Is Steve Martin skeeving you out lately? Me, too.

December 22, 2010

Skeeves. Claire Danes thinks so, too, clearly.

I was practically in love with Steve Martin back when he was singing and dancing and being hilarious and all life-partners with the adorable Bernadette Peters. Even after that, when he was writing little amusing, vaguely clever-even-if-they-tried-to-hard plays.

But now that he’s all trying to play like he’s in with the art scene but also hates the art scene (I guess?), and being kind of obsessed with women a third of his age, he just strikes me as icky and weird. This review is revealing:

The writing in the novel is by turns dull, flat, ugly, and inept. Especially grim are the passages when anyone says anything about art. For example: “However opposite these pictures were, they both worked as historical objects, and they worked as objects of beauty. While the Picasso was deep and serious, the Warhol was radiant and buoyant. The Picasso added up to the sum of its parts: artistic genius combined with powerful thought combined with prodigious skill combined with the guided hand equals masterpiece. The Warhol was more than the sum of its parts: silk-screen, photo image of popular actress, repetitive imagery, the unguided hand, equals . . . masterpiece.” This is so bad, so silly, that one must charitably wonder if Martin means it to be a parody; but what it most resembles is the writing of a college student hurriedly answering an exam question. No dealer or critic, no one who really knows or cares about the history of art and aesthetics, would spout such vacant nonsense. Martin writes of people who “talk art,” but no one in his book is actually capable of doing so, at least not in any interesting or arresting way.

I mean, seriously, I hope he’s trying to be funny, too. But it’s not a very dead-on parody in that case, is it? Some art people are certainly pretentious, but Christ, they’re pretentious in a way that tries to show how much they know about art, not how little.

Anyway, it’s just too bad for Steve Martin.