4 - The Art Encounter

Summary

It is more or less axiomatic that the novels and short stories of Don DeLillo feature art and artists in abundance – to the extent that it would be fair to consider the nature of art, and its role and purpose in society and culture, as one of his major themes, alongside technology, death and language. For his characters, art is a way of interacting with the world, whether creating or – for want of a better word – consuming it. In this chapter I will be considering the specific instances in DeLillo's novels and short stories when a work of art is encountered and experienced from the ‘receiver’ side, that is, by a character or characters who are not the creator of the work in question, who are encountering the work as we might, as a civilian.

This will involve careful policing of boundaries, for the attention DeLillo applies to the experience of artworks in his writing he also applies to things that are not, strictly speaking, artworks at all. Is a photograph of the most photographed barn in America an artwork, for instance? Or a snippet of Super 8 film shot by a child through the rear-view windscreen of a car that randomly captures a random murder? Or live webcam footage of a Finnish highway? Certainly, DeLillo is alive to the continuity and crossover between art and not-art, between what John Dewey called ‘the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience’ (2).

This chapter will focus primarily on those art encounters that take place within a formal or traditional or accepted sociocultural art-world context, defining an art encounter as an engagement with an artwork that includes the social and cultural context of that engagement – although this doesn't mean it must necessarily be an institutional setting. The role that art encounters play in DeLillo's inherently expressive, narrative art means that my discussion of aesthetic experience will tend to be evaluative, rather than ontological: that his characters are having an aesthetic experience when they encounter these artworks seems in the context of this chapter to be worth accepting as a given; more interesting is the nature and quality of the experience they are having, and what these things tell us about them, and the role of art in their life.