What is The Painted Word about?

The Painted Word began as a provocation and became a minor classic. Tom Wolfe's argument, launched in 1975, is that twentieth-century American fine art — Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and the movements that followed — had become entirely dependent on a priestly class of critics to explain it. Without the accompanying text, the theory, the manifesto, Wolfe argues, the paintings are inert. The art world had inverted the traditional relationship: instead of theory following art, art was being produced to illustrate theory.

Wolfe traces what he calls the "boho dance," the cultural ritual by which artists in New York performed poverty and rebellion while remaining entirely beholden to the approval of three or four critics — chiefly Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg — who could anoint or destroy a career with a paragraph. The Abstract Expressionists needed Greenberg to explain what their canvases meant. The audience, unable to look at a Rothko or a de Kooning and see anything without instruction, took their cues from the theorists. The painting had become the painted word.

The satirical set pieces are sharp. Wolfe reconstructs the atmosphere of New York art world gatherings, the anxious deference to critical opinion, and the way each new avant-garde movement required an ever more elaborate theoretical apparatus to distinguish itself from what came before. Minimalism needed more theory than Abstract Expressionism; Conceptual Art more still — culminating in work where the idea replaced the object entirely, the logical endpoint of the trajectory Wolfe is skewering.

As a piece of argument the book has real weaknesses: Wolfe dismisses rather than engages, and the satirical voice crowds out the analysis. He never fully accounts for why critics became so dominant, or whether the situation he describes was unique to a particular moment rather than constitutive of modern art as such. But as a provocation it works. The book forces you to ask a genuine question: what exactly is the relationship between the art object and the discourse around it, and who gets to decide?