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.