Please read Donna Tartt's new essay on what art is and isn't!!!!

"A work of art has an unconscious. It thinks; it dreams. A painting or an opera or a film that has stood the test of time is a capacious public dream that’s big enough to let a lot of people in..."

Donna Tartt’s introduction to J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice was excerpted in the July edition of Harper’s. It’s perfect, arresting, glimmery, inviting, yours. After reading it, you’ll want to do something crazy. Jump in a body of water (cold.) Call someone you shouldn’t. Start another novel. Pull the other one out of the proverbial drawer.

“I LOVE EVERY LINE,” one friend texted me after reading it. “THANK YOU,” messaged another. And yes, these texts were all-caps. You’ll see why (read here.)

By the way, I think we are due for another novel, yes? Typically she publishes on a ten-year cadence and The Goldfinch came out in 2013...

My fingers are so crossed they’re aching.

My Favorite Lines

Art is escape

"Whenever we make, or experience, art, we escape the chronic fatigue of screens."

Art (always, but especially now) is under attack

"In our own sped-up nightmare of screens and algorithms, accelerating more wildly every day, art—and artists—are battered with all the same old discouraging assaults along with new ones that Whistler never dreamed of."

Art is the only way to know ourselves

"Art is the only truly effective means we have of engaging, in a communal context, the psyche on its own terms."

Art is not, never will be, tech

"This is not the surrealism of predictive AI—endlessly recircling within its own sidewindings and elisions—but the bizarre wide-open Real out on the edges of experience..."

Art is not flashy, not shallow, not predetermined

"Martel tells us that, according to Joyce, true art is static—both demanding calm and creating a calm microclimate of its own, a still space where, as Joyce says, ‘the mind is arrested and raised above desiring and loathing.’ But artifice—or false art—orients us toward what is flashy and shallow—toward movement and, more specifically, in the predetermined path where it wants us to move."

Art dreams (and thinks)

"A work of art has an unconscious. It thinks; it dreams. A painting or an opera or a film that has stood the test of time is a capacious public dream that’s big enough to let a lot of people in..."

Art doesn’t wag its finger

"A work of artifice, intent on pushing the audience into a predetermined direction or point of view however well-intended, is incapable of suggesting a way forward through a dilemma of any complexity without being preachy and simplistic. But in helping us think with the world, instead of about it, art—which has no agenda other than being itself—always reminds us that all human-created systems are contingent..."

Art is sublime!!!

"The Real that art helps us come into contact with is something far more slippery, and far closer to what Walter Benjamin called the ‘true surrealist face of existence.’"

Art is prehistory, prophetic, unreal

“But Martel’s definition of Art with a capital A extends beyond the gilded category of fine arts. He casts it as an uncanny force bursting into the world in earliest prehistory, less a theoretical construct or byproduct of culture than a slant of light streaming into our world from elsewhere. Like dream, it gives us access to parts of the psyche and even of society that we might not otherwise be able to see; like prophecy, it has potential to burn through all the managed and multilayered cultural fictions that surround us and to awaken us from our pervasive sense of unreality.”

Okay, go read it now. And remember, this isn’t the whole essay. To fully experience Tartt’s brilliance and Martel’s profound exploration, listen to the audiobook where the introduction shines in its entirety.

Make some atmosphere this weekend!