Art or Shit: Value, Sincerity, and the Avant-garde in David Foster Wallace

Abstract

David Foster Wallace’s fiction often depicts the reception of unsettling avant-garde artworks; it also makes use of similar strategies to those that it depicts. The short story “Octet” can be seen to pose a question about its own value, or status as art, in a similar way to avant-garde provocations such as Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit. Stanley Cavell analyzes the experience of uncertainty that modernist art causes for its audience; in the absence of agreed criteria, there is no obvious way to know what “counts” as art. The absence of criteria also causes a crisis for sincerity—we have no way of knowing if an artist means their artwork. For Wallace, questions about the sincerity of his work are woven into questions about whether it “counts,” since he seems to have taken seriously Tolstoy’s claim that only sincere works of art should count as art.