Among the journalistic-philosophical bombs Tom Wolfe tossed out over the years was a cheery outrage at the conventions of contemporary art. He (and he was hardly alone) felt that art-making and criticism had fallen completely under the spell of abstraction and minimalism, and that adherence to high modernism had stripped away any respect for craft or innate talent in favor of pure ideas. Contemporary art, he suggested, was mostly beholden to the wall text explaining it. He found the work of an artist like Ellsworth Kelly or Cy Twombly ridiculous, and although he didn’t write “my kid could do that,” he definitely was willing to say that most people who claimed to appreciate it were full of nonsense.

Wolfe had hinted at this stance before in our pages, in the story about neon-signs-as-art that we featured a few weeks ago in this newsletter, and he unleashed a screedier version thereof, entertainingly and maddeningly, in two subsequent books, The Painted Word (about fine art, from 1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (about architecture, 1982). I’ve always suspected that he was actually more equivocal and measured about the art he was seeing — that he was playing up the disdain to troll the aesthetes in his circle. If that was the case, it worked, too. Drove them absolutely up the wall.

Three years before The Painted Word, contemporary art and design were, evidently, already becoming one of his hobbyhorses — as you can see in this week’s feature about advertising illustrations and graphic design. Wolfe, effectively, plays semipro art critic here, not of fine art but of ads and posters. The reviews are quick hits, not super deep but quite perceptive, although the story admittedly suffers from dark and muddy images. (The scans you see on our site aren’t degraded — that’s how the images looked in print.) That’s somewhat made up for by a funny and arresting cover, with a photo by Steve Horn and Norm Griner.