630
PARTISAN REVIEW
stead? If he thought the criticism !Uisdirected, what kind of writing would
serve its subject better? Ifhe thought those institutions corrupt, what should
replace them? "I don't
care,
frankly," was Wolfe's consistent reply . "I don't
care if the situation never changes. Because
if
it changes, it might not be as
funny. I've had a good time writing about it." In short, it's kind of a goof.
I
The Painted Word
hit the
art
world like a really bad , MSG-headache-
\
producing, Chinese lunch .
It
hit it at a time when-after a decade of activity
during which work of consistently focused ambition and high quality was
produced-a sense of diffuseness and transition pervades the art world. But
transition is not the same as decline . So those readers of Wolfe's book who
have any serious interest in the state ofmodern painting and sculpture did not
think it such agoof; they tended, instead, to think it something of an affront.
The thesis of
The Painted Word
is that modern art, long ago emptied of
any intrinsic content, functions solely as a medium of social exchange.
Through its purely honorific value, the work is able to add a specialized luster
to
the cultural lives of the rich, in exchange for which they are willing to
lionize its makers. In order for this exchange to take place, Wolfe's argument
continues, someone has to create a value for these meaningless objects of
trade. This is where the critics come in. Part middlemen, part shamans, they
are the ones who validate these fetishes by endowing them with a meaning
they would never otherwise attain. In order to concoct this meaning, the critics
invent special brews of aesthetic theory that are as elaborate as they are
obscure.
The Painted Word
sets itself the task of "exposing" this arcanum of
theory, and for this endeavor its author considers the best technique
to
be
ridicule. So, for example, Wolfe decides to make sport of the notion of
"flatness," a concept he identifies as the theoretical property of Clement
Greenberg. He begins by quoting from an essay on the work of Jackson
Pollock in which Greenberg, postulating that the general concern of mod–
ernist art is to reveal, rather than conceal, its material means, states that one of
the ways painting can do this is by declaring its own flarness, and describes
Pollock's work in those terms . To these statements by Greenberg , Wolfe then
adds his own set of interlineal riffs:
''That thick, fuliginous flatness got me in
its spell,
"
he starts to jeer.
"That constructed, re-created flatness that you
weave so well .
.. ;
Those famous paintflinf!.s on that picture plane,
"
Wolfe
finishes, counting on the comic expose
to
mock both art and theory out of
existence.
But when the laughter subsides, there is left, for some people, an image . It
is an image of one of Pollock's great canvases from the late 1940s, the Metro–
politan Museum's
Autumn Rhythm
perhaps; and those people are remem–
bering a particular experience they had in relation to that work. That
iJ
