It was not a coincidence that his disenchantment with visual art occurred right around the time when making simplistic, often digitally formulated abstract paintings became suddenly passé, as was discussing them, critiquing them, even satirizing them. These paintings amounted to societal self-portraiture, and an age grows tired of its own face. Casting about for something to do, he found himself newly interested in writing, which, in comparison to art, offered delightfully fresh challenges. He recognized the peculiarity of this step: advanced painting since the Impressionists had jettisoned the aim of re-creating a recognizable, narrativized human world and had plunged into abstraction, whereas writing had remained in thrall to narrative and human psychology. Yes, there had been a modernist rupture, but the majority of serious literary fiction, and all mass product, went right on pursuing realistic concerns. The field of contemporary art was activated by cataclysm and relentless progress, whereas contemporary literature remained relatively staid. This was because it was a mass form, he reasoned. Who follows contemporary painting? The few. Who reads contemporary books? Everyone.
At this moment, however, he believed writing culture to be undergoing a tectonic shift. No doubt this development was late in coming, trailing by a century visual art’s own decisive mutations, but then again, for all that radical change, where was art now? Wallowing in hush money, patting itself on the back for having finally solved the evolutionary problem of how to be simultaneously good and bad, abstract and representational, popular and cutting edge, with the result that nothing was at stake but auction prices.
Writing, on the other hand, which had little connection to money and power, was only broadening its already considerable mass appeal, thanks to the proliferation of texting, tweeting, blogging, and so on, even as those same forces were emancipating writing from its long-standing narrative conventions. In fact, it was less apposite to say “Who reads? Everyone” than “Who writes? Everyone.” Maybe this explained why writing was becoming at the same time more popular and more abstract. In short, writing was becoming just plain weirder.
In this situation, and in distinction to the problems of visual art, everything was at stake: “the novel,” of course, but also “the field of literature,” “the book business,” “the future of the word,” and communication itself. No one knew what it meant. You could feel the charge of that anxious energy, it was the motor thrumming behind many recent novels and columns and articles and blog posts. He imagined this to be a historical echo of the introduction of film, with all of that medium’s looming ramifications for the image, and how odd that this contemporary upset concerned words!
He himself was not a writer by any stretch. He’d tried it years ago, had even enjoyed success with some oddball critical essays that circulated in art-world contexts, but ultimately he’d dropped it. The problem with the art world was that you were expected to write uneven, eccentric, unresolved texts; it was like being a grad student in an experimental-writing workshop. While many in the art world were wonderfully omnivorous, broad-minded readers, few were any good at writing, including most of the critics and curators, so it was easy to stand out. Most people didn’t even bother with critiques of art-world writing, and for good reason: if people criticized you for being lazy or obscurantist, you could assert that you were being “artistic,” that what you’d intended was not lucid rhetoric but Delphic poesy. Writing these texts was like making films in which everything was a dream sequence, and therefore immune to charges of illogic and sloppiness. At the same time, of course, nothing was at stake.
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