Drive north on Highway 281 out of Austin, Texas, and the hills collapse, the land goes flat, the creeks and heights give way to wide ranches, farms, and small towns, which get smaller and farther between as you approach the edge of the Plains. Oklahoma is due north; the Panhandle, a little bit west; you pass through Lampasas, Hico, Stephenville, Mineral Wells. After about three hours you hit Jacksboro; a few miles north you turn east onto 114; at Olney you turn north again onto 79, and fifteen or twenty miles later you’re in Archer City–which is nowhere, really: one traffic light, a few streets, population somewhere around 1,700, just another little Texas town where they take football too seriously and you can’t get a drink on a Sunday night.
Or anyway, it would be nowhere, except that Larry McMurtry grew up there, and rendered the place in a couple of books–The Last Picture Show and then Texasville–which were made into a couple of movies, which in turn made Archer City something else, the model for mythical Thalia, and hence, if not exactly somewhere, then at least Nowhere: the remains of the great American West after the frontier had been fully settled, the cowboys were extinct, and the oil booms had come and gone. Thalia was–and Archer City is–an archetype by virtue of its obsolescence. Still, it’s a good enough place to live if you have family in the area or a local business to run. McMurtry has both. His sister lives nearby, his brother’s down the road, and in the center of this tiny little town he’s installed one of the largest and one of the best used bookstores in America, perhaps in the world: hundreds of thousands of volumes, representing the entirety of literary production–biography, poetry, history, essays on travel, natural science, the movies–all of it carefully priced and shelved in four enormous storefronts gathered around the town square. McMurtry has turned his hometown into a book town, along the lines of Hay-on-Wye, the little Welsh village that’s become a British center for booksellers, reading festivals, and the like.
Well, Archer City is a strange place. Or rather, it’s a perfectly unexceptional place to which strange things have been done. The bookstore–McMurtry’s named it Booked Up–is a sort of grand folly on the Plains, but in the context of the town’s history it’s just another odd wrinkle. Consider: On the wall of the Archer City Dairy Queen there’s a framed reproduction of a newspaper photograph showing Peter Bogdanovich directing a scene from Texasville, using that very same Dairy Queen as a set. That is, local families sit down to their burgers beneath a reproduction of a reproduction of a photograph, of a man in the act of photographing, yet one more time, a staged scene based on a book, which purports to represent, if not a moment of life in Archer City, as such–for fiction and film both have their prerogatives when it comes to truth (though McMurtry exercises them less, perhaps, than most other novelists, and in fact it was he who first suggested to Bogdanovich that realism would best be served if they filmed in the town that inspired his novels)–then at least a fair approximation thereof. And there it is, that image so many times removed, displayed on the wall of what, for lack of a better term, we might call the original. (If I’d had my wits about me, I would have snapped a picture of the thing for reproduction here, compounding the ontological layering to yet another level of degeneracy.)
Well, big deal. To the locals, it’s just an occasion for a little passing pride: Someone wrote a novel set in town, someone else decided to film the novel there, and someone else took a few pictures of the process. And while there are more antinomies to come, they have the same curious outcome: They make the town seem just a little more normal.
Thus, the movie. The Last Picture Show is a brilliant and beautiful thing. Bogdanovich had studied the French New Wave carefully and well: the handheld camera, the black and white film (this was 1972), the jump cuts and other deliberately clumsy edits. But the setting pushes the style back onto its sources in American cinema–mainly, I think, by way of two elements on the move’s soundtrack: Hank Williams’s music and the prairie wind which blows through almost every frame of the film. In effect, then, Bogdanovich made an American version of a French version of an American movie, and the result is an enduring archetype of Americana. Along the way, even the town’s name passes through a series of transformations, through fiction and back into a kind of fact-once-removed: Archer City is called Thalia in the novel, and Thalia, in turn, is called Anarene in the movie, which is the name of a real town, about nine miles down the road from Archer City (nothing was shot there; Bogdonavich just wanted to use their football jackets). The sum of it all, then, is an improbable nexus of techniques, representations, reversals, and contradictions in the service of debunking the fable of the frontier cowboy, which yields yet another fable about what happens to small towns when their moment of history is gone.
But through it all Archer City remains utterly undisturbed. We drove in on Highway 79, and there it was. Fictionalized and then transferred over into another medium, renamed and then renamed again, the town itself seems to have endured all this metaphysical mayhem without a care. There was the movie theater, there was the water tower, there was the square, and everybody we met was very nice and utterly without pretension, and, to be perfectly honest, I was left wondering if it was only me, if nothing extraordinary was happening there at all. I was just thinking too hard, again.
Meeting McMurtry didn’t help. Three of the four branches of Booked Up are unstaffed and often left open overnight; you wander the stacks on the honor system, and take whatever you find over to the fourth store when you’re done. My friend and I did just that, and we were paying for our goods when McMurtry himself wandered in; so I chattered with him for a while. A nice man, thoughtful, erudite, obviously much enamored of books and the business of selling books, and I couldn’t get him to drop the “Yeah-I-opened-one-of-country’s-largest-bookstores-in-the-middle- of-nowhere-and-so-what?” attitude. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, a book-length essay McMurtry published in 1999, he says, with regard to his relationship to Archer City, “Stay in one place long enough, or return to the same place often enough, and some interesting ironies are likely to accumulate.” And yet no such ironies, no sense that he had done anything strange at all, came through in his answers to my questions. Some of his affectlessness was simply Texas style, which understates, as a matter of honor, the obvious (one riot, one Ranger); the rest, I think, was the natural reticence of a man who knows that he can’t give a quick answer to a complicated question, and perhaps can give no answer at all. So I stopped asking. Instead, I walked back out and wandered through the stacks a little bit more, and after a while I began to think, Yes, in fact, I have come to a perfect place. And somehow–trust me, follow me on this–I began thinking about the Strategic Air Command, up outside Omaha.
You see, there are enormous missile silos dug into the Nebraska Plains, as far from any human settlement as you can get in this country. They’re packed with state-of-the-art electronic equipment, computers, security and communications systems, and they’re staffed by highly educated and well-trained technicians. I’ve seen the silos, and wondered how they would seem a few hundred years from now, when they’re abandoned edifices in the barren heart of the continent. To the military men who built them, they are crucial elements of an effective defense, but to me they’re the emblems of our hubris, seemingly permanent, but sooner or later to be as defunct, and therefore as chastening, as the broken statue in Shelley’s poem:
TWO VAST AND TRUNKLESS LEGS OF STONE STAND IN THE DESERT … NEAR THEM, ON THE SAND, HALF SUNK, A SHATTERED VISAGE LIES, WHOSE FROWN, AND WRINKLED LIP, AND SNEER OF COLD COMMAND, TELL THAT ITS SCULPTOR WELL THOSE PASSIONS READ WHICH YET SURVIVED, STAMPED ON THESE LIFELESS THINGS, THE HAND THAT MOCKED THEM, AND THE HEART THAT FED: AND ON THE PEDESTAL THESE WORDS APPEAR: “MY NAME IS OXYMANDIAS, KING OF KINGS: LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR!” NOTHING BESIDE REMAINS. ROUND THE DECAY OF THAT COLOSSAL WRECK, BOUNDLESS AND BARE THE LONE AND LEVEL SANDS STRETCH FAR AWAY.
“Despair!” the statue says, not just to Oxymandias’s rivals but to us, for the statute’s fate is obviously ours, as well. To recognize as much is to acknowledge that there’s always an element of desolation lingering at the heart of any compilation of human knowledge, any exercise of human powers. You don’t feel it in cities, or on college campuses, or anywhere that culture lies optimistic on the landscape. But in Archer City, as I made my way down the aisles of Booked Up, I scanned shelf after shelf, read the spines of title after title, each representing an enormous effort on the part of its author, each once the pride of some publisher and the possession of some now dismantled library, most of them probably never to be read again. Outside, the wind blew down the wide streets and across the town square, and I wondered, I really did, at the ephemerality of the entire endeavor, the vanity and futility, and the inevitable anonymity of almost any effort one can make. The Texas Plains are harsh and lonely, Archer City is isolated, and Booked Up is a suitably melancholy place, where culture and its ambitions come looking to be reborn, and find that they are mostly to die.
I browsed for copies of my own books, which weren’t there, not even among the 500,000–never made the cut, I assumed, though I prefer to think that their owners had thought them too precious to sell. Later, I found a first edition of James Merrill’s Divine Comedies, as permanent a book of poems as post-war America has produced–whatever that may mean, around the time those Nebraskan missile silos are uncovered by some future archeologist. Anyway, I put down ten dollars for it, and then I took it home and read it. And I was glad to read it, in part because of its virtuoso rhyme-schemes and luminous language; in part because the poems themselves were communications with the dead, written to bring back some extraordinary men and women who would otherwise be gone; and in part because I knew the volume, small and jacketed in silvery gray, would have another life, for a little while anyway, on the shelves of my own library.

As more and more artists make movies, build houses, fabricate furniture, open restaurants, patent inventions, and design clothing and wallpaper, it’s becoming increasingly clear that they’re not threatened by the specter of commercial viability. “Bring it on!” the best works being made today seem to shout, “If I can’t stand the hype that accompanies being liked by more than a handful of standoffish fans, I’m not worth the paper I’m printed on, the canvas I’m painted on, or the various mixes of media I’m made of.”
Early on, Pop Art built this wisdom into its form. Jasper Johns’s flag paintings are based on the simple idea of putting something out in the world that people might stand before and salute, as if they cared so deeply about what it represents that they would line up behind it and be willing to fight for it. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyns use the rhetoric of fame to expand this relationship between objects and individuals to the culture at large, suggesting that a painting that doesn’t aspire to popular regard isn’t much of a painting at all. Edward Ruscha’s pictures of words don’t put words into your mouth or leave you speechless as much as they get anyone who comes across them to stutter and mumble, trying to say why they are so goddamned interesting when none of their elements appears to be anything special.
In the decades that followed, many viewers were not so promiscuous or open-minded. Despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, most still tended to think that selling equals selling out–that artistic integrity is so fragile, precious, and rare an essence that it can’t be mixed with too much popularity or success without being diluted to such a degree that its original impact is lost. Unfortunately, original impact is over in a moment–and vastly overrated. While it may leave indelible impressions in one’s memory, it’s not as important as ongoing impact, through which works live in the present, their effects rippling out into the world. Although integrity is central to all creative endeavors, the stubborn belief in it became for many little more than a palatable, aesthetically-correct defense of Art-with-a-capital-A, a catchall of a cliché in whose name all sorts of boring nonsense is perpetuated.
In the name of this capitalized abstraction, we often heard art audiences decry all kinds of entertainment, decoration, and design. Yet, decoration and design are the territories traversed by many of today’s most far-reaching artists–including Lari Pittman, Jim Isermann, Jorge Pardo, Takashi Murakami, Larry Johnson, and Pae White, to name but a very few–all of whom use easy-to-read vernaculars to change the world by making it look better, one satisfied customer at a time. Or think of Andrea Bowers’s drawings of solitary sports fans, concertgoers, and karaoke-singers–surrounded by mirrorlike fields of synthetic silver or gold leaf–which drive the point home: Artistic integrity is far less important than the responses viewers bring to works, even blatantly imitative ones.
Like commercial integrity, artistic integrity is a slippery concept that’s hard to pin down. But commercial integrity typically has discernible, pragmatic consequences. Consumers may not be able to define it, but our behavior reveals otherwise: We know what we’re doing whenever we acknowledge a product’s quality and value by buying it and using it (or admire more affluent consumers doing the same thing). There is no mystery to a job done with integrity in the world of commerce: Everything is up-front and surprises are few you’re satisfied with the service and happy to be a repeat customer.
In contrast, artistic integrity does not elicit such agreement, much less a coherent definition. What is clear is that it is not a matter of what something is made of. Using oil-on-canvas does nothing to insure that an object’s got it. (In fact, it’s probably more difficult to wrestle some integrity out of these tried and true/materials than it is to use ones that don’t have the historical burden.) Nor is it a matter of how something is made. We detect integrity in movies (upon Which numerous contributors collaborate and countless compromises are made). and poems (about as solitary an endeavor as exists in our world of multitasking team work) as well as in dance and theater symphonies, pop songs, TV shows, installations, photographs, and design. What links the diverse works in which we find artistic integrity is not the number of well-intentioned people who collaborate on them, but the number of viewers who respond to them.
In mercantile democracies like the United States, a big part of art’s job Is to allow people to distinguish themselves from one another. Many use art to Identify themselves as discerning consumers, whose refinement and sophistication Make run of the mill things seem dreadful and dispiriting. The beauty of Commercial culture as a critic friend of mine likes to say, is that it allows everyone To be an elitist–a self-educated enthusiast whose passion for fine things (or not so fine things) and cultivated experiences leads to a level of experiences that is constantly tested among one’s cohorts, colleagues, and comrades, by making what appear to be hairsplitting decisions as a matter of course. When it comes to art, outsiders may perceive such activities as privileged and overspecialized, but they are not fundamentally different from those of birders, sports fans, and rock-climbers, for whom a combination of passion, talent and time dedicated to an obsession produces a body of knowledge whose usefulness pales in comparison to the pleasures it makes possible. In all cases, participation has less to do with one’s upbringing and social position than with one’s interests. (I’m not excluded from the yearly proceedings of the NHL because It’s elitist, but because I don’t care about hockey)
Self-selected elites like myself are radically different from aristocratic or bureaucratic ones, although traces of both European and Soviet models make their way into the art world in the form of snobbery and arrogance, which never seem to be in short supply. If part of art’s power is in allowing a few malcontents to stand out from the crowed, the patron saint of this process is the artist as solitary visionary or misunderstood genius: a soul too deep, sensitive, and sweeping to live among those of us whose sensibilities are shaped–and whose desires are sometimes satisfied–by mass-marketed stuff. Laboring away in his or her garret, isolated from the distractions and depravities of commerce, the alienated artist represents an extreme, idealized version of viewers who are unsatisfied by what’s served up by the market.
But there’s a difference between standing out from the crowd and standing apart from it. To stand out from the crowd can be a powerful tactic, for in so doing one maintains some kind of connection to it. In art, as in fashion and rock ‘n’ roll, the more contentious, mettlesome, and unsettling the better. To stand apart from the crowd, however, is to transform the uneasy, back-and-forth tug of this charged, often antagonistic relationship into a flat, this-or-that opposition. It is to reject the imperfections of the commercial world in favor of the mere idea of something better. The result abandons any possible relationship to the presumed vulgarity of the market and, if lucky, ensconces itself within a museum.
In academic circles, works that stand apart from the culture are said to be “resistant.” But their resistance shares little with that of today’s most compelling art, whose power resides in its capacity to throw a monkey-wrench into the well-oiled machinery of production and consumption, generating meanings and experiences that scandalize some viewers while thrilling others. Throughout the history of Modernism, this critical frisson occurred at the point of consumption, when people bought works of art, took them home, argued about what they meant with others who also cared about them, and, every once in awhile, reorganized their lives around them. In the nineteen seventies, however, art’s critical component began to take on a life of its own. Institutions in which the artist’s critical intentions were honored rose up, driving a wedge between art’s critical and commercial components, which, in the past, had depended upon one another to insure that a work would have any impact outside the imagination of its maker. What counted was no longer what a work did, but what its maker wanted it to do. The revolution became an entirely symbolic affair. All too often, until recently, the works that got talked about and shown had stopped criticizing society from within (by presenting a living alternative to the status quo) and started criticizing it from without, from the safety of the ivory tower. Modernist self-criticism degenerated into finger pointing.
Such anticommercial prejudice forgot that works of art–even those that look good over the sofa–are born out of some form of dissatisfaction with the world. Artists wouldn’t take the trouble to make the things they make, or dedicate their lives to doing so, if they could buy them in stores or see them in museums. Like all forms of commercial ingenuity, art begins when an artist looks at his or her surroundings, perceives them to be lacking, and does something about it. Every work of art is a critique of its context in the form of an object that risks disappearing into that context. Of course, there is no problem in thinking of works of art as labors of love, but we often define love too narrowly: as something pure and virtuous, that has more in common with fantasies of knights in shining armor and alabaster-skinned damsels than with the lives of people like us. The love art elicits (and the behavior it incites) is more salacious (and satisfying) than such outdated illusions allow. So too are the compulsions and convictions that drive artists to make it.
One of the funny things about art is that if you act as if it doesn’t have consequences, it doesn’t. Its hold on viewers being consensual, and its powers reciprocal, art requires energized engagement if it’s to have an effect, especially a sustained one. The converse is also true. If you act as if art has any kind of agency, it does. As willing participants, the acting “as if” is what matters. Make no mistake; mistaken interpretations are just as effective as correct ones. More often than not they live longer lives and exert more influence than more sophisticated and meticulously elaborated ones. The same is true of responses: It’s impossible to have a false one. You cannot fake it. All are valid and authentic. The only catch, and the most ambitious goal, is to get others to respond similarly–to sell, and, if things go really well, to sell out.