Literature : Tom Wolfe ; No Hands Art (conceptual art)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/9618607/Tom-Wolfe-on-his-new-book-Back-to-Blood.html

'Ah God,’ he says, chuckling at the memory of Art Basel Miami. 'You’ve got all these billionaires dressed like overgrown children in shorts and sneakers, and they’re all pushing and shoving in a frenzy to outbuy each other. Every one of them has an art adviser, and the adviser tells him – they’re all men – what he likes. What the adviser is really telling him is what the reigning fashion is at that moment, and that’s good enough for the buyer, who only wants to have what’s happening on his walls. The big thing now is No Hands art.’

This is Wolfe’s term for conceptual art, because so many of the top conceptual artists never touch their own artworks. Their job is to come up with the concept, and thereafter keep their hands clean. Richard Serra, for example, sends a sketch of some steel walls to a foundry. Once the walls have been manufactured, he hires a crew of 'elves’, as Wolfe calls them, to arrange the walls in a pattern.

'Jeff Koons is another one, a big, big name. He got his elves to build a 45ft bunny rabbit with things planted all over it to give it a kind of fur. He briefly married a famous Italian porn star. He had pictures taken by a photographer of them having at it in every possible way. I’m sure he didn’t even put them in the envelope, but the photographs were sent to the elves in Switzerland, who returned them in the form of three-dimensional glass sculptures, like pornographic Lalique, and these have brought tremendous prices.’

Once Wolfe gets talking about the art world, it’s hard to stop him, and pretty soon he’s chuckling over Damien Hirst’s $8 million shark, which is now rotting in a Connecticut mansion. 'Hirst offered to replace it with another one. Hah!’

Then he goes into a long, nostalgic reverie about Andy Warhol, the first artist really to mock the art world. 'I wouldn’t go across the street if they were handing out Warhols myself, but you have to hand it to him. His influence was extraordinary and yet he was making a joke of the very people who took him so seriously. He had very little physical personality, but he managed to appear charismatic to people in that world. I’ve never seen that done before. No Hands art goes straight back to Warhol. He was the first to use elves.’

Pretty soon we’re back in Paris in the 1880s, when the rot set in. An intellectual movement was born that scorned realistic art and literature as plebeian, and championed more difficult and experimental work. Wolfe has been banging on about this since 1970 at least, and he’s still thoroughly energised on the subject.

'Rimbaud and Baudelaire were the darlings of a very intellectual group. It also included a man named Catulle Mendès, who told a newspaper interviewer, “We no longer care about the masses. We write for 'a charming aristocracy’.” That was the phrase: a charming aristocracy of taste. Now Rimbaud and Baudelaire are somewhat understandable, but as time goes on, to show that you’re a member of that charming aristocracy, you have to like things that completely baffle the masses and the middle class. It all started from there – concretism, minimalism, every -ism you can think of, right up to the present day.’

Rather than keep coming up with new fads to make the in-crowd feel superior, Wolfe thinks art and literature should broaden their appeal and re-engage the masses. The only way to do this, he has argued for nearly 50 years, is to go back to realism, and portray society as it actually is. His literary heroes are Dickens and Zola – novelists who went out into the world like journalists, wrote for the masses and made their books as real as possible. 'If the novel dies, which it may do in this country, it’s because our novelists aren’t doing this any more.’ To put it another way, almost everyone writing fiction these days is doing it wrong except Tom Wolfe. This, he seems to believe, is why his novels have been so widely read.

http://www.vdare.com/articles/tom-wolfe-s-back-to-blood-a-confederate-looks-at-miami-s-cubans

Download Transcript - New York Public Library

www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/livewolfe_11.28transcript_1.doc

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It's a pleasure to have you here tonight, Tom Wolfe, and ..... But I think it's an era in which practically every group would like to go around ..... The first is no-hands art, Richard Serra, and these great walls of COR-TEN ..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ButAxst6CFs

Back to Blood 2012, interview