Tom Wolfe on his new book, Back to Blood (video)

BACK TO BLOOD by Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe on his new book, Back to Blood - Telegraph:
The art world has been a never-ending source of amusement for Wolfe. In 1975 he skewered its faddishness and pretensions in a book-length essay called The Painted Word. Since then, as Back to Blood demonstrates with glee, the art has got even sillier, and the prices have climbed into the millions. 'Ah God,’ he says, chuckling at the memory of Art Basel Miami. 'You’ve got all these billionaires dressed like overgrown children in shorts and sneakers, and they’re all pushing and shoving in a frenzy to outbuy each other. Every one of them has an art adviser, and the adviser tells him – they’re all men – what he likes. What the adviser is really telling him is what the reigning fashion is at that moment, and that’s good enough for the buyer, who only wants to have what’s happening on his walls. The big thing now is No Hands art.’ This is Wolfe’s term for conceptual art, because so many of the top conceptual artists never touch their own artworks. Their job is to come up with the concept, and thereafter keep their hands clean. Richard Serra, for example, sends a sketch of some steel walls to a foundry. Once the walls have been manufactured, he hires a crew of 'elves’, as Wolfe calls them, to arrange the walls in a pattern.


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