Between Market and Myth: The Spanish Artist Novel in the Post-transition, 1992–2014 by Katie J. Vater (review)
- Between Market and Myth: The Spanish Artist Novel in the Post-transition, 1992–2014 by Katie J. Vater
What is an artist? When attempting to answer this question, one inevitably imagines autonomous, sensitive and bohemian creators whose non-conformism and disinterestedness frees them from social constraints and allows them to transcend their time through their art. This image is the myth inherited from Romanticism, but still prevails nowadays among many western societies. Between Market and Myth: The Spanish Artist Novel in the Post-transition, 1992–2014 (2020) brings back down to earth this myth by contextualizing and analyzing a series of artist novels (or Künstlerromances) that were written by a wide variety of authors, such as Lourdes Ortiz or Paloma Díaz-Mas, among others, at the turn of the millennium. The book’s central goal is to question “how authors represent or negotiate the concept of artistic autonomy when there is no longer an ‘outside the market’” and explores the tensions that appear in the production of cultural capital (8); and it does so by presenting a multifaceted poststructuralist literary analysis that reveals the impact that neoliberalism, postfeminism, and identity cast on the characters of these texts. Between Market and Myth lays bare the ambivalent and contradictory position of contemporary creators, who tend to criticize the commodification of culture while being deeply engaged in it.
The book cohesively structures its primary texts in groups that display the philosophical, ideological and existential tropes that define artist novels and demonstrate the ambivalences and contradictions of contemporary cultural capital within the production context of Spain. [End Page 309] The first chapter—titled “The Weight of Fame: Memory in Two Contemporary Künstlerromane by Ángeles Caso and Julio Llamazares”—kicks off skillfully merging two different genres, the Künstlerromane and the novel of memory, to accommodate the Romantic ideal of the artist within the capitalist demands of the market without renouncing to his/her autonomy (30). The primary texts that illuminate this idea are El mundo visto desde el cielo (1997) by Caso and El cielo de Madrid (2005) by Llamazares. Along the same lines, but adopting a gender-oriented perspective, the second chapter—“The Postfeminist Turn in the Artist Novel by Women: The Case Of Almudena Grandes, Clara Usón, and Nieves Herrero”—delves into the artist novel written by female authors and points out the influence that postfeminist views cast on them—in particular, the study cases here are Castillos de carton (2004), Corazón de napalm (2009), and Todo fue nada (2005) by Grandes, Usón, and Herrero, respectively. Between the Market and Myth not only distinguishes that the drive of these texts is to resolve the conflict between “woman” and “artist,” in contrast with “art” and “life” which is the dichotomy in novels written by men (56); but it also shows how postfeminist views shaped the female characters in the texts, who understand their outcomes as the result of personal failure, instead of systemic sexism. Overall, the analysis of both sets of novels—ecumenic pieces that are faithful to the genre and those that present the female perspective—make a good case since both present a coherent geographical and historical contextualization that proves the interpretative assertion of the book.
The third chapter is “The Art Historian as Neoliberal Subject in Lourdes Ortiz’s Las manos de Velazquez and Paloma Díaz-Mas’s El sueño de Venecia” and slightly deviates from the canonical artist novel by including two texts whose protagonists are not strictly artist but are producers of knowledge: art historians. Still, the chapter also shows the existential crisis that neoliberalism casts on these characters, which directly relates to the production of cultural capital, as does the figure of the artist. Finally, the last chapter, “Affiliation Anxiety: Avant-Garde Identity at Documenta(13) in Enrique Vila Matas’s Kassel no invita a la lógica” singles out one text, to illuminate another trope of the artist novel: identity. In this case, the...
