Artists Who Come Back Into Fashion
Sometimes you will read something that will send your thoughts down a twisty, only slightly relevant path. This is especially true after you’ve had an edible.
I read this tweet and thought what if Jeet Heer is right? What benefit does he derive from “calling it.” Maybe some very small scale bragging rights? If John O’Hara was a mostly forgotten novelist, Heer could possibly buy the copyrights to his stories and novels pretty cheap from whoever currently owns them, but my assumption is that those rights are not on the market. (As far as I can tell, none of his works have fallen into public domain, but they will in just a few years.)
The reason this question intrigues me is that in the art world, there is often a financial motive in hoping that some forgotten artist’s reputation will be revived. Let’s imagine X, a painter from Colorado active in the 1930s and 1940s, who had a mostly local reputation in his time, only occasionally being noticed in national publications. If I thought like Heer does that X was going to have a major revival in 15-20 years, I might buy up as many of his paintings now as I could afford. It would be an investment that would pay off if my hunch about X’s future reputation were correct.
In other words, a reputational revival is more valuable in the world of visual arts than in the world of literature. Heer can’t make a direct financial investment in his belief in a John O’Hara revival, but he could in a revival in the reputation of X the painter.
But even as I typed that, a counter-example occurred to me. What if Heer. believing that a John O’Hara revival was coming in several years, started researching a biography of O’Hara now. He could have a definitive book written by the time the revival happened. Jeet Heer is an excellent writer—I’m sure his O’Hara bio would be fantastic.
[Please consider supporting this publication by becoming a patron, and you can also support it by patronizing our online store. And one more way to support this work is to buy books through The Great God Pan is Dead’s bookstore. ]