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“Architecture: Choice or Fate” by Léon Krier

krier portrait

By Ray Sawhill

The post-Warhol now isn’t a moment when a taste for the quiet, the tender and the modest gets you much credit. People who are fascinated by forms, conventions and codes — and who see much that’s potentially wonderful in them — have largely given up trying to make a public case for them; there seems to be no way of escaping their association with stuffiness, let alone (ultimate sin) boringness. The polemicist, architect and town planner Léon Krier is one of the few who’s currently taking this temperament public. His new book, “Architecture: Choice or Fate” (Andreas Papadakis), though stuffy indeed, isn’t just not boring, it’s enthralling.

Although not widely known in America, the Luxembourg-born Krier has been a ferocious and witty provocateur on the town-planning circuit for several decades; his ideas lie behind such icons of the New Urbanism as Seaside, the Florida town that served as setting (and object of mockery) for “The Truman Show.” He’s likely to become more familiar over the next few years as the planner of Poundbury, a new British town in Dorset that’s being created under the sponsorship of the Prince of Wales. More than 100 Poundbury houses have been completed (by a variety of architects and builders), and are now inhabited; the New York Times reports that the development is a surprise hit. Krier — who for years was better known for his ideas than for anything he’d built — has now helped create a town that’s likely to become a standard on the New Urbanist grand tour.

Poundbury

“Architecture: Choice or Fate” provides a chance to sample Krier’s mind and eye. At first glance, it’s simply a handsome coffee-table book by a guy who hasn’t built much. Images and diagrams of schemes, plans and proposals are accompanied by quirkily organized comments from Krier. In fact, in an understated way, it’s a complex and intriguing work. Text, pictures and design all mesh and advance a vision; Krier is making a case and exemplifying a method at the same time. We’re used to this, but we have come to associate it with modernism — with Joyce or Calvino, for example. We make comments when reading such books about how their real subject is “the artist’s mind,” or perhaps “consciousness itself.”

Krier’s book has that kind of complexity and interwovenness, but it’s explicitly anti-modernist — and in discussing buildings and towns, he’s proposing that the mind itself play a different role than it plays in modernism. Forget the fireworks of abstraction and inwardness: How about using the mind (and buildings and cities) to help us find a place in the world, and in history too? If you enter into the book’s method and argument, it can be indescribably moving to turn a page and find a delicate pen-and-ink cartoon of a man on a porch looking past a colonnade toward a plaza: Consciousness and social life, for so long at odds, have opened back up to each other once again.

In this very special branch of literature — iconoclastic thinking about buildings and towns — the two towering figures are Jane Jacobs (a genius version of the little old lady in tennis shoes) and Christopher Alexander, whose “A Pattern Language” has a perennial, Rubik’s-cube-like fascination. By comparison, Krier might be a gentleman poet with a tender-yet-mischievous streak; his easy-breathing and whimsical neoclassicism will be a surprise for readers who associate the style with stiffness, brutality and imperialism.

Krier’s arguments in favor of “the modernity of traditional architecture” often take the form of the wry near-epigram. On how architects are to blame for making themselves irrelevant: “As long as artists arbitrarily assume the right to decide what is or is not art it is logical that the public will just as arbitrarily feel that they have the right to reject it.” On the way modernists and their neo- and post- descendants overemphasize the role of inspiration: “As is the case with all good things in life — love, good manners, language, cooking — personal creativity is required only rarely.”

The book’s art includes reproductions of paintings — by a number of artists, including David Ligare, Rita Wolff and Carl Laubin — of Krier proposals. These images are touching, slightly absurd fantasias that bring out both the impressiveness and the fragility of civilization; you gather that, for the urbane Krier, city life is, or can be, idyllic. Krier himself supplies drawings of towns and buildings he has imagined, as well as a large number of cartoons, some humorous, some didactic. He’s a first-rate cartoonist in the bittersweet-boulevardier mode of J.J. Sempé.

krier cartoon

As a production in its own right, “Architecture: Choice or Fate” is lavish yet approachable, contained yet unfolding, affording moments of lush yet pristine beauty as well as pockets of refreshing quiet. This is a book for contemplation and browsing. I found myself beguiled by its principles of organization and by the touches of the marvelous and the irrational in its art and decoration.

Bizarrely, Krier — who so beautifully makes a case for a humane classicism — has often been reviled by other architects and planners; he can be quite funny about how quick some are to call him a “reactionary,” even a “fascist.” Part of the point, in fact, of the New York Times report about Poundbury was that visitors were surprised by how pleasant a place it’s shaping up to be, because what had been predicted was a nightmare of kitsch and control — a miniature, right-wing version of that modernist disaster, Brasilia. I wonder if an explanation might be that some people are outraged by any suggestion that common sense and poetry don’t need to be antagonists. Their loss. If a Krier town is anything like a Krier book, I wouldn’t mind a house in one.

©1998 by Ray Sawhill. First appeared in Salon magazine.

“Kinski Uncut” by Klaus Kinski

klaus

By Ray Sawhill

For Klaus Kinski, the star of such films as Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” over the top was never close to enough, and in “Kinski Uncut” (Viking) he produced what is probably the most outrageous actor’s autobiography ever — less a memoir than a hyperbolically pornographic performance piece.

The book, which was a scandalous best seller in Europe, was on its way to American stores in 1988 when Random House’s lawyers grew alarmed and had it recalled — though enough copies got loose to make it an underground mini-classic. The version that has now been released by Viking has been trimmed of a few pages — “There was too much monotonous sex with chambermaids,” says the book’s editor — but includes new details about Kinski’s final years in California. Initials now disguise a few potentially litigious figures.

What made the book a cult sensation are its portraits of film people and its horror-comedy accounts of sex. It’s the cheerful relish Kinski takes in his own egomania that earns the book a place on the camp shelf, alongside such wonders as “Hollywood Babylon” and Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diaries.

© 1996 by Newsweek, Inc. Reproduced by permission

 

“Horny Biker Slut” by John Howard

horny02

Hags on Hogs

By Ray Sawhill

If you worry that upscale comic books such as Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” have destroyed comics as an unselfconscious entertainment vehicle, then you may find the work of John Howard in the irregularly-published smut comic book “Horny Biker Slut” (Last Gasp) rejuvenating and cheering. Printed in black and white on cheap paper, it’s disposable, gratuitous and inexcusably vulgar. It’s impossible to defend in any respectable terms.

Howard writes and draws two stories per issue, and includes a couple of full page drawings too. (The stories by other writers and artists in the issues touch on the same themes.) His work mostly features a rotating cast of motorcycle mamas—members of the Road Weasels. Life for the sluts, who are built like Olympic athletes, consists of riding choppers, participating in epic gang bangs, guzzling rotgut (preferred brand: “Antelope Piss”), and brawling with members of a rival gang, the Skull Fuckers.

Heavy on the blacks, cross-hatchings and Fritz Lang-like low angles, Howard’s visual style is out of expressionist woodcuts and the men’s room. It’s essentially a tribute to the inescapable physical crudeness of sex—to puddles and slime, appendages and clefts, puckers and oozings and stink. But Howard has the fastidiousness of the true pornographer, incising every curly hair on the underside of an overweight belly, every bump and hole in a pierced nipple, and every wrinkle in a tight scrotum with fondness and humor. Protrusions, flaps and orifices are made colossal with sexual assertiveness in ways that can make you giggle and gag. It has to be said that, as an artist at least, Howard has a way with sphincters.

Part of the fascination of smut of course is that it’s largely about your subjective response. In one story, a couple of buzz-cut toughs challenge the lead slut to screw them both. When they slam their monsters into her simultaneously, she gasps, then grits her teeth and calls out: “I got the strongest pussy-muscles in the tristate area! … Nobody fucks me into submission, losers!” Why do I find this cry of indomitability and pride more moving than Rastignac’s—”He eyed [Paris] … and said with superb defiance, ‘It’s war between us now!'”—at the end of “Pere Goriot”?

Howard is as crudely male as Henry Miller, and he has Bukowski’s gusto for the gutter. His work offers similar lewd, funny pleasures, but “Horny Biker Slut” has no surprises of melancholy or feeling. Howard is frankly skulking and furtive, and behind his deadpan is the spirit of a baggy-pants variety-show entertainer. “Horny Biker Slut” is also free of the element of generational self-congratulation boomer-era underground comix often had. In fact, I can’t detect a political or aesthetic agenda behind a single panel. (The dog collars, leathers and studs are blessedly un-chic.) In five issues, Howard hasn’t wimped out once; even the exhortations to practice safe sex are sweetly gross.

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Howard is so methodical and clear-headed a degenerate that he might be a family-man accountant whose ya-yas come from perpetrating the occasional anonymous outrage. In a note to his readers in his most recent issue he announced that he’d got married, but that we weren’t to worry—”she knows what I do for a living.”

The appeal of his fantasy for the (inevitably) male reader is that the sluts aren’t just huge, gorgeous and powerful—they’re also raunchier than you’ll ever be. No tender feelings here! (The sluts may be tough, frightening babes, but they’re still projections of male fantasies.) What the comic expresses (and celebrates) is the never-say-die quality of men’s ability to fantasize about sex—an ability many men enjoy equating with the life-force itself.

The best time to thumb through an issue of “Horny Biker Slut” is probably after an exhausting day at work. It hits the spot then as satisfyingly as booze; it makes you feel free to wallow in your surliness and resentment. The gentrifiers may have taken just about everything else from you, but you can still call the hostility and filth your own.

©1992 by Ray Sawhill. First appeared in The Modern Review.

“The Client” by John Grisham

grisham

By Ray Sawhill

Reading the bestselling novels of the young ex-lawyer John Grisham is like being privy to the conversations ambitious middle-Americans have with themselves. I’ve never read any fiction, including porn, romance novels and comic books, that’s so completely unself-aware, and I’ve never read a writer who’s less aware of his effects. He’s the Dan Quayle of novelists. His books are strangers to such concerns as shape, theme, character, and form; there’s nothing in them to wrestle with in the way of meaning.

It’s fiction for people who don’t normally read fiction by a guy who isn’t much drawn to it himself, except as a business proposition — as an effort to score a bonanza. But the books don’t seem to be experienced as cynical by his fans. (Is it because they too understand the world largely as a mass of business propositions?) His novels are for and of a world where making it is everything. Reading them is a little like watching game shows, except his novels are for people with college educations rather than working-class people. Grisham offers a little suspense, a little sexual temptation, and some money-and-job details to relate to.

The guy isn’t a genre craftsman, and the books aren’t exactly formula novels. At the same time, these suspense novels are an entertaining treasure trove of unwitting Dadaism. But where Dada was European and sophisticated, this is homegrown and inadvertent. The Dadaists were conscious artists purveying an idea of the unconscious. Grisham’s books are the unconscious. They don’t exactly express the ambivalent feelings many Americans have towards sophistication, but those feelings are certainly in them.

Grisham’s novels — he has written four so far and more than 19 million copies are in print — are full of scrambled syntax and crazy names, but there’s nothing of the puzzle-maker about him as a writer, and there’s nothing in the books that’s meant to be broken down or analyzed. Relationships dart in and out of the narrative frame in a way that, without meaning to, recalls Queneau. “Klickman was a meathead with little finesse,” the narrator of Grisham’s new novel “The Client” (Doubleday) tells us. Two pages later, the main character, an 11-year-old boy, apparently struck by what a great word choice the narrator made, begins a lecture to Klickman (a cop) this way: “Let me tell you something, meathead.” Within another couple of pages, the narrator, evidently pleased the 11-year-old enjoyed the word “meathead,” takes to calling the cop “Meathead Klickman.”

Listen to the Grisham narrator:

  • “Mo had at least four guns either on him or within reach.”
  • “He paced around the office as if in deep thought.”
  • “His screaming lungs were almost audible.”
  • “At some point, about halfway to the jet, Mark stopped.”

Sentences like these can really get you thinking: If the narrator doesn’t know, who does?

The idioms the narrator uses often seem to come from Mars. One character “cracks his window so he could breathe.” Another “cuts his eyes in all directions.” A singer in a black church opens her “vast mouth” and out flows “a deep, rich, mellow river of glorious a capella.”

At times you find yourself wondering if Grisham is trying to compete with Lewis Carroll:

“The name’s Reggie, okay.”

“Sure, Reggie. Listen, K.O. just brought me up to date.”

Even allowing for some attempts at comic characterization and for how eccentric names can be in the south, Grisham has the most topsy-turvy ear for character names imaginable. Nearly all are like something S.J. Perelman invented for a Marx Brothers movie: Cat Bruster, L. Winston Lotterhouse, Gavin Verheek, Gray Grantham, Fletcher Coal, Denton Voyles, Eric East, Clint Van Hooser, Smith Keen, Hinky Myrick, Mason Paypur, Willis Upchurch, Paul Gronke, Emmitt Waycross, Norma Thrash, Link Dole, Dr. Wilbert Rodeheaver.

In “The Client,” Grisham outdoes even himself in the name department, showing a completely inexplicable fondness for names with repeating letters: Boyd Boyette, Roy Foltrigg, Reggie Love, Penny Patoula, Chester Tanfill, Walter Deeble, Slick (Mole) Moeller, Marcia Riggle, Omar Noose. In a virtuoso touch, a few characters win names with double sets of double letters: Wally Boxx, Barry Muldanno, Skipper Scherff.

When a couple of thugs hole up at a Radisson Hotel, it certainly seems like the right place for them. And when you learn that the lead character adores pizza, you’re relieved — it’s the right food for him. If you look for a Nabokovian pattern of linguistic playfulness here, you won’t find one. You end up wondering: is this a tick that comes from Grisham’s years in Mississippi and Tennessee? The names contribute to sentences that really leave you cross-eyed: “He had an escort of sorts with Wally and Fink and agents Trumann and Scherff.”

When Grisham sets out to provide detail and atmosphere, what he achieves goes past the Hemingwayesque into pure corporate-speak. “The lights were bright and the carpet was clean.” “A minister of some generic faith appeared.” “His voice was loud, yet warm. His words were educated, yet colloquial.” “Deacons danced. Elders chanted. Women fainted.”

Reading his novels all at once, you turn up gems for the auteurists. Why, in three of the four novels, is there a black character — always a different one — whose first name is Roosevelt? In “The Client,” as in his other books, Grisham seems drawn to backsides: “Slow on his ass”; “He shifted his wide ass”; “Wally perched his tiny butt”; “He followed her, watching her wide rear end” — all these appear, in the narrator’s voice, within twenty pages of each other. In the first two pages of one chapter we get: “the screaming and ass-chewing had ended hours ago. He’d have the pleasure of busting her ass.”

Grisham’s storytelling is so methodical his novels sometimes have the minimalist fascination of those repetitious passages in Beckett where a character moves stones from one pocket to another. At these moments, the books seem more akin to office supply catalogues than to traditional fiction.

I don’t know what to make of the fact that the main character has gotten younger in each of the books. In “A Time to Kill,” he’s a lawyer in his early thirties; in “The Firm” he’s a new hiree; in “The Pelican Brief” it’s a woman law student. In “The Client” it’s the 11-year-old boy. Is there anything to make of this? Grisham’s scrambled narrative voice — a potpourri of steals from movies and TV shows, premature wise-guy cynicism and self-pity — and the main characters do synch up a little better in “The Client” than in the earlier books.

But it’s almost impossible to understand what the central plot of the novel is. The setup is clear: a mob lawyer is trying to commit suicide. The boy tries to foil him. Drunk and morose, the mob guy tells the kid where a dead senator’s body has been buried, then manages to do himself in. But the rest of the book! The only thing that keeps it from shutting down entirely is that the boy can’t decide whether or not to tell anyone his secret.

That said, it’s easy to understand why, when you board a plane and walk to your seat, you see so many businesspeople reading a Grisham novel. The books are guileless expressions of America’s middle class. They aren’t middle America as seen and expressed by an artist; they’re middle America entertaining itself. A Grisham novel is cousin to those catalogues you find in the seat pockets of airplanes advertising desk accessories, leather business-card holders, fold-up luggage carts, pool floats and dopey gifts for the kids.

It’s bewildering, if rather sweet, in “The Firm” that the book simply assumes we’re going to identify with its main character — a nice guy, a little competitive maybe (Grisham’s concession to the fact that the guy’s actually a shark), who just wants to make money. He wants to achieve this by doing tax law, and we’re expected to say: Smart move, I can see doing that myself.

What’s on many millions of people’s minds is right there on the surface in these books. Nothing has been digested, nothing transformed. They’re as genuine and true to themselves as the work of what are usually thought of as folk artists, only the culture they issue from — middling colleges, suburbia, a couple of cars, concerns about savings plans and office politics — isn’t what we’re accustomed to thinking of as a folk culture. Even the suspense-novel frame has a middle-American purity. Grisham has spoken about learning how to do suspense from an article in Writer’s Digest: it’s a matter of lots of dialogue and action; creating a main character for people to identify with; trapping him in an evil conspiracy; closing things in around him; then getting him out.

What he puts in his books is exactly what’s in the air when you’re among hustling middle Americans. He’s one of them; he’s their boy. Here’s some of what’s in the novels:

  • The desire of middle Americans to retire early to someplace sunny.
  • Their attachment to seeing themselves as wised-up former idealists, although all they’ve ever really cared about is making money.
  • The vindictiveness they have towards media liberals, experts, technicians — “sophisticates.”
  • Their feelings of betrayal and aggrievedness. They once hoped they’d enjoy their job, and it has turned out to be a bore, and the people at the office are greedy creeps.
  • The way they live well but always feel anxious about money.
  • Their mixture of priggishness and lasciviousness. Even while they’re giving each other the eye, expressions of disgust — towards politicians, towards the aged — keep popping out of them.

The novel of his Grisham has said he cares most about is his first, “A Time to Kill.” The book involves his hero’s feelings about a case he has taken on: defending a black man accused of murdering two rednecks who raped his 10-year-old daughter. What Grisham’s hero feels angriest about is that he isn’t getting paid much for the case — which he has taken not because of any feelings about justice (it’s assumed we all agree that some people, in this case the rednecks, just deserve to die), but to get noticed.

He worries that the case will be stolen from him by a more famous lawyer. When it is, he berates the black prisoner for having ditched him in favor of the big-timer, and we’re expected to side with the main character in this scene — to agree that he’s being treated outrageously. He wins the case back — worrying some about the ethics of this — then blows a major part of the trial. He gets drunk. He stares at himself in the mirror. He pulls himself together for a winning, touchingly sincere final speech to the jury. (It’s perfect that Tom Cruise — master of willed ingenuousness — will be the first onscreen Grisham hero.) Our experience with novels leads us to expect “criticism” of such a hero for his inability to care about others. Here, the criticism never comes. The entire point is what he goes through to nail this case — essentially, to advance his career.

As a fantasy, this story is central to all of Grisham’s books. Sexually, what happens is: the Klan starts to make threats, and the main character sends his wife and daughter to his parents’ home. Instantly, a beautiful, liberal, intellectual, bra-less northern law student volunteers to assist on the case — she’s from Boston but is at school at Ole Miss. She buys beer and trades wiseass banter; she looks swell in her jeans (offering a fetching “rear view”). She does research — and her best to seduce the hero. She wants it; he does too. When things really warm up between them, she gets kidnapped by the Klan.

The scene where the Klan tortures her is the sexiest passage in Grisham, if you’re open to responding that way to this kind of thing. She’s tied facing a post in front of a burning cross. Her blouse, skirt and underwear are ripped from her back — bottom alert! The robed ones threaten to whip her; they chop her hair off and release her.

She’s alluring, she handles the complexities of the law more confidently than the hero can, and she’s a little too fast for him; she threatens to take him away from the mother-wife. So the Klan rises up and punishes her, because finally what she represents is “all crap” — one of Grisham’s, his narrator’s, and his characters’ favorite terms. The hero’s achievement in the novel is that he wins the case and he doesn’t fuck the northern girl.

Two key sentences appear in “A Time to Kill”: “he had never won an argument, in court or out, with an expert witness,” and “the embarrassment turned into anger.” These sentences express Grisham totally as a writer: resentment towards expertise, technique and sensitivity, and towards any perspective on his feelings about things.

The only other scene in Grisham that has any sexiness at all is in “The Firm.” The hero is in the Caymans, disapprovingly helping his boss launder some money, and (disapprovingly) watching the older man make out with young women. The hero rejects the advances of a few girls — rather nastily, as though their wanting to frolic made them disgusting. But then he has a few drinks, and a cute, mischievous girl in a bikini top and sarong lures him down the beach. They’re alone, it’s warm and the water is seductive. She unwraps the sarong and — she’s wearing not just a bikini bottom but a string/thong. He can’t resist playing with that string…For the rest of the novel he’s upset because he couldn’t resist fucking her. He wonders whether he should confess to his wife; we learn shortly that the beach girl was part of a conspiracy that’s entrapping the hero.

The central fantasy in all Grisham’s books is of being on the verge of puberty, getting a look at adulthood — yech, when that string comes off, it’s confusing, it’s disgusting — and managing to leap over it to a wonderful retirement where you still have your youth and looks. (This is adulthood as seen by a young boy: a matter of corruption, spies, conspiracies, wiretaps. The great thing is to outwit adulthood and get away with it.) Glimpsing power and sex, you return to Mom and escape with her to the sun, where bottoms are clean, plump and fresh –where they do nothing but arouse, and are wrapped up enticingly, like gifts and candies. Given that, it’s almost surreal to learn from published interviews that as many as two-thirds of Grisham’s readers are women, and also that he regrets having let his hero fuck the girl on the beach.

  • Buy a copy of “The Client.”
  • Francis Coppola’s film of Grisham’s “The Rainmaker” ain’t half bad. Buy a copy.
  • Though many people hated it, I loved Robert Altman’s atmospheric and satirical Grisham takeoff, “The Gingerbread Man,” starring Kenneth Branagh doing a great take on Bill Clinton.

©1993 by Ray Sawhill. First appeared in The Modern Review.

“Lullaby Town” by Robert Crais

crais

By Ray Sawhill

Elvis Cole, the hero of Robert Crais’ “Lullaby Town,” does business the California way — it looks like casual recreation to people from less forgiving climates. The genre hasn’t spawned a purer example of mankind in its L.A. incarnation than Elvis. When friends visit, he puts salmon and eggplant on the grill. His wisecracks usually include a movie reference. His detecting skill is always ready to be called on. But why make a big deal out of it?

In “Lullaby Town,” Crais’ third private-eye novel, Elvis is hired by a film director to find his ex-wife and child; the search leads to rural Connecticut and into the heart of a Manhattan mob family. Shivering in the cold and wincing at the filth, Elvis is unable to understand why anyone puts up with life in the Northeast. But he gets to the brutal heart of things in his own way, and he and his ninja-style partner make an impressive team. In terms of lethal efficiency, they’re a match for the bullet-spraying East Coast goons.

Crais has a reader-friendly style, and he’s a meticulous craftsman; the relaxed-seeming plot keeps paying off with scenes of surprising tension. Supple and low key, he’s actually far better at the private-eye-novel racket than most writers who make a loud point of being down and dirty. He gets the job done without losing track of the pleasure.

© 1992 by Newsweek, Inc. Reproduced by permission.

“In Praise of Commercial Culture” by Tyler Cowen

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By Ray Sawhill

You probably know that Impressionism couldn’t have occurred if it hadn’t been for the invention of metal tubes for paints. You may not, on the other hand, have wondered about the technology needed to quarry and transport the blocks of marble that Michelangelo turned into sculptures, or about the kinds of financial organizations a culture needs before it can fund such efforts.

Tyler Cowen, a young economics professor at George Mason University, writes about many such questions in his refreshing new look at markets and art, managing somehow to steer clear of both esthetic and neo-Marxist high-mindedness. In his new book “In Praise of Commercial Culture” (Harvard), he sets forth two arguments. The first is that, although we like to imagine that artists live and produce in defiance of the market, art has had no better friend than capitalism. Imperfect though they may be, markets have opened up opportunities and promoted diversity; they have sprung artists free from aristocratic patronage, and they have provided artists with ever more, and ever cheaper, materials.

The evidence he marshals is overwhelming. One long chapter concerns wealth, cities and art, and reminds us that the cultural breakthroughs that took place in Florence and Venice in the Renaissance, in Amsterdam in the 17th century and in 18th century London were all partnered by commercial flowerings. He’s good too on the entrepreneurial energies artists have displayed over the ages. The typical Renaissance artist wasn’t hiding in a garret, wrestling with demons in an effort to express himself. He had product to move, assistants to mobilize, contracts to draw up and customers to pursue — and he generally worked on commission. Those ur-rebels, the Impressionists, didn’t just kick out against the esthetics of the Academie, they (and their colleagues) worked hard to develop ways to outwit its stranglehold on sales outlets.

At its best, the book is a convincing and informative paean to the resourcefulness of artists and to the market’s ability to allow ever more niches to be discovered and exploited. Cowen’s second argument — a call for cultural optimism — is weaker. He wants to pose a question to the Allan Blooms on the right and to the Frankfurt School fans on the left. Thanks to capitalism, consumers today have more art more easily available to them than anyone else has ever enjoyed in all history. How, then, can anyone justify being a pessimist about the fate of culture? It’s a point that needs more stressing than it generally gets. But the openness of Cowen’s approach is more eloquent than the way he elaborates his argument; he misses out, for instance, on the sheer fun of being a crank. And though he seems solid as an economist, he’s woefully underequipped as a critic, undermining his case with, for example, lengthy college-paper-level claims for the greatness of pop music. Cowen could use a little more crankiness himself; as it is, he sometimes comes across as an ungainly mixture of Pollyanna and whippersnapper.

But his first 120 pages are the most accessible introduction to the history of the economics of Western art that I know of, and deserve a place on that shelf of writing you wish someone had steered you to as a freshman. It’s surprising how enlightening and pleasurable it can be to see art discussed in terms of “incentives” and “funding models.” The art lore alone makes the book a rewarding browse. Did you know that it took the skin of more than 300 sheep to produce one Gutenberg Bible? If the experience of reading Cowen can sometimes be like watching 3-by-5 cards flip dutifully past — the book is largely a collation of other people’s research — he avoids trendiness and jargon, and he does keep pulling his facts together and then sorting them out. Cowen’s common sense wrestles your thoughts and fantasies down to solid earth — which is where, as most artists will admit when they’re being honest, 90 percent of art-making takes place.

© 1998 by Ray Sawhill. First appeared in Salon magazine.