The Painted Word
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Book Review/R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Succès de Scandale •• One dark night in early spring of 1975 a desperate howl stabbed the darkness of midtown Manhattan, and for a terrifying moment brave...
...Soon or late the puckish Wolfe will be the subject of one of those critical seminars endowed by the Ford Foundation and inspired by the proposition that the only way to ferret The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus and Giroux $5.95 out the truth is to inter it beneath a monument of sonorous academic sophistries...
...Succès de Scandale •• One dark night in early spring of 1975 a desperate howl stabbed the darkness of midtown Manhattan, and for a terrifying moment brave men looked heavenward and maidens clutched their breasts...
...Who would have expected that this cosmopolitan world of avant-garde artists, art critics, and antibourgeois bourgeois collectors would have so little wit about them...
...They have no humor...
...No indeed, it was the primitive response of thousands of indignant devotees of Modern Art who had just gotten wind of the April issue of Harper's...
...I approve of such patriotic toil...
...But, as William Nolte has said, "It's not the simple truth that sets men free or even causes them to think, but rather the Truth apparalled in shocking garments and blown up to epic size...
...I have no doubt that it will today endure the philistines, for the philistine threat from outside the world of Modern Art is unlikely to be as dangerous to it as the subversion from within that threatened during the late, lamented, 1960s...
...Not since Arthur Jensen talked about hereditary I.Q...
...one gets the impression that the charlatans are becoming edgy...
...Quite the contrary: it continued and spread throughout all the literate parts of the Republic...
...has a furor of this magnitude arisen...
...In fact some of them have been among the most energetic iconoclasts in the land, and hardly a cranny of American experience has been able to claim sanctuary from their ribald genius...
...Now Wolfe has laid the joke on them, and not only have they lost their old brag and bounce but in their learned rejoinders one notes a neurotic fussiness...
...He is in error about the birth of modern art, the critics contend...
...I applaud it and roar for more...
...If, as Hilton Kramer alleges, Wolfe is sounding the call for a revival of philistinism I shall remain vigilant...
...It was a dreadful night, and contrary to expectations the eerie chorus did not dissolve into the dawn...
...Even in the porn palaces thoughts momentarily strayed toward Jehovah's credentials as a civil libertarian...
...But the fine quality of serious art has always had a way of enduring...
...This was not the howl of the noble wolf...
...He has hopelessly confused the theories of art critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg...
...In The Painted Word Wolfe mordantly notes the Modern Art world's pedantry, charlatanry, unwarranted elitism, and weakness for the kind of self-promotion characteristic of reform-minded district attorneys...
...In The Painted Word the shocking garments are all about, the frauds are blown up to Wagnerian proportions, and from the cacophony of howls from Culturati, Inc...
...In an instant a howling cacophony of rejoinders went up all over the island...
...Hogwash...
...Careful analysis, a sober marshalling of the facts: that is one way of setting things aright...
...Tom Wolfe, the Judas Iscariot of Manhattan trendies, and Wolfe's joke has now been published as a book, The Painted Word...
...The fussy declamations now resounding through the Republic are amusing testimonials to his sense of direction...
...What unspeakable devilry was afoot...
...Poor Wolfe...
...Oh, of course, the critics say, there was a speck of sham involved in those esoteric theories of the 1960s, there was a little hokum in the experimental art forms that kept popping up at the Museum of Modern Art...
...Obviously the inhabitants of that world disagree...
...Quite possibly Modern Art may soon be set free from their moonshine...
...The ghostly wail was picked up in Scarsdale, and beyond into Connecticut...
...For it is precisely this matter of emphasizing theory over beauty that induced Wolfe to write his book...
...but Wolfe is too extravagant, too glib...
...He missed the conceptual nuances of "flatness...
...he is lost at sea in the complicated world of art scholarship and art theory...
...It was the April issue of Harper's that carried the latest bit of lampoonery by Mr...
...What Wolfe said was that a world that sniggers at Popes and Presidents can also find merriment in the pretensions and misadventures of the world of Modern Art...
...It is a wonderfully successful joke, and what makes it even more humorous is that it is being analyzed and pondered by art critics all over the Republic as though, it were a monograph of the gravest import...
...This is the gravamen at the center of their howl, and it is in this complaint that they reveal themselves not only to be humorless but to be humorless donkeys...
...Is Wolfe lost at sea...
...The howls have risen a thousand decibels...
...and from this moment forward—though, truth to tell, I share many of their artistic passions—they go down in my ledger as worthy of rebuke...
...What is needed is erudition and calm analysis...
...22 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975...
...They have been the very first to chortle at the pieties and fatuities of America...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
