In fact, the mad excesses of the art market play a decisive, jaw-dropping, and disturbing part in the novel's plot. So is the opening paragraph just a tease? Funny, astonishing and authoritative as this novel may be, does it actually have any satirical point to make about the art world? Or is that just a feint, in a book that is really about work, loneliness, and the struggle to find meaning in life? The novel is confidently erudite about art, imparting knowledge on everyone from William Morris to the Vienna Actionists – an erudition that is hilariously undercut by Houllebecq's acknowledgements, where he thanks Wikipedia. On the contrary, Jed Martin moves easily between painting and photography, and manages to make portraits, or history paintings, that have nothing to do with the "losers" who call for a return to figurative art. Then again, if that opening caricature of Koons and Hirst seems to promise a blistering denunciation of art's sacred monsters, Houellebecq soon makes it clear that he is not some furious conservative critic of modern art. On one level, Houellebecq makes it plain he is not claiming anything like an accurate reportage of the art scene: the career of Jed Martin is shaped by the patronage of Michelin, a gloriously surreal idea that does not really bear any resemblance to the art world – the target here is, rather, France and Frenchness. The way it portrays the contemporary art world is both deadpan and subtle. This is the brilliant and controversial French writer's most intellectually ambitious book. Those who come to Houellebecq's novel for a satire on the contemporary art world will find more than they bargained for. This marked the triumph – according to Houellebecq's novel – of death and morbid fear over pornography and pleasure. The painting was meant to record the moment when Hirst replaced Koons as the number one selling contemporary artist in the world. When Martin himself becomes rich, his dealer points out that now he would be in a position to exhibit that work – before, it might have seemed like sour grapes.
The painting's analysis of the art market is pursued later in the book, however.
In his despair at being unable to portray this "Mormon pornographer", he destroys the canvas. It is a realistic portrait of the two famous artists in conversation, based on their photographs in the media, and although the novel's fictional artist character Jed Martin can capture Hirst quite easily with his brutish British arrogance, he can't really get a visual grasp of Koons. Michel Houellebecq's new novel The Map and the Territory opens with an artist at work on a painting called Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst Dividing Up the Art Market.
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