecdotal fact, but to constitute a pictorial fact."
Reading The Painted Word virtually five decades afterward its initial publication is quite a trip. Peter Plagens was not incorrect when he labeled Wolfe's prose "relentless glib" in his Artforum review. Wolfe admitted as much in 1975, when he appeared on Firing Line with William F. Buckley. He described The Painted Word equally "a social comedy" intended to reveal the ways in which cultural mores shape the artistic canon, to expose the mysterious "process past which art becomes serious, by which information technology becomes praised." Wolfe's "social comedy" has now had time to mature into a total-diddled tragedy for the kind of art that Plagens and others so valiantly defended 50 years agone. The art world's evolution since 1975 confirms Wolfe'due south claims nearly the primacy of theories over objects. And his merciless exposé of the socio-economical motives that determine aesthetics is more important than e'er in the age of the NFT.
As Wolfe pointed out, the disembodied character of art is a weathered cliché in art theory. As theory grew increasingly influential on practice, it was only a thing of time until the object disappeared altogether from the artwork. By 1968, Lawrence Weiner could contend that an artwork doesn't "need to be built" in club to exist. And every bit an old Russian proverb goes, "a holy place is never empty." The missing object was supplanted by the new importance of the artist's personality on one hand, and by validation through purchase on the other. Wolfe described how an creative person'due south image, their "story," or what Dave Hickey called their "creation narrative," came to have precedence over their work.
The emergence of NFTs brought the financialization of fine art to a climax. NFTs exist just in theory. An NFT is not a material entity. It comes into being through a financial transaction, in which the purchaser acquires ownership rights to a digital image otherwise available to anyone with an Internet connection. Anyone tin view the artwork, but but the buyer of the NFT can own it. The pleasure of ownership is now an aesthetic experience. The bluish-chip auction houses fell over themselves in their blitz to validate digital fine art NFTs: these days money talks and walks (and runs) too. An artwork's total lack of physical beingness is evidently no obstruction to its acquisition of fiscal value.
Back in the distant '70s, much to the consternation of the critics, curators, and artists of the day, The Painted Word besides mentioned the unmentionable: the office of fashion in the fate of art. "Fine art and style," announced Wolfe, "are a two-backed beast today; the artists tin yell at fashion, but they tin can't move out ahead." The Painted Give-and-take demonstrated the role of fashion in the art world by describing the rolling waves of ever-changing styles that accept won the favor of critics and hence the marketplace. Contempo examples include Zombie Ceremonial, Bad Painting, Blackness Figuration, and the rise of the digital art NFT falls neatly into this continuum. Modernist sects have always formed cliques to cultivate what Wolfe calls their "merry battle spirit," and today's artists are no different. Depending on i's stock of charity, NFT Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse Rooms seem like dull gatherings of bros zealously spreading the blockchain gospel, or like equitable and nurturing environments helping "creatives" to monetize their output. Either manner, they reincarnate the cenacles of the 19th-century rive gauche.
And either way, theory dominates practice. Wolfe attacked the curators, critics, and professors who preached the Modernist gospel with religious veneration. He attacked pomposity and pretension by "putting his readers on" á la McLuhan. In the 1970 chat, McLuhan noted that a comedian'southward "put-on" is "an aggression," "a style of hurting the public," so that "when a writer picks up his pen, if he has something to say, it's going to hurt." Wolfe'south aesthetic treatises were "put-ons" which were bound to injure. His sardonic tone earned him the appellation "smartass" from Dave Hickey, simply it concealed a serious grievance confronting the creeping inroads of theory, a protest against the rising of the word, and a rearguard activity confronting logocentric dematerialization. A joke, as McLuhan liked to say, always contains a grievance. Wolfe grieved for the object, for representation, and with the rise of the NFT, information technology begins to appear that he was grieving for art itself.
Time has proven Wolfe correct fifty-fifty if he had "no eye," as Paul Goldberger declared, and fifty-fifty if his aesthetic theories were, as Robert Hughes asserted, "dumbly simple." His acuity as a social historian allowed him to identify the means by which financial instruments came to penetrate an fine art earth already well lubricated by theory. It is the successfully completed business deal, which has nothing to do with aesthetics as traditionally conceived, that validates the NFT as an artwork. This confirms Wolfe'due south ascertainment that the modern public has no role in determining aesthetic value. That power at present rests with those who can shell out six- or fifty-fifty nine-figure sums to buy artworks, afterwards which the critics tin invent theories to instruct the populace on how to bask such unappetizing fare as Everydays, or CryptoPunks, or Bored Apes. "The public," as Wolfe put it, "are only tourists, autograph seekers, gawkers, parade watchers, then far every bit the game of Success in Fine art is concerned."
The Painted Word also exposed the mutual self-interest that lay behind the phony war between the bourgeoisie and the bohemians. It mocked the marketing strategy of artful modernists equally the "Boho Dance": an arcane mating ritual in which downtown artists professed to scorn the tastes and mores of the uptown suburbia as a prelude to succumbing (with appropriate protestations of reluctance) to the temptations of fame and finance. Wolfe shrewdly observed that the avant-garde urge to épater la bourgeoisie was bars to the cultural sphere, scrupulously avoiding the economic factors that actually secured form privilege.
A chosen few artists progress from the "Boho Dance" to "The Consummation," in which they are elected by the culturati to be "exciting, original, important." These lucky ones are rewarded with "fame, money and beautiful lovers." The buyers get to launder their money, and cleanse their consciences, by supporting "the arts." Wolfe describes "the arts" as the new religion of the ruling class, the socially advisable recipient of philanthropic largesse from aspirants to the "semi-sacred status of Benefactor of the Arts." Collectors of avant-garde art have ever derived cachet from the bohemian associations of their taste, and today in that location is nothing more avant-garde than an NFT. For many, the NFT is their first-always purchase of an artwork, and their cocky-epitome as connoisseur is included in the toll.
An additional bonus for such collectors is that the images represented by most NFTs are drawn from popular culture rather than from the standard mandarin heritage of abstruse painting. Wolfe outlined a parallel phenomenon amid the 20th-century bourgeois, who always enjoyed realism, and so long equally the critics could provide them with a theory proving that it was "(a) new, and (b) not realistic." Collectors were emboldened to purchase the eminently realistic Pop Art by the appearance of a theory explaining that Andy Warhol did not paint cans of soup but depicted "sign systems." A similarly convenient theory emerged to show that Photo Realism did non consist of painted photographs but constructed "photo systems." In every corner of the fine art earth, reality disappeared behind a cloud of theory.
III
The Painted Word drew heavy critical burn down. Yet rather than retreat or take embrace, Wolfe diversified his attack. His essay was but the opening salvo in a series of three theoretical treatises he devoted to the topic of aesthetics. It was followed by a biting critique of modernist architecture, From Bauhaus to Our Business firm (1981), and so by an acerbic indictment of the gimmicky novel, "Stalking the Billion-footed Animal" (1989). Wolfe identified an identical procedure at piece of work in each area. In painting, compages, and literature alike, the rise of modernism involved a procedure of abstraction, a retreat from representational art into cocky-referential, eclectic forms of expression that required an explanatory theory earlier they could be appreciated, or "seen."
This debate stretches back to the origins of Modernism. In the 1920s, Modernists ranging from Marxists like Bertolt Brecht to conservatives like T.Due south. Eliot began to detect that traditional realism was no longer realistic. They saw radical aesthetic techniques like estrangement, aperture, polyvocality, and bricolage as more accurate representations of alienated life in the modern metropolis. A deluge of theoretical manifestos proclaimed the autonomy of the symbol, declaring that signs had attained an independent power that demanded acknowledgment in aesthetic practise. The portraits of Picasso, the poetry of Mallarme, and the prose of Joyce all direct attention to the manner of representation rather than to what is represented. In modernity, as McLuhan put it, the medium is the message.
Defenders of realism conceded that subjective experience of metropolitan life was discontinuous and cluttered. Only they claimed that the discontinuity and chaos were artificial and illusory products of commercialism'southward ceaseless revolutionizing of custom and tradition. The apparent autonomy of signs was equally false: a chimera produced past the market's promotion of symbolic commutation-value over substantial use-value. The artist'south task was to uncover the objective unity and coherence that had been obscured by capitalism's distortion of social club and the psyche, and this could only be accomplished by a rigorous realism. Georg Lukács argued that artists should eschew "immediate and surface" appearances and instead show the world "as information technology really is."
Realism was thus conceived as a protest confronting reality. On this basis, Wolfe took upwardly his position in the realist camp. He declared: "By the mid-1960s the conviction was not merely that the realistic novel was no longer possible, but that American life itself no longer deserved the term existent." He scorned the anti-conservative pretensions of the artistic advanced, dealing them a savage blow in "Radical Chic" (1970), a hilariously roughshod account of Leonard Bernstein's fund-raising party for the Blackness Panthers. Imitating the fly-on-the-wall technique of cinéma vérité, Wolfe uses the conventions of realism to describe utterly surreal events.
The resulting vignette blurs the border between fiction and reality as effectively as anything by Salvador Dali. It opens with Bernstein's "vision" of a "Negro" rising up out of his thou piano and, at his party for the Panthers, the vision becomes real. Neither the host nor the guests tin can quite believe their optics, and Wolfe imagines their interior monologue: "if I wasn't here to see information technology…." The final section deals with the New York media's derisive coverage of the political party, which immediately transforms its meaning in the eyes of the participants. Wolfe's slice-of-life realism turns cocky-referential: the media's representation of the party, rather than the party itself, turns out to be the essay'south true bailiwick.
This device has become a staple of postmodern aesthetics. Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese apply it at the finish of Taxi Driver, when newspaper headlines transform Travis Bickle from psychopath to hero. Wolfe has a expert claim to have invented this trick, and he used it throughout his career. In his concluding novel Back to Blood (2004), a policeman of Cuban heritage dramatically prevents an anti-Castro refugee from landing on Miami Beach. He is delighted at the prospect that: "Todo el mundo had watched his heroics on television. ... He is now known throughout greater Miami, wherever the Telly digit-rays have reached." But on returning home the hero is dismayed: "his father and his female parent and his grandparents had been watching the whole affair on American Telly with the audio muted, and listening to it on WDNR, a Castilian-linguistic communication radio station that loved to become furious over the sins of the americanos." This unfortunate combination of media convinces the cop'south family that he is a traitor. The medium is the bulletin.
Wolfe always enjoyed blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality. His early New Journalism used novelistic methods to describe existent events; his afterwards novels described fictional events in scrupulously realistic terms. He capped his career with a series of novels that used strict realism to depict the hyper-reality of postmodern America. The HBO series The Wire has been hailed for its searching exam of Baltimore. The metropolis's instruction arrangement, media, economic system, constabulary and criminal element are all analyzed in realistic detail. Wolfe's novels pioneered this approach. Three of the iv survey a particular city (New York, Atlanta, Miami) from a totalizing perspective, demonstrating the inter-connected whole that underlies the apparent discontinuity of subjective experience.
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) concentrates on the convergence between the financialization of the economy and the trivialization of culture in millennial Manhattan. It eschews the flashy formal devices of postmodernism in favor of rich, deep description of figures and phenomena that are clearly recognizable from real life. The plot recounts the downfall of Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street broker who Wolfe designates by the Hegelian term "bondsman." McCoy trades in "gold-backed bonds": fiscal instruments that stand for a determinate quantity of physical gold. Such bonds are referential signs, similar in form to the verbal signs with which Wolfe describes them. McCoy has fabricated his fortune by trading in the kind of coin whose value is causeless to be real. He is therefore unprepared for the eruption of hyper-reality in either economic or linguistic form.
In economic terms, hyper-reality produces "derivatives": fiscal signs that refer just to other financial signs, rather than to whatever real-world commodity. In linguistic terms, hyper-reality is manifested in differance: Jacques Derrida's never-catastrophe chain of representation that never comes to rest in actress-linguistic reality. Sherman McCoy is certainly destroyed by a media wildly contained of annihilation that might exist described equally "reality." And even so, the novel is unimpeachably realistic in form. Wolfe surveys the roiling chaos of 20th-century New York City from a detached, objective perspective. He uses realism as the antitoxin to the hyper-reality of existent life.
He does the same in his 2nd novel, A Human being in Full (1998). Hither McCoy's role is taken by Charlie Croker, a heavily indebted real estate mogul from Atlanta. When he begins to miss his payments, Croker's creditors care for him with contempt, and when he protests, he is reminded of the extent to which character is now defined in financial terms: "'I know exactly who I'm talking to Mr. Croker. … I'chiliad talking to an individual who owes this depository financial institution half a million dollars, and six other banks and 2 insurance companies 2 hundred and eight-five million more, that's who I'm talking to.'" In the financialized environment of belatedly-20th-century America, personality is systematically translated into money.
Similar his earlier exposure of the fine art world's venality, Wolfe'due south alarm of financialization's effect on grapheme was non particularly welcome amongst mainstream critics. Even today, he is not quite respectable. Despite their commercial success, neither his fine art history nor his fiction take won the acclaim of intellectuals or achieved academic credibility. Even so this only confirms his thesis that postmodern social club has set its face firmly against realism of every kind—and fifty-fifty against reality itself. As the ethical and practical drawbacks of hyper-reality grow ever-more evident, Wolfe surely deserves to be recognized amongst the near pertinent theorists, as well as the well-nigh achieved practitioners, of contemporary aesthetics. The age of the NFT commands his presence.
On February 23rd, 2022, Sotheby'southward Punk It! sale was chosen off less than xxx minutes before the sale was due to begin. A sloppy tweet from the consignor who withdrew the lot reported: "nvm, decided to hodl [sic]." The unmarried lot of 104 CryptoPunks then unceremoniously withdrawn from sale was valued between $20 and $30 1000000, the highest-request price for an NFT at sale thus far. Typically, such last-minute cancelations are attributed to lack of interest from the buyers. Merely the consignor sent another tweet, this fourth dimension a tandem meme, 1 office of which read: "Taking punks mainstream past selling on Sothebys [sic]." The other said "Taking punks mainstream by rugging Sothebys [sic]." We accept just witnessed a 21st-century, Twitterified version of the one-time "Boho Dance" An NFT insider "shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms … every bit if he doesn't intendance near anything else: equally if, in fact, he has a pocketknife in his teeth confronting the fashionable world uptown." As Wolfe pointed out long agone, these are the disingenuous protestations of the career coquette. It is, after all, the oldest profession.
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Source: https://quillette.com/2022/03/09/against-de-materialization-tom-wolfe-in-the-age-of-nfts/