The Nonexistence of Art

Art is mostly fraud perpetrated by narcissistic academic quacks on a public easily gulled. They should be prosecuted. This is as true of literature as of painting and sculpture. If modern sculpture were placed in a junkyard, art critics couldn’t find it. Most of what we are told are great works are great works only because we are told that they are.

Consider the Mona Lisa, for mysterious reasons regarded an epochal detonation of artistry. Why? She is an excessively round woman who looks as if she is about to spit. We have to be told that she was an astonishment and marvel. Otherwise we would rate her a a pretty fair effort for an art student somewhere in Nebraska.

You have to tell the critics that it’s art, or they don’t notice. Every few years someone copies out The Reavers, or Crime and Punishment, changes the names, and sends it to New York—where it is rejected out of hand. See?

The trouble with great literature, or what is said by tenured pomposities to be great literature, is that it tries to deal with the human condition, the place of man in the cosmos, the meaning of life, and other trite subjects that we all think about every day. These themes are dealt with more succinctly on the wall of the men’s room at Joe’s Bar: “Shit happens.” “Life’s a bitch, and then you die.” “The whole world sucks, and everybody thinks it’s gravity.”

Great literature is chiefly the boring accounts of things we have already done. We’ve all had loves and lost them, we’ve all had Granny die horribly of cancer, and we all shudder at the injustice of the universe. We don’t need Malraux or Mann to rub these things in.

Now, while there is no great literature, there is great writing. Hamlet’s soliloquy, despite the thunderous ordinariness of its ideas, is marvelous because of the writing. Hunter Thompson, the Duke and the Dauphin in Huck Finn, Don Marquis on Shakespeare, all of Milne—them is art. But not great Literature.

In Washington, go to the Corcoran Gallery’s annual show of the best art by high-schoolers in all fifty states. You will find more variety, imagination, and sheer delight than in five hundred acres of Velazquez in the Prado. But you dare not say so became most of it a plumber might like. Perish forfend.