I was
inspired to pick up Steve Martin's new novel, An Object of Beauty, by a ridiculous kerfuffle that took place at New
York's 92nd Street Y at the end of November. As just about everyone
seems to know by now, Martin and a moderator, Deborah Solomon of The New York Times, were conducting an
open discussion about the novel and its subject, the contemporary art world. Then,
halfway through the talk, the two speakers were given the thumbs-down American Idol-style, with a Y employee
coming on stage with a note for Solomon: "Discuss Steve's career." It
seems that the event was being telecast on closed-circuit TV across the
country, and viewers were emailing in their displeasure that Martin and Solomon
were focusing too much on art and not enough on Martin's showbiz reminiscences.
Backlash ensued, with
bloggers ridiculing the philistine viewers and Martin taking a measure of
revenge on The Times' op-ed page. The
whole thing was a disaster for the Y, which had impulsively offered the live
audience their money back, thereby insulting Martin even more and reaping
sneers from New York's chattering class: here, after all, was one of the city's
premiere cultural institutions catering to lowbrow taste and privileging vapid
entertainment over intellectual substance. For Martin the incident seems to
have proved a bonanza, drawing much more attention to An Object of Beauty than the book might have garnered under normal
circumstances.
After all this drama I
really, really wanted to like An Object
of Beauty. The excesses and vicissitudes of the art market are always
riveting, and Martin's intelligence is evident from the way he has conducted
his multifaceted career. But a sad disappointment was in store: the book,
though mildly diverting, turns out to be the sort of thing that might not have
found a publisher if it hadn't had a famous name attached. To be perfectly
honest it's like chick-lit, only written from a male point of view.
Martin
has chosen to satirize the art business through the device of the rake's
progress. In this case the rake is a woman, the ruthless and ambitious young
Lacey Yeager. Over the course of twenty years or so she goes from "the
spice rack of girls at Sotheby's" to a position at a high-end Madison
Avenue gallery to, finally, a downtown gallery of her own. As she moves onward
and upward Lacey leaves a trail of lustful males in her wake, and Martin
himself is so busy slobbering over his heroine that he seems not to have
noticed that she doesn't quite come alive as a character: she is neither
someone readers can root for nor someone who fascinates by repelling, in the
great tradition of Becky Sharp. She is just a not-very-likeable female, more a
device for reflecting the Zeitgeist
than a living human being.
Not that Martin can't nail
his targets when he has a mind to. It's clear that he knows a great deal about
the art business and understands the submerged psychological forces governing
its ebb and flow: the group-think and mass hysteria, the exhibitionism, the
Darwinian forces that elevate some works and kill others. And when Martin gets
to the contemporary art bubble of the late 1990s he really moves into his
element:
Art
was about to acquire the aura of an internationally recognizable asset, a
unique and emotional emblem of the good life….
…Whether it
was any good or not, the sheer amount of it—to the dismay of cranky critics—was
redefining what art could be. Since the 1970s, art schools had shied away from
teaching skills and concentrated on teaching thought. Yet this was the first
time in conventional art history where no single movement dominated, no
manifesto declared its superiority, and diversity bounced around like spilled
marbles on concrete.
Indeed. Martin has fun
with fads of the period: "pale art" ("faint things with not much
going on in them"); "high-craft OCD" ("those guys who take
a thousand pinheads and paint a picture of their grandmother on every one");
"low-craft ironic" ("a fancy name for wink-wink nudge-nudge")—and
let's not forget "angry pussy": art made with menstrual blood. Daniel
Franks, Martin's self-effacing, Nick Carraway-style narrator, is a congenial
guide to the scene and its tribal rites.
"In
dialogue" [Daniel comments] was a new phrase that art writers could no
longer live without. It meant that hanging two works next to or opposite each
other produced a third thing, a dialogue, and that we were now all the better
for it. I suppose the old phrase would have been "an art show," but
now we were listening. It also hilariously implied that when the room was empty
of viewers, the two works were still chatting.
All
this is amusing enough, and if only Martin would stick to cultural satire he
would be fine. But he keeps reverting obsessively to overheated melodrama and
tacky soft-core sex reminiscent, oddly enough, of the work of pulp-mistress
Judith Krantz. Here for instance is Lacey enjoying the high life with her rich
Parisian beau, Patrice Claire:
They walked
around the block first, each proud to be on the other's arm. The sun was just
dropping, and the bedecked, bejeweled mannequins in the store windows were like
saluting soldiers as they strolled in their enchanted state of opulent
seduction….
Now,
feeling the kind of euphoria that can overtake you at this time of day, at this
temperature, at this level of breeze, after one drink, when the person beside
you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not
imaginable, Lacey and Patrice went back to the Carlyle….
They
ordered room service, sat at their own corner table with views across and up
Manhattan, and sipped a bottle of wine until there was nothing left to do but
kiss, and kiss again, for anyone with a pair of binoculars to see. Lacey led
him into the bedroom, where the hotel sheets were fresh and rich, where the
lighting had been preset, and where, placed opposite the bed, illuminated by
two candles that threw their light upward, was the Matisse that had overseen
their last coupling….
The scene goes on for some
time in this vein, with Lacey donning, after sex, "a robe that swathed her
like meringue." (Could this be a hotel bathrobe, or one stashed away by
Patrice for just such an occasion? There is no mention of Lacey having brought
an overnight bag to their date.) An
Object of Beauty contains any number of such episodes, revealing the
surprising fact that at the age of sixty-five, and having enjoyed spectacular
success and world fame for four decades now, Steve Martin is still as bedazzled
by glamour as any young man from the provinces.
Such starry-eyed wonder
sits awkwardly with Martin's knowing cynicism about the business and marketing
of art. Just what kind of a book was Martin attempting to write? A satirical
novel? A serious novel? A novel of ideas? A sour romance? Sophisticated gossip?
An Object of Beauty never quite
succeeds on any of these levels; it may please for an hour or two, in the
manner of a magazine article, but it is too artificial and contrived to hold
our interest for very long.
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