Lost in Culture Gulch

By ROBERT HUGHES

Over the past ten years, Tom Wolfe has set himself up as the Bugs Bunny of American journalism--a squeaky, impudent dandy with a glib eye for the lumbering victim. Toward the end of the '60s, New York appeared to be strewn with his targets, from rich Black Panther-loving liberals to the editorial staff of The New Yorker. It was also dotted with the lucky recipients of his approval: mayflies like Baby Jane Holzer, cultish ephemerids like Marshall McLuhan and social grotesques like the collector-exhibitionists Robert and Ethel Scull, all festooned in yards of Wolfe's glittery, incontinent prose. He was the compleat '60s fashion plate, so much a part of the hustling, celebrity-obsessed triviality of the time that even now he can hardly be detached from it--a sort of two-dimensional Cocteau, with the poetry subtracted.

Wolfe's eye for social foible was mean and exact; his sense of ideas almost nonexistent. He had (and still has) one obsessive theme: the unease of the arrived white rich, the devices by which they assuage guilt, and the hustles wrought on them from below. That was the motif of his last book, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970). It also supplies the comedy of manners for his new one, The Painted Word, which appeared in Harper's April issue and has now been published in hard cover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book was meant to be a scathing indictment of modern art in general and of American painting and its social milieu in particular. Instead, it emerges as a curious document of frustration: the dandy as Archie Bunker.

"All these years," Wolfe asserts with his customary hyperbole, "I, like so many others, have stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses... waiting, waiting, forever waiting for ... it ... for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward [for so much effort] which must be there." The reward did not come. Ergo, it could never have been there, and anyone who thought it was --whether artist, critic, collector or onlooker--was either a patsy or a fraud.

The New York art world, especially in its present decay, is the easiest target a pop sociologist could ask for. Most of it is a wallow of egotism, social climbing and power brokerage, and the only thing that makes it tolerable is the occasional reward of experiencing a good work of art in all its richness, complexity and difficulty. Take the art from the art world, as Wolfe does, and the matrix becomes fit for caricature. Since Wolfe is unable to show any intelligent response to painting, caricature is what we get: a rehashed conspiracy theory.

Svengalis and Status. All American artists, Wolfe argues, are Trilbys. For the past 30 years they have been hypnotized by three powerful critics named Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg and Leo Steinberg. These Svengalis have dictated what shall be painted and sculpted. From abstract expressionism onward, American art has been made only to illustrate their theories. The works are then fobbed off on a public of bourgeois status seekers who strive to soothe their guilt at being rich and successful by patronizing the New. Such is the gist of Wolfe's pamphlet. If it seems familiar, that is only because Wolfe did not invent philistinism.

So in The Painted Word Wolfe tries to come across as the little boy looking at the Emperor's new clothes. In fact, his account of the art world reads more like an eleven-year-old's written report on a pornographic movie. The lad is spry and attentive at first. He can see things moving up and down and in and out, buttocks heaving, breasts jiggling. He has heard about sex but never had any. Consequently he has no inkling of what the real transaction between these absorbed couples might be, or why the glazed audience is staring so raptly at the screen. His state is incomprehension, broken by fits of naughty giggles.

Wolfe seems to know virtually nothing about the history of art, American or European. What sort of mind could describe the reserved and cultivated Georges Braque as "a Montmartre boho of the primitive sort" who "waited for his old comrade Picasso's imminent collapse as a painter and a human being"?

Scissors and Paste. There is no sign that Wolfe has bothered to verify a fact, check a source or even do a day's consistent reading in a library. To nail the dozens of elementary howlers in his text would require almost as many pages as The Painted Word takes. One example will do for all. Wolfe on social-realist art in the '30s: "Even Franz "Kline, the abstract painter's abstract painter, was dutifully cranking out paintings of unemployed Negroes, crippled war veterans and the ubiquitous workers with open blue workshirts and necks wider than their heads." In fact, he never painted such pictures. Either Wolfe is making them up, or he cannot distinguish between Franz Kline and Ben Shahn.

Nor can he handle his fantasy's archvillains, Critics Rosenberg, Greenberg and Steinberg. Wolfe is naive about critical power. The idea that Jackson Pollock was Clement Greenberg's ideological puppet in the '40s and '50s is sim ply not true: Greenberg did Pollock a great service by writing about his work intelligently and with passion, but he did not "tell" Pollock how to paint. (That dubious privilege would be reserved for weaker artists in the '60s, who wanted to attach themselves to Greenberg's by then mythical aura as a trend spotter.) In any case, Wolfe is inept at dealing with thought, and his account of Steinberg's and Greenberg's criticism is utterly garbled. He cannot treat their writings as argument, only as manipulation. He seems not to have read them, only read about them. He imagines, for instance, that Greenberg somehow invented the issue of pictorial flatness, which had been a subject of continual debate among European artists and critics since the days of Maurice Denis and Paul Gauguin in the 1890s.

Wolfe has an astute eye for what he knows about: namely, the pretensions of art consumers and the stratagems by which the chic of New York use new art as a tool for social climbing. There he is on home ground, being in every sense part of his frothy and fashion-ruled subject. He was there. But he was not in any of the places where art was made or serious thought about it discussed. The world of production, as against consumption, is alien to Wolfe. Hence the scissors-and-paste flavor of The Painted Word. It is not just wrong history; it is not even firsthand reportage. There has been a long fall from -- remember it?-the New Journalism.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.