Greg Lazarus's Blog - Posts Tagged "edmund-white"
Experimental Art
I've just finished Edmund White’s latest memoir, Inside a Pearl, about his fifteen or so years in Paris. Although I don’t think it’s his best work, it is still titillating, absorbing, gossipy, even scandalous. My favourite of his books is probably The Farewell Symphony, because it’s so frank and funny, sexy and shocking.
Inside a Pearl claims that paintings can afford to be much more experimental than books. I’d never thought about it like that before, but he has a point – if you want wide appeal as an author, then, to some extent, you need to track the cultural norm.
In Eddie’s own words: “It took ten critics, two dealers, and twenty collectors to get an artist on the cover of Time, whereas a novelist had to convince eighty thousand readers to buy his book to win a comparable fame. For this reason, the painters could be more daringly experimental than the writers, who had to please so many more culture consumers, many of them with brows firmly in the middle.”
Inside a Pearl claims that paintings can afford to be much more experimental than books. I’d never thought about it like that before, but he has a point – if you want wide appeal as an author, then, to some extent, you need to track the cultural norm.
In Eddie’s own words: “It took ten critics, two dealers, and twenty collectors to get an artist on the cover of Time, whereas a novelist had to convince eighty thousand readers to buy his book to win a comparable fame. For this reason, the painters could be more daringly experimental than the writers, who had to please so many more culture consumers, many of them with brows firmly in the middle.”
