That Lucy Ives’s Impossible Views of the World (published in August by Penguin Press) and Andrew Durbin’s MacArthur Park(published in September by Nightboat Books) are both debut novels written by poets who are also art critics might explain the two books’ further similarities.1 Each centers on a neurotic art worker—Ives’s Stella Krakus is a curator and Durbin’s Nick Fowler, a writer—in the midst, simultaneously, of an affair with a wealthy, insufferable man; a research project with no clear end; and an ensuing existential crisis. Stella and Nick are both erudite, hypercritical narrators prone to exacting description and essayistic digressions about art, urban life, and the familiar archetypes that populate arts professions. Most significantly, the two protagonists share a fascination with utopias—and a troubling readiness to accept their impossibility as an excuse to stick to the status quo.
This is not to say the books are not distinct. Stella, to a greater degree than Nick, dwells in the particular, as does her story: Impossible Views of the World takes place in the course of one eventful week. An awkward thirtysomething “termed a cartographic specialist in the art history world” but “a dilettante in the world of cartographers,” Stella works as an assistant curator in the American Objects wing at New York City’s Central Museum of Art. (Called CeMArt for short, the museum is a barely veiled send-up of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, though the administration’s immoderate coziness with a corporate sponsor smacks of the Guggenheim.) Her unfulfilling routine is upended by the disappearance of her colleague Paul, who is “almost a friend” and an obscure but respected poet. Tasked with completing Paul’s work on the checklist for an upcoming exhibition, Stella discovers in his desk a photocopy of a fantastical early-nineteenth-century map of a utopian community called Elysia. Determined to figure out the map’s significance, she steals the document, along with copies of Paul’s files. What follows is an art historical caper that Vogue aptly dubbed “something of a From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler for grown-ups.”2
As Stella gets closer to determining the map’s provenance, she may (or may not) be uncovering a conspiracy connecting Paul’s disappearance, several generations of a wealthy but disgraced New York family of artists and patrons, possible forgeries, and CeMArt’s latest exhibition of American portraiture. That exhibition is organized by the impossibly handsome Fred Lu, a senior curator in the American Objects department and scion of two wealthy New York families, with whom Stella has been conducting a (mostly) emotional affair while going through a bitter divorce. Stella seems to loathe Fred almost as much as she loves him, particularly for his willingness to collaborate with WANSEE, a multinational corporation seeking to privatize the world’s water supply and partner with CeMArt to open satellite museums around the globe.
Where Impossible Views finds its subject matter (and critique) in the institution, Durbin’s MacArthur Park looks to what Ives, in her blurb for the novel, calls “the precarious margins of the art world.” And where the focus of Views is small, concerned with inconspicuous but meaningful detail, MacArthur Park is big and sprawling, in both its settings and its questions. Nick, a twentysomething poet and budding art critic, begins his travel narrative in New York, where the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy catalyzes a preoccupying anxiety about climate change and the impending end of the world. He then sets out on a nebulous book project “about the weather”—and on trips to Miami, upstate New York, Fire Island, Los Angeles (because he has been commissioned to write about the Tom of Finland Foundation), London, and Vienna.
While in Los Angeles, Nick’s book about the weather (which, in a reflexive turn, is what we understand ourselves to be reading) also becomes a book about utopia. This section opens with a history of intentional communities and cults in Southern California, beginning at the start of the twentieth century and concluding with Scientology; at the Tom of Finland Foundation, Nick’s guides frame Touko Laaksonen’s erotic gay drawings as a “utopian project.” But Nick suspects that “a utopia of men is no utopia”—and that all utopias, however appealing, are illusory. In Impossible Views, Stella comes to a similar realization about the Elysia of her map. Though she never believes the town depicted is real, when she finally solves its tantalizing mystery—her own idealized project—she is not quite satisfied. Every utopia fails on its own terms.
Together, Impossible Views and MacArthur Park suggest that art itself might be such a failed project. Or that the art world is, at least, as Nick implies while considering the 2014 Pierre Huyghe retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:
The art world is an unregulated economy that borrows from other economies . . . to continually update its relationship to the world and, in acting as a conduit for other (and all) disciplines, strives to become the clearest image of the world in which we may better see ourselves. . . . Art tries to be everything for everyone at once, all of it contained within salable products that can be exchanged between artists, galleries, individuals and institutions, across media, in a ‘conversation’ about what now means, and what that now once meant and will someday come to mean. . . . Everyone wants to be an artist because everyone wants to speak about the now.
An impossible aim, to be sure, “to be everything for everyone at once.” But it is not its ambition that dooms the project of art so much as its constraints, “contained” as it is. Consider, in Impossible Views, CeMArt’s partnership with an evil corporate sponsor that wants to include affiliates of the museum in each of its planned “smart cities”—“‘technology responsive’ communities” around the world in which people will “take refuge not just from everyday inconvenience and security issues posed by fundamentalists but from approaching environmental collapse.” The proposed sites include Nevada and Abu Dhabi, evoking international expansions undertaken by the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and others.
“Everyone” might want to be an artist not only because they want “to speak about the now” but also because they wish to be a part of the noble project of crafting an “image of the world in which we may better see ourselves.” Who doesn’t? Who in the art world, anyway? But reflection is not action, nor is this the only way to imagine art’s function. As Trotsky wrote, “Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes.”3
In their accounts of the flawed contexts in which they live and work, both Stella and Nick position themselves as outsiders. Though they blend in well enough, they go to great lengths to make it clear they see through the fictions that others around them happily accept. Disgusted by the scene of the swanky party where Fred announces CeMArt’s partnership with WANSEE, Stella wonders: “How could I possibly be a curator if Fred was a curator?” Of the partygoers at a club vying with feigned nonchalance to be photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans, Nick says: “I watched them and did not once allow myself [to] slip into their time.” Both fixate on the class differences between them and their more affluent lovers (Nick hates his boyfriend Simon’s “moneyed affect”), though both protagonists are white and middle-class, hardly outliers.
Stella and Nick’s desire to see themselves as exceptions to the rules of their lives is paired with a sense that they are powerless to change those rules. Stella laments that the circumstances of her life—her career, her relationships—feel beyond her control, even as she recognizes that she must bear some responsibility for them. Nick speaks of history grabbing and shoving us forward as if our role in it were passive. This echoes Stella’s description of the “invisible hand” she feels guiding her during her boldest moments. Ultimately, Stella’s most profound discovery in Impossible Views is not the origin of the map, but of that hand. Drunk at a friend’s party, she cracks it: “When it feels like there is that weird hand. . . . That’s you encountering yourself.”
How Stella and Nick imagine themselves in their own communities is how many in the art world seem to imagine themselves in the world at large: as outsiders who know better, exceptions to the ugliest aspects of their time and country, but powerless to do anything but study works of art. Through these characters and their delusions, Ives and Durbin reveal the flaw, and danger, of such thinking: it’s precisely at the moment we feel most helpless that we are exposed to our own potential power. Helplessness, as Nick says, is a mask.
Endnotes
1. For a discussion of their books, the relationship between poetry and fiction, and the genre of the “poet’s novel,” see “Poet Novelist: An Interview between Andrew Durbin and Lucy Ives,” Poetry Society of America, 2017, poetrysociety.org.
2. Lauren Mechling, “Impossible Views of the World Is a Perfect Summer Pleasure,” Vogue, July 24, 2017, vogue.com.
3. Leon Trotsky, “Futurism,” Literature and Revolution, ed. William Keach, trans. Rose Strunsky, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2005, p. 120.
Some young fellows went into contortions, as if somebody had been tickling them. One lady had flung herself on a seat, stifling and trying to regain breath with her handkerchief over her mouth. Rumors of this picture, which was so very, very funny, must have been spreading, for there was a rush from the four corners of the Salon, bands of people arrived, jostling each other, and all in eagerness to share the fun.
Fictional portrayals of the art world today are rarely more flattering, but new stock tropes have replaced salon-going philistines foolishly jeering at the avant-garde and pompous painters assured of their superiority. The contemporary art world is, more often than not, represented as a ridiculous shell game in which empty provocation is propped up by canny marketing and rampant financial speculation. Collectors are rich idiots looking to be flattered, gallerists are shrewd capitalists who cloak luxury retail operations in the pretense of a higher calling, curators are overeducated airheads in Prada who have memorized the Frankfurt School Cliff’s Notes, successful artists are talentless fakers who look the part, or naive and corruptible dupes. Critics, of course, are bloviating hacks, not to mention, the dumbest ones of all, since they don’t even stand to profit from their participation in this charade. Even novels that depict meaningful encounters with contemporary artworks tend to regard the art world itself skeptically, as if the work succeeds in spite of the best efforts of professionals who smother it with slick pretentiousness: in both Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), parts of which are set at a residency in Marfa, and Enrique Vila-Matas’s picaresque The Illogic of Kassel (2014), a fictionalized account of the author’s participation as a “writer in residence” at Documenta 13, the protagonists liken themselves to visitors to an alien planet inhabited by strange, unintelligible creatures.
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt, Simon & Schuster, 2014; 384 pages
All the familiar grotesques appear in Siri Hustvedt’s 2014 novel, The Blazing World, presented as an anthology reconstructing the murky details of Harriet Burden’s project “Maskings” (1998–2003), a hoax for which the sixty-something Burden, bristling at decades of art world neglect, enlisted three young male artists to exhibit her works as their own. Through annotated excerpts from Burden’s diaries, archival press clippings, and interviews with family, friends, and participants in her scheme, witting and unwitting, we learn that Burden had a minor career as an artist in the 1970s and ’80s, but is better known as the lumbering and unpleasant wife of the esteemed art dealer Felix Lord. Her work, to the extent that anyone notices it, is dismissed as “high-flown, sentimental, and embarrassing.” When Felix dies, the art world—“that incestuous, moneyed, whirring globule composed of persons who buy and sell aesthetic objets”—has no use for her at all, and she retreats with his money to the distant wilds of Brooklyn to plot her revenge. Attached to more appealing authorial personas—a photogenic recent SVA grad named Anton Tish, the gay Black performance artist Phineas Q. Eldridge, and the mononymic Rune, a blue-chip bad boy who thinks it all sounds like a lark—Burden’s work, she believes, will finally get the recognition it deserves, at which point she will appear from behind the curtain, not only presenting the art world with devastating evidence of its own sexist bias, but proving that she has been smarter and better than the “twits, dunderheads, and fools” all along.
Naturally, things do not go according to plan. Though Anton’s and Rune’s shows are rapturously received—Phineas’s is, tellingly, a more modest success, garnering a few short, positive reviews, but none of the fanfare lavished on his straight white counterparts—Burden’s attempts to take credit are met with derision and disbelief. Anton disappears and Rune denies everything, claiming that “Harriet Lord” is merely a delusional patron. (Phineas is the only one of the “masks” to openly confirm Burden’s account, but also the one whose word matters least.) The various critics, collectors, and gallerists who have embraced the work, each more slippery and odious than the next, find it far easier to believe that she is a mad, jealous harpy than an unheralded artistic genius. “I am as tickled by a good hoax as the next person,” says the critic Oswald Case, “but a fiftyish woman who’s been hanging around the art world all her life can’t really be called a prodigy can she?” In the end, Rune gets the last word, dying spectacularly in a Houdini-esque performance gone wrong, with Burden’s installation Beneath hailed as the crowning achievement of his already distinguished career. No such glowing tributes are forthcoming when Burden herself dies from cancer not long after; only years later does her work enter the cycle of posthumous rediscovery that has elevated so many women artists of her generation.
The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, Penguin Random House, 2012; 288 pages.
While Hustvedt’s Harriet Burden is the raging embodiment of thwarted ambition, Jed Martin, the dispassionate artist protagonist of Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory (originally published in French in 2010), effortlessly rises to the top. The two novels’ supporting players, however, are quite similar. The Map and the Territory, for which Houellebecq won the Prix Goncourt, opens as Martin wrestles with an allegorical portrait titled Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market. It isn’t conceived as a critique so much as an even-handed assessment of the field: “On the ArtPrice ranking of the richest artists, Koons was number 2,” recently overtaken by Hirst, Martin notes. He himself is at the bottom of the list, but not for long: later that year, he sells out a show of paintings similarly depicting tête-à -têtes among titans of various industries, netting him a staggering 15 million euros ($19.9 million), even after his gallerist’s 50 percent cut; in a metafictional twist, the catalogue essay is written by none other than the famous writer Michel Houellebecq, who, in the book’s final section, is gruesomely murdered by an art thief seeking the portrait he received as compensation, now valued in the low eight figures. Though the novel is set roughly in the aughts, it purports to be written from the vantage of the mid-twenty-first century, when Martin is a decidedly canonical artist, and his ascent is narrated with a biographer’s hindsight, peppered with references to art historical monographs by specialists like Wong Fu Xin. (In the future, cultural hegemony belongs to China.)
View of the Armory Show, New York, March 2020PHOTO GEORGE CHINSEE
The Blazing World and The Map and the Territory were both received in literary spheres as penetrating commentaries on the art world’s mystifying inner workings. Yet like most art world satires, they are remarkably unrevealing, particularly to those of us who slum it down here in the world of appearances. If the contemporary art world’s excesses easily lend themselves to absurdist caricature, they also tend to immunize it against satire’s most eviscerating effects: it’s all but impossible to pierce the veil to reveal some sordid, unspoken truth, because the art world’s messy contradictions are already right on the surface, even flaunted, as a seemingly oxymoronic category like “canonical works of institutional critique” makes clear. The art world sexism Hustvedt diagnoses is painfully real, but the force of her critique is blunted by the sheer clownishness of her villains, sniveling one-dimensional monsters who seem viscerally repulsed by the very prospect of a female artist, while bowing down to any white man with a BFA.
Indeed, the bite of Houellebecq’s novel lies less in its predictable depictions of culture class inanity than in the sharp contrast between Martin’s blank passivity and the manic zeal with which his work is received, by the art press and deep-pocketed collectors alike. Throughout the novel, his indifference is taken as a sign of artistic integrity, his silence when he can’t think of anything to say as high-minded commitment: “Jed adopted, without knowing it, the groovy attitude that had made Andy Warhol successful in his time, while adding to it a nuance of seriousness—immediately interpreted as a concerned seriousness, a citizen’s seriousness.” The overriding impression is that the affectless Jed and his work, which aspires to nothing more than transcription, are ideal art world avatars precisely because of their absolute neutrality, assimilable into whatever narrative best suits a given context. This, at least, rings true.
A contemporary art auction at Christie’s, New York, in 2015, showing Andy Warhol’s Colored Mona Lisa, 1963.AP
The popular suspicion that contemporaryart is one long con is nothing new: think, for instance, of the studio audience howling at John Cage’s televised performance of “Water Walk” on the 1960s game show “I’ve Got a Secret” (his “secret” is that the composition calls for instruments including a bathtub, a vase of roses, a bottle of wine, and a rubber duck) or the cult classic “Batman” episode “Pop Goes the Joker” (1967), in which the Joker enters an art competition and beats out internationally renowned painters like “Jackson Potluck,” who rolls around in a bathtub of paint, and “Leonardo da Vinski,” whose pet monkey hurls tomatoes at an easel, by submitting a blank canvas that the haughty judges interpret as a comment on “the emptiness of modern life.” But Houellebecq and Hustvedt’s novels leave the art alone, reserving their scorn for the social and institutional forces around it. The Map and the Territory is ultimately agnostic about Martin’s work, despite Houellebecq’s disdain for the coterie of collectors, publicists, critics, and gallerists who orchestrate—and profit from—its meteoric rise, while Hustvedt’s Burden is clearly meant to be read as difficult but brilliant, even if the fictional oeuvre the author invents for her doesn’t quite bear that out. The problem isn’t contemporary art, these novels suggest, but the sordid environment in which it circulates, a vacuum of money, celebrity, and self-righteous pretension.
But no one is scandalized by the revelation that, say, Hollywood and the fashion industry are full of multimillionaires with bloated egos who subordinate creativity to commerce, or that they’re driven by the pursuit of cheap novelty and hype. It is precisely because art is imagined to belong on some higher plane, to exist at an ideal remove from other kinds of things that are bought and sold, that the art world’s follies have come to stand in for contemporary society at its most bankrupt and debased.
The Exhibition of Persephone Q by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020; 224 pages.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, Penguin Random House, 2019; 304 pages.
The unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) is “tall and thin and blond and pretty and young.” She repeats this refrain throughout the novel, as if these are the truly salient facts about her life, from which all other details flow. Her parents—distant father, alcoholic mother—died during her junior year at Columbia, leaving her a sizable inheritance that enabled her to purchase an Upper East Side apartment in cash shortly after graduation and now supplements her $22,000 salary as a Chelsea gallery assistant.
The narrator’s main function at the fictional Ducat gallery is to be “hip decor,” which makes her “amazing wardrobe” her most valuable professional asset, Ivy League art history degree notwithstanding. “I was the bitch who sat behind a desk and ignored you when you walked into the gallery, a pouty knockout wearing indecipherably cool avant-garde outfits. I was told to play dumb if anyone asked a question.” Not that she minds: “I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time.” Her job is so fundamentally pointless and inessential that it takes nearly a full year for her icy boss Natasha to notice that she spends half the workday napping in a supply closet, which isn’t even a fireable offense. She is finally dismissed after fucking up a shipment to Art Basel; her only regret is that she’d “wasted so much time on unnecessary labor when I could have been sleeping and feeling nothing.”
View of the Armory Show, New York, March 2020.PHOTO GEORGE CHINSEE
Ducat is a never-ending parade of faux subversion, “canned counterculture crap, ‘punk, but with money,’ nothing to inspire more than a trip around the corner to buy an unflattering outfit from Comme des Garcons.” The newest star of the stable is Ping Xi, a twenty-three-year-old provocateur with fake acne tattooed on his chin, whose gallery debut features Pollockesque splatter paintings made by masturbating onto canvas with powdered pigment in the tip of his penis, given titles like Decapitated Palestinian Child and Bombs Away, Nairobi. A follow-up comprises an installation of taxidermic purebred dogs with red lasers shooting from their eyes, rumored to have been acquired by the artist as puppies and raised until they reached the perfect size. No matter how repulsive the narrator finds Ducat’s milieu, Moshfegh suggests that it is the only natural place for a figure so preternaturally jaded, interminably bored, hopelessly shallow. Bracingly caustic, the novel stresses the contrast between the narrator’s oft-mentioned physical beauty and the curdling personality it masks, sharply doubled in a gallery where artistic gestures, ranging from merely dumb to shockingly cruel, are elegantly framed for elite consumption.
Young, rich, blond, thin, pretty: the world is hers, and yet all she wants to do is sleep. The novel charts her escalating attempts to anesthetize herself with Whoopi Goldberg movies on VHS and fistfuls of assorted pharmaceuticals: Risperdal, Xanax, Lithium, Ambien, Trazodone, as well as novelistic inventions like Infermiterol, which causes her to black out for days at a time, waking up surrounded by food and lingerie she can’t remember ordering and stamps on her hand from clubs she can’t remember going to. Though her indiscriminate pill-popping betrays a casual disregard for her own physical well-being, the narrator isn’t exactly suicidal; if she initially self-medicates to drown out her own misanthropic thoughts, her haphazard regimen progressively evolves into something more grandiose, a quasi-artistic project of complete spiritual transformation. Entering a symbiotic partnership with Ping Xi, she plans to spend the final months of the titular year of rest and relaxation in full hibernation, waking for only a few hours a week to eat, hydrate, and bathe. In exchange for bringing her necessities, he has free rein to make use of her in his own work, so long as he disappears before she returns to consciousness. At the end, she would emerge “renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person.”
The Superrationals by Stephanie LaCava, Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, 2020; 192 pages.
Like the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Mathilde de Saint-Evans, the wispy protagonist of Stephanie LaCava’s self-serious The Superrationals (2020), is another beautiful twentysomething orphan with an art history degree from Columbia. She works in a loosely defined client relations position in the contemporary department of an unnamed upscale auction house, a role that mostly entails being blankly alluring around would-be consignors. The novel unfolds as a sequence of gauzy vignettes, variously told from the perspectives of Mathilde and others in her orbit, among them a Greek chorus of coworkers identified as simply “The Girls,” who seem to speak and think in one voice, mostly about how much they inexplicably loathe Mathilde. (“We had decided we didn’t like Mathilde even before we met her,” they snipe, by way of an introduction; she’s “weird,” “looks like an alien,” “so fucking cool and Bohemian.”) Interspersed throughout are excerpts from a hackneyed essay in progress by Mathilde, yoking together Mike Kelley, Cy Twombly, Marcel Broodthaer’s [sic], and Carolee Schneemann under the ponderous title “Transmuting Desire: Memory, Mannequins, and the Contemporary Reliquary, An Exploration of the Unsaid, Unseen, Uncanny Space, the In Between.” (In an interview with Texte zur Kunst, LaCava stressed that she meant for Mathilde’s text to be bad, and it is, but whatever critical intentions she had in mind here are muddied by a close resemblance to the prose in the rest of the book.)
Following the art world’s peripatetic flows, Mathilde flits between locations—New York, Paris, Berlin, London—“herding objects” from one place to the next; she is perpetually arriving, leaving, arriving somewhere else. The cities bleed together, so little does the routine change from place to place: airport, hotel, collector’s home, artist’s studio, auction house office, of which there are naturally satellites spread throughout the globe. With its barely sketched settings and stock types, The Superrationals casts the world its characters inhabit as flimsy and unreal, so detached from anything on the ground that they all but defy the laws of time and space.
Mathilde does not so much choose the art world as she is gravitationally pulled by it, as a pretty, pedigreed young woman who knows she’s supposed to aspire to something, but can’t decide what. Hovering in the background is her mythical late mother, a storied fiction editor who died young—not much older than Mathilde is now—but had a genuine calling, whereas Mathilde can only flail around, unsure of what to do or whom to be. Less a person than a spectral image that materializes out of thin air whenever, wherever she’s called, Mathilde is so constitutionally passive that, at the novel’s close, her boss intercepts her on her way to a dinner and she follows him up to his hotel room, even though she knows what’s coming, mustering little more than a head shake as he assaults her. Rather than quitting, she intentionally bungles a shipping form, an act of rebellion so subtle that The Girls, smugly cleaning out her desk after she’s fired, cluck that they’d known she was an idiot all along.
Pretty, overeducated orphans who serve as high-end window dressing, finally set loose by an errant shipment from jobs they disdain: despite their striking differences in tone, ambition, and, in the end, quality, the similarities between Moshfegh and LaCava’s novels are telling. Less concerned with depicting the contemporary art world than invoking it as a theater of anomie, they sketch out its most basic, vapid contours and let the reader’s own worst assumptions fill in the blanks. Equally telling is that the resolution of the protagonists’ psychodramas is signaled by leaving the art world behind: in the final pages of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, after the narrator rises from her pharmaceutical haze for the last time “like a newborn animal” ready to meet the world, she skips Ping Xi’s exhibition of her portraits at Ducat and heads instead to the Met, where she stares at the old masters with earnest wonder.
A sculpture by Pierre Huyghe on view in Documenta 13, Kassel, 2012UWE ZUCCHI/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP IMAGES
Oval by Elvia Wilk, Soft Skull Press, 2019; 352 pages.
Things got sold, but it was understood that the buyers were buying into the artists’ whole brand via the object. The object stood in for something: a share of the artist’s sum total life’s worth. The object was a token for speculation on that life’s worth. Over time the objects had begun to seem more and more incidental to that speculation. Sponsors realized that using artists as object-makers was a waste of resources. The artists’ true value was their proximity to the vanguard, that is, the future, that is the next niche for market expansion.
The ease with which contemporary art’s conceptual armature is appropriated by corporations is familiar from our own present; Oval’s art world simply cuts out the middleman. In redefining art as ambient creativity, artists have ostensibly been freed from the limiting imperative to produce unique, precious objects that circulate in a circumscribed elite sphere, but the alternative Wilk envisions is hardly more promising: the old avant-garde dream of merging art and life has been achieved, yet the result is corporate servitude instead of liberation, with art finally subsumed into branding.
At the start of the novel, Louis has just returned from his mother’s funeral in the States, and disappears for days at a time to work on a mysterious project in his Basquiatt studio: a designer club drug that encourages generosity, flooding the user’s brain with serotonin when they give things away. The goal of this chemical Gesamtkunstwerk is to permanently transform the city’s social relations without having to bother with the messiness of political education or consciousness raising: Louis believes that the drug, called Oval, will be like “one of those mindfulness apps, but actually effective,” brain-training self-absorbed Berlin creatives to associate “being nice and feeling good.”
Attempting to artificially manufacture an enlightened public by dosing partygoers with a pharmaceutical developed by an artist embedded in an NGO embedded in a multinational corporation has predictably disastrous results: social fractures can’t be so easily resolved. The avowedly apolitical Anja is the only character to recognize that this plan is both unhinged and doomed to fail—a sign of how fully the ideology of disruption has penetrated her and Louis’s social and professional circles. Louis’s neoliberal Productivism is an illustration of what emerges when artists and institutions identify too closely with the logic and interests of a technocratic elite: the belief that the path to a better world is lined with individual creativity and private capital.
Relics of our art world remain in Oval: the jockeying for status, the insider hierarchies, the suddenly shifting winds of taste, the elaborate promotional scaffolding surrounding each new project. “If there was a formal device signaling continuity between the old and new systems,” says Anja, “it was the press release. . . . You still needed an explanation for what was going on.” But Wilk doesn’t take these tics and rituals for granted as signs of spiritual emptiness; she adapts them for Oval’s universe, rendering them subtly surreal. At one point, Anja attends a farewell party for a consultant whose career has stalled: “She’d been ‘emerging’ forever, up into her forties, but instead of making the transition to ‘mid-career’ that should have happened by this time, she’d veered off course. She hadn’t been rehired by her company and she hadn’t been hired anywhere else.” Later, she describes the sudden stratification of the crowd that occurs in the final minutes of an opening, when it becomes evident who has and hasn’t secured an invitation to the dinner after: “The invitees politely and/or condescendingly disengage from their sorry companions, casually mentioning ‘a dinner,’ which everyone knows to be the Dinner, making promises to meet up later, kissing, kissing, then slipping off. The event is left without its lifeblood; the people who own the venue may even be gone; only the interns are left tending to the evaporating crowd.” In Oval’s future, the artwork is expendable, but the press release is still compulsory; this may be the most damning detail of all.
This article appears in the July/August 2021 issue, pp. 54–61.
