In this essay, Tom Wolfe explains how contemporary art has evolved into an intellectual theory, nourished by art critics, and lost the part where it was all about visual and emotional beauty. According to Wolfe, art has evolved into a closed circuit comprising artists who must be free and bohemian, yet still require acknowledgement from the system, meaning the critics and the world elite. In this universe, the public is completely excluded from the process of determining who is or isn’t an artist. It is understandable that this book was not well received by critics. Wolfe ridicules them mercilessly. I found this book extremely witty and very true. It raises interesting questions about what constitutes art, who is an artist and who gets forgotten. Really interesting.
“Greenberg’s Post-Painterly Abstraction has gone under other names since then: Hard-Edge-Abstract and Color Field Abstract, to name two. But all of them can be defined by the way in which they further the process of reduction, i.e., the way they get rid of something—just a little bit more, if you please! How far we’ve come! How religiously we’ve cut away the fat! In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs (Hard Edge, Color Field, Washington School).”