Joining the Enemy Camp

THERE WAS a New York painter named Ad Reinhardt who, before his death, had advanced his art to such a point that he was painting canvases that were--well, frankly, they were entirely black. They looked as if Reinhardt had given them a couple of swipes with a paint roller and called it a day. Some critics maintained that the discerning eye could pick out subtle variations from painting to painting--in the play of tone underneath the black, or in the direction of Reinhardt's brushstrokes--but the fact remained that to the masses, aside from the six of the canvases, all of Reinhardt's painting looked exactly the same. There are photographs in art books of Reinhardt's shows in New York, of white-walled galleries entirely filled with identical square black canvases.

It's easy to imagine the shows as great emperor-without-clothes scenes--the critics and collectors, as Tom Wolfe writes, "now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer--waiting, waiting, forever waiting for...it...for it to come into focus, namely the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which every (tout le monde) knew to be there--waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings..."

So if the critics were writing ponderous essays about Reinhardt's work and collectors were buying it for thousands of dollars, it was perhaps only in the hope that the magic moment, the shock of recognition, would come to them. They must have felt there was something profound there, as they must have when they looked at all the other random splotches of paint, stripes, near-empty canvases and soup cans of the fifties and sixties.

WOLFE IS READY to call the bluff. He moved into the art criticism field this month with a long piece in Harper's, called "The Painted Word" and apparently intended to blow the whistle on post 1945 art and its accoutrements. His general thesis is simple the reason modern art is so in comprehensible, the reason it's so hard to imagine why anybody would like it, understand it, or want to buy it, is that the whole show is run by critics who have turned art into an extension of their theories.

If the big time art scene is made up of only a few thousand people--artists, wealthy collectors and critics--then the people who write about it, the high priests of culture, can have an enormous impact. What people are getting out of art is not enjoyment of art but the thrill of being where the intellectual and cultural avant-garde is. The whole scene has built upon itself, because it depends on change and even more on the deliberate strangeness of the art--only the truly enlightened can appreciate it. No philistine would ever buy an Ad Reinhardt painting.

Wolfe talks a good game, hitting modern art at exactly its weakest points--its elitism, its removal from reality and its total dependence on literary explanation in order to be understood. But "The Painted Word" reads more like an attack on critics and New York-based culture than on the art itself. Wolfe spends more time talking about the place of the artist in high society and on the increasingly outlandish theories used to justify artistic movements, than on actual paintings. It's an overall indictment of a scene that Wolfe says will end up on the dustbin of art history, to be viewed only as a curiosity.

ALL OF THIS is entirely consistent with the vein Wolfe has been writing in lately, a vein that has nothing to do with art but apparently a great deal to do with Wolfe and his own historical standing. Wolfe has not been prolific lately, but his last major work was a book called The New Journalism, an anthology of pieces along with a long critical essay. The position Wolfe takes in The New Journalism is a clear extension of his earlier work. Wolfe in the sixties was frenetically active, innovative and controversial. Using intense research and attention to detail, a structure similar to that of short stories, and a breathless writing style he wrote about what he liked to call "the status revolution," the confusion of the age.

Wolfe became famous and even popular, but he never fared well with the modernist New York-based critical old guard. He was saying in all his pieces that the things those critics cared about weren't really important, that he knew what was really going on in America. He wrote about high-school kids customizing cars in California--they were the cutting edge of art, not the stuffed-shirts back East. Even when he dealt with the modern art scene, he treated it as an amusing cultural phenomenon, an elaborate set of strange conventions rather than as a serious endeavor. He wrote about mass culture in America and took digs at high culture, and he was a constant target of attacks in The New Yorker. The New York Review of Books and other toney magazines.

Wolfe was most often criticized for his break neck style and for playing fast and loose with the facts. Dwight Mac Donald called him a "parajournalist." But none of it seemed to be getting to Wolfe, who kept on churning it out, kept getting more outrageous, didn't seem to care.

SOMETHING MUST HAVE happened in the early seventies, as Wolfe's subject matter began to fade out of existence and he started to worry about his place in history. Hence the anthology, proof for the ages that the new journalism was significant. And hence his essay, which was intriguing but also an obvious attempt to beat the critics at their own game.

Wolfe had cooked up an elaborate theory: that the novel rose to success because it was an organ of social realism, and that at its height novelists did real research before writing. But after the Second World War, the novelists dropped the baton and, passing into the ozone of interior landscapes, wrote about nothingness and such. That left the way open for the new journalism, which was a great revival of social realism and had therefore replaced the novel as the dominant literary art form of the modern age. All that was stated; what was implied, of course, was that Wolfe, as founder and chief theoretician of the new journalism, was a great and seminal artist.

A lot of the themes in the new journalism essay resurface in a less obviously self-serving form, in "The Painted Word." There is the same criticism of post-war art as being relevant only to critical work and to other art, rather than life. There is the same bitterness towards critics, the same yearning for realism.

The trouble is, Wolfe is falling prey to the things he condemns. He's undergone a transformation, from reporter--or, if you prefer, realistic artist--to critic. Instead of producing things that everyone can appreciate and understand, he's given up his crusade against the cultural and become one of them. He's kept up the fight, of course--if anything, pieces like "The Painted Word" will make him more controversial than he ever was--but now takes it on the terms of his opponents, as if the critic's place is now more comfortable than the reporter's.