Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe.
New York: Farrar, Strous & Giroux, 2000.
$25

Before I review a book that involves criticism of the arts, I should probably tell you that I find much of modern “art” silly, unskilled, and intellectually fraudulent. Blotches of paint, rusted iron shards dangled by twine from a ceiling, crucifixes suspended in jars filled with urine. To me, these are the signs of an end to art, no matter that it appears in a museum or is touted by some critic of the “art world.” I’ve heard all the arguments for modern and postmodern art; I even bought into some of these arguments at one time, but I’m not buying anymore.

Recently I enjoyed supper at Fisherman’s Pier, a seafood restaurant here in Waynesville. The food was fine, standard seafood fare, but the real treat was this seashore painting, this BIG painting, running around the entire wall of the large, two-room table area of the restaurant. Granted that much of this painting was blue - blue skies, blue water - and granted that the few humans in the painting had a sort of American primitive quality to them, this painting of fishes, boats, birds, and the beach was still ... well, cool. It wasn’t The Sistine Chapel, but then the painting didn’t try to be something outrageous or pretenious or offensive. It was art designed to appeal to the people eating at such places. The bright painting helped set the mood and tone of the place, and it made the viewer - at least, it made me - feel good looking at it. It also raised certain questions the staff that evening were too busy to answer fully. What prompted the painter who constructed this mosaic to undertake such a big job? What drove the painter to do it? How much time was spent on the design? I don’t know, but I’ll bet there’s a good story behind that painting.

Was this painting art? I don’t know. Was it fun, pleasing, intriguing, suited to its setting? Yes.
Let me tell you about another encounter with art that was ... well, cool (and also quite humorous). Remember the first “Rocky” picture? The city of Philadelphia was so proud of their boy Stallone that they put up a statue of a boxer in front of the Philadelphia fine arts museum, right at the top of the steps climbed by the fictional Rocky during his morning run. The statue of the boxer had attracted quite a bit of interest - children, and not a few grown men, wanted their picture taken beside it - yet the guardians of artistic culture set up a howl. It’s not art, they said; it detracts from the museum. (It makes us look like rubes, is what they meant). Finally the big shots prevailed, and the statue was moved to the sports arena.

I happened to be visiting Philadelpha a day or two after the statue’s removal. A friend and I were out jogging, and ran past the museum. There at the top of the steps, the steps where Rocky Balboa dances in triumph after his own arduous morning run, there was the concrete base on which the statue had rested. Broken shards of cement, left by the workman, still lay at the foot of the base. Behind the statueless base was a line of people - kids, parents, young people and old - all waiting to stand on the concrete block and raise their arms in imitation of Rocky Balboa’s triumph. The small crowd was taking pictures, laughing, talking about Rocky and about the statue, while behind them the imposing facade of the art museum glared down like a disapproving schoolma’rm. (And yes, I jumped up on the base myself for just a moment, laughing at my impulse even while I was unable to resist it.)

Was the statue art? Yes, even some of the critics conceded it. But it was just ... embarrassing. What would such a statue say about “real art?” Besides, too many people liked the statue. Great art these days has to offend people or, as one friend recently informed me, at least make them uncomfortable. Otherwise, it isn’t art.

A last scenario: while visiting Switzerland 20 years ago, I entered an art museum and found myself in a room with some modern British sculpture. One odd exhibit among many odd exhibits contained seven flat stones running in a short walkway across the floor. Pasted on the wall above the stones, in single-spaced prose, was an explanation of the meaning of the stones. Why the heck the Swiss, who seemed an eminently practical people, allowed such idiocy in the museum baffled me.

Was it art? I guess so; it was, after all, in an art museum. Did it appeal to me? Actually, I prefer rocks outside with some grass around them. Did it have a message? Well, yes: those stones were for me as sure a sign as the stones of ancient Rome that the British Empire was as dead as Dickens’ doornail.

I suspect that Tom Wolfe wouldn’t have cared for those stones either. A criticism of the arts, both literary and visual, and of society makes up most of Tom Wolfe’s latest collection, Hooking Up. Wolfe looks at American sexual mores (“In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, old people in America had prayed, ‘Please, God, don’t let me look poor.’ In the year 2000, they prayed, ‘Please, God, don’t let me look old.’”), computers, sociobiology (“Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill,” the title of this essay, reveals that the man who wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test hasn’t lost his flair for great titles), literature, and the arts.

Certainly the most profound essay in this uneven work is “My Three Stooges,” a long look at the state of American literature, its 50-year dalliance with European formalism, and what the future holds for fiction. Wolfe’s “Three Stooges” are John Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer, all of whom savaged Wolfe in reviews following the publication of his wildly successful novel, Man In Full. Wolfe contends that these three writers attacked him in part from jealousy (a motive which I find dismaying, given the status of these three highly successful writers, although some writers do burn with envy), and in part because he has not succumbed to European formalism, but writes as an American and a realist (a motive for their attacks which seems much more plausible).

Another appealing essay is “The Invisible Artist,” an account of the success and tribulations of sculptor Frederick Hart, who died in 1999 at the age of 55. Hart, a “juvenile delinquent” from Conway, S.C., lived a life that is the stuff of movies. Having fled to Washington, D.C., after being arrested for his involvement as the only white student in a civil rights protest at the University of South Carolina, Hart managed to find work carving stone on the National Cathedral. Naturally gifted in stonecutting and carving, he was chosen during a world-class competition to complete the massive sculpture on the cathedral’s west facade. Later, he put out such works as the Vietnam memorial statue, (the one with the soldiers), as well as hundreds of other pieces.

As Wolfe demonstrates, the art world - those mysterious few who tell us what is art and what is shlock, why a few paving stones are superior to a statue of a boxer - chose to ignore Hart. His works were too popular. “Rejection by the public meant depth,” says Wolfe, and we learn that Hart died with every success except recognition from the critics.

“Ambush At Fort Bragg” is also included in this collection. Wolfe’s novella contains themes which he has examined since The Bonfire Of The Vanities: class differences in the United States, the contempt of many in television for the hinterlands outside Los Angeles and New York, the way in which Americans speak, a concern for getting right the details of different professions. In this story, Mary Cary Brokenborough and Irv Durtscher set up three soldiers whom they suspect of murdering a homosexual. Capturing their conversation with a hidden camera and recorder, Mary Cary then confronts them with “evidence” of their involvement in the killing. More than most novelists, Wolfe is able to give us sharp portrayals of people from different American backgrounds, and the differences sketched here between the New Yorkers and the “redneck” soldiers reveals the great gulf of values that often exists between these two cultures.

Although Wolfe is not always at his best in this collection - readers unfamiliar with the business world of computers may find “Two Young Men Who Went West” difficult going - there is enough of the “right stuff” to make this book a pleasure.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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