Book review: Conceptual art and money in Hari Kunzru’s Blue Ruin

Blue Ruin

By Hari Kunzru
Fiction/Knopf/Paperback/272 pages/$35/Amazon SG (amzn.to/4dY6Q3i)
4 stars

British author Hari Kunzru is a culture aficionado. His novels are known for their deep dives into particular artistic milieux.

For example, White Tears (2017) was about a pair of young, white hipsters caught up in a blues music thriller. Red Pill (2019) followed a recipient of a prestigious writing fellowship, suffering a breakdown at the taunting of a monster of an antagonist.

Blue Ruin completes this trilogy that mirrors Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Three Colours film projects. The title, this time, refers to an actual object – an art masterpiece by a famous, plagiaristic painter.

Kunzru, devoting long passages of text to descriptions of conceptual and performance art, frames this account of the insularity of the art world with the competition of two moody artists in love with the same woman.

The twist? One of them, Jay, is a has-been who lives in his car and performs odd jobs. Readers first meet him delivering groceries to the upstate New York estate of his erstwhile best friend, Rob, now married to his former lover Alice.

It is Alice whom Jay catches a glimpse of on the porch before passing out from the stress and exhaustion in a compelling opening sequence. She is “radiant with the kind of health that’s made of yoga and raw juices and massage and money”, while his own body – scarred and debilitated from 20 years of fracking jobs, drug trafficking and backpacking – is barely able to sustain consciousness.

In a way, this is a tacky start, extreme poverty meeting glitzy wealth, but the intelligence and restraint of Kunzru’s writing make the encounter a serious and sobering one.

Set amid the Covid-19 pandemic, it generates an appreciation for the chaos of the city, the luxury of space and the involuntary fear of essential workers viscerally and without much fuss.

Alice, masked, wants to help but can only set Jay up at an outhouse.

“It’s a fiction we seem to demand, that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives – human ships of Theseus, each part replaced, but in some essential way unchanging,” Jay thinks. “We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganisations of selfhood.”

The most exciting bits of the narrative whirl readers back to Jay, Rob and Alice’s more idyllic days as art students in London, a nostalgic gambit also employed to absorbing effect in Lydia Sandgren’s Collected Works published in 2023.

Kunzru’s love for art is obvious, and he writes incisively and entertainingly about trends in this rarefied, but also ridiculous world – the underappreciation of representational painting now; the pull of bold, abstract brushwork so crassly adamant on self-expression.

But mostly, it is the artists’ heady mix of egotistical one-upmanship and need for validation. The instinctive reaching for social ideals to justify their work proves often to be mere lip service.

Jay’s final-year project, slammed by critics, involves him painting in a sealed room before shredding his work. Never mind that it might be a middling portrait. The point is the refusal to create art that collectors can hang on walls and be subjected to the whims of capitalism.

Yet, naturally, everything can be commodified and Jay is asked to repeat his performance. The seals locking him in the room are preserved, accompanying write-ups by curators. Is there such a thing as true ephemerality? Can an artist be free of the market?

The battle of wills back at the house in their adult lives is more petty, driven mostly by blocks of dialogue and the capricious moods of a flailing Rob, more willing than Jay to be a cog in the system.

Still, it is a fun and readable account of the pitfalls of allowing one’s emotions to govern all action – both a critique and a celebration of the myth of the artistic genius.

If you like this, read: Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren, translated by Agnes Broome (Pushkin Press, 2023, $24, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/4bRMeYs). A single father, whose wife has just walked out, returns to his heady days of youth when he was still an aspiring writer.