Finance Fictions by De Boever Arne;

Author:De Boever, Arne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

The Map and the Territory

Houellebecq’s novel The Map and the Territory develops a very different approach to the relation between realism and finance by exploring the financialization of realist art itself. The central concern here is no longer a representationalist realism of finance, even though representationalist realism is still a focus in the novel. Instead, Houellebecq is concerned with how concrete works of representationalist realism are valued financially.

The Map and the Territory tells the life story of the visual artist Jed Martin, whose photographs and paintings show a deep interest in technology and work. The novel begins with a prologue of sorts in which Jed is at work in his Paris studio on a painting titled Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market:

Jeff Koons had just got up from his chair, enthusiastically throwing his arms out in front of him. Sitting opposite him, slightly hunched up, on a white leather sofa partly draped with silks, Damien Hirst seemed to be about to express an objection; his face was flushed, morose. Both of them were wearing black suits—Koons’s had fine pinstripes—and white shirts and black ties. Between them, on the coffee table, was a basket of candied fruits that neither paid any attention to. Hirst was drinking a Bud Light.

Behind them, a bay window opened onto a landscape of tall buildings that formed a Babylonian tangle of gigantic polygons that stretched across the horizon. The night was bright, the air absolutely clear. They could have been in Qatar, or Dubai; the decoration of the room was, in reality, inspired by an advertisement photograph, taken from a German luxury publication, of the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi.

Koons’s forehead was slightly shiny. Jed shaded it with his brush and stepped back three paces.29

The description is of a painting (in progress) showing Koons and Hirst engaged in a discussion. Given that they are two of the most expensive contemporary artists, it seems appropriate that the scene is dripping in luxury: with the exception perhaps of Hirst’s Bud Light (which needs to be attributed to Hirst’s coarse looks, as the novel suggests), the painting shows a setting associated with Qatar, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi—choice destinations for a certain class of German (i.e., wealthy European) travelers.

Whereas Hirst is easy to represent—including his “I shit on you from the top of my pile of cash” attitude (3)—Koons poses a problem, and this in spite of the fact that Jed has many photographs of him, for example in the company of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates (4). Somehow Jed cannot get Koons quite right. By the end of the novel’s prologue, Jed has decided that Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons is a failed painting:

He seized a palette knife, cut open Damien Hirst’s eye, and forced the gash wider; it was a canvas of tight linen fibers, and therefore very tough. Catching the sticky canvas with one hand, he tore it in one blow, tipping the easel over onto the floor. Slightly calmed, he stopped,

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