Pure art as a gift outside the money-and-publicity machine — the wife-as-painter parable
echoes
From: 'A Frightening Time in America': An Interview with David Foster Wallace (Ostap Karmodi, Radio Svoboda / NYRB)
- Early text: n/a (interview) — "I'm suspicious of the word" pure, DFW
begins. His example is his wife, a painter who mainly "makes them as gifts
for people" rather than chasing galleries and market value, because that
process would make the work less fun for her. He extends it to himself: the
only way to make "pure" art in America might be to "remove oneself from the
public sphere and produce" "that art only as gifts, where there's no money
involved and no attempt" at publicity — but if everyone did that there would
be no public art, a paradox he says he has no answer to. [NYRB text]
- IJ echo: the art-versus-commerce polarity that underwrites both
entertainment-purpose (what a work is for — gift/communication vs.
commercial capture) and book-as-entertainment (whether IJ performs or
resists the samizdat's logic). Here the load-bearing distinction is gift vs.
market; in IJ the samizdat is the pure-pleasure commodity's limit case.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation