Telling the success story of the fictional artist Jed Martin, first famous for his offbeat Michelin map photography and then for his series of pictorial portraits of celebrities like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Houellebecq analyzes the secret mechanisms of the contemporary art world.
1. contemporary. Telling the success story of the fictional artist Jed Martin, first famous for his offbeat Michelin map photography and then for his series of pictorial portraits of celebrities like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Houellebecq analyzes the secret mechanisms of the contemporary art world. In his novel, there are a PR lady, a gallery owner, a buyer from Abramovich, art critics who forge reputations. The artist, in the midst of the fuss around his creations, modestly stands aside.
2. Frankly. Welbeck fills the novel with the names of his contemporaries – the writer Frederic Beigbeder, the famous French TV presenter Jean-Pierre Perno, the most expensive artists Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, as well as … Michel Houellebecq, a drunk, lonely and smart, whom the namesake author leads to a very abrupt denouement. Ridiculing the limitations of art market participants, Houellebecq becomes serious when he talks about the meaning of art. “I want to leave a witness to the world…” explains Jed Martin to a journalist. This, it seems, is the purpose of the artist according to Houellebecq: to record the birth, life and finale of ideas, things, people. That’s just to do it without falsehood and lies, only by maintaining complete independence from critics, in solitude and serving the cause. By the way, this is how, according to rumors, the writer himself has been living in recent years.
3. Wisely. In Map and Territory, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt last year, there is a quiet, almost gentle melancholy. Not hurting, not hysterical, sounding exactly muffled by the noise of the metro and the voices of a baroque concert in headphones. Atypical for the author tired wisdom.
Corpus, 480 c.
Maya Kucherskaya