Craig Mod’s recent essay on looking closely reminded me of Houellebecq reading Schopenhauer, and in particular the centrality of careful observation/representation to the artistic process:

Before Schopenhauer, the artist was generally seen as someone who manufactured things… But the original point, the generating point of all creation… consists in an innate (and thus not teachable) disposition for passive and, as it were, dumbstruck contemplation of the world…

A work of art, in Schopenhauer’s conception, is a kind of product of nature; it must share with nature a simplicity of purpose, an innocence…

Once I read this I had to re-read The Map and the Territory. I think, when I first read this novel, that it seemed likely the character Jed was Houellebecq’s send-up of the art world, the author having vicious fun at the expense of the character (probably a safe baseline assumption reading Houellebecq).

That seems wrong now. Jed is an artist in the full, unironic Schopenhauerian sense:

Today, when art has become accessible to the masses and generates considerable financial flows, this has very comical consequences. Thus, the ambitious and enterprising individual with a range of social skills who nurses the ambition to have a career in art will rarely succeed; the palm will always go to the pathetic blob-like folk who everyone initially thought were just losers…

Since the idea is and remains intuitive, the artist is not aware in abstract terms of the intention and purpose of his work.

📚