What the Artworld Wants Right Now

Andrew Norman Wilson’s essay about being poor, sick, rejected, yet still pretty busy in the art world before exiting for greener pastures, is a smooth, neutral read. Memoir or autofiction, it recounts eight years in the art world in entertaining though barebones vignettes that maintain an expository, not-yet-colored-in feel. It's a work in its own right, but also a draft to be fleshed out in film, which Wilson makes explicit in the last paragraph. Topics are timeless, and the narrative arc is classic: coming of age, human frailty, artists’ poverty, and falling out of market/critical demand come to a head when a player’s, the writer’s rib, goes rogue and needs to be stopped. But very current narrative devices — semi-absurd “signs of the times” events, familiar locales, recent nostalgia, and a few meme references — keep the text feeling on-trend enough.

The metaphors, especially the out-of-control rib, which, instead of forming art in our likeness, punctures vital organs, are not subtle and maybe a bit too perfectly constructed. But on the whole, they work. Yes, a lot of us have had our penises broken off while trying to fuck something bigger than ourselves. Fittingly, during the pandemic portion of the narrative, the staccato sentence structure of main clause on main clause becomes repetitive, and the essay drags for a few paragraphs. But there are pleasantly few adjectives in this text, and those present are either actually descriptive or funny: “I should have stood my barren ground,” which keeps the text flowing.
A main strength of this work is the emotional distance it allows the reader. The tone remains laconic, and moments of explicit interiority are so rare they feel like minimal bedazzlement on a beige suit. It’s not easy to keep engagement high without asking for emotional labor from your recipient, but it’s a smart and untimely move, which saves this text from feeling too indulgent, a danger especially because Wilson’s self-deprecation is so often turned humble brag. In the essay, the author’s filmmaking is referred to as “beyond arthouse.” This text really is not that, but for the format Wilson chose, it works.

Wilson’s essay explicitly performs one of the art world's biggest current trends: retreat to the written word. Narrative writing is hot right now. Artists are writing novels, new spaces with lit-heavy programming are full, and the discourse around the written word is suddenly reverent. The cyclical nature of everything art adjacent, and the economical case for writing — cheap to produce, potentially lucrative to sell — are obvious. But there seems to also be a sense of artistic freedom projected onto the space/realm of writing. While painting is going dreamy and escapist, writing is hardening. Texts are either matter-of-fact or steely; cold adjectives, sex, shattered glass, and detachment.

First-person narration is big. TLDR might now actually function as a protective barrier. While soft painting is escapist in motif but remains fully within the art world, the escape from the constraints of the art world to text is more literal. Wilson’s vignettes not only narrate the wish to escape, but published in the Baffler, they also perform that move. “It's not what the word (word or world?) needs right now” is therefore exactly what the (art) world seems to want right now.