'He Is the Andy Warhol of Art'

Guy Davenport was our Johnny Appleseed of culture. He was an academic who published in Harper’s and the Journal of the American Institute of Architects; Life magazine and Art News; National Review and Inquiry. He sowed allusions without regard for pretentious pieties. He loved P.G. Wodehouse, Kipling, O. Henry -- and Finnegans Wake -- and was neither a snob nor a virtue-signaling populist. Here’s an anecdote from Davenport’s “On Reading” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1997), set in a St. Louis restaurant: 

 “Over white beans with chopped onions, veal cutlet with a savory dressing, and eventually a fruit cobbler and coffee, I read [Spinoza’s] De Ethica in its Everyman edition, Draftech pen at the ready to underline passages I might want to refind easily later. Soul and mind were being fed together. I have not eaten alone in a restaurant in many years, but I see others doing it and envy them.”

 

For Davenport, books and the rest of life were un-self-consciously integrated. Reading him gave me permission to follow my own tastes, not to be cowed by fashion or critics, to trust my sensibilities. I first encountered his essays, reviews and stories in the mid- to late-seventies, in The Hudson Review, and I’ve found a review in that journal I hadn’t seen before: “ Post-Modern and After” in the Spring 1978 issue. Davenport looks at eleven works of academic criticism, all hovering around that still-fashionable label among the university set, post-modernism. I’ve always thought it was like Silly Putty: tasteless, malleable and, well, silly. Davenport opens by making fun of the fraudulent “minimalist artist” Carl Andre. It’s worth quoting at length:

 

“Just last week I learned from the Grapevine that we are soon to have a novel from Carl Andre, who gave up requiring an accent aigu for his surname years ago. Andre was most recently in the news for distributing boulders in a Hartford park and calling the arrangement sculpture, an event that pierced the triple tungsten of The New Yorker’s fastidious exclusiveness and the Connecticut treasury to the tune of eighty-seven thousand dollars. Before that, he shook up the British with a line of bricks along the floor of the Tate: another sculpture, unnervingly called Lever. He is a poet, a novelist, and, before his career in the fine arts, a line-brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad. He is the Andy Warhol of art.”

 

That last line is priceless. Andre gets no avant-garde nihil obstat from Davenport, who dismisses the idea of progress in the arts:

 

“[T]he arts themselves became problematical by sharing the idea of progress, or, more accurately, trying to share the idea of progress. It is purest illusion that the arts can participate in a technological evolution, or that their history moves from primitive to civilized, like the kettle growing up to be a steam locomotive. And yet we persist in criticizing, measuring, weighing works of art in terms of modernity, advancement, obsolescence.”

 

Three cheers for honest, enlightened philistinism.