The Painted Word

Wolfe’s essay-length attack on the postwar New York art world, first published in Harper’s and then as a short book. His claim is that modern painting had inverted the relationship between work and commentary: the theory came first and the canvas became its illustration, so that by the 1970s a painting was unintelligible — and unsaleable — without the accompanying text, hence the title. He follows the succession of doctrines from Greenberg’s formalism through Minimalism to Conceptual Art, where the text finally dispenses with the object altogether, and reads the whole sequence as a status market in which a very small circle of critics, dealers and collectors ratify one another’s taste.

Wolfe appears three times in this section of the list: The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House, the architectural companion to this one.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s literature and societal critique section, which is the list’s argument that novels and essays can diagnose a society’s self-understanding more precisely than analysis can; Wolfe’s target here is the mechanism by which an expert consensus makes itself unfalsifiable.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Literature and Societal Critique. The entry carries a ☑️ on the source page; the page gives no legend for that mark, so it is recorded here literally and not interpreted. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Tom Wolfe — the author.
• Expertise — the credentialed consensus the essay takes apart.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.