AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Intro by Donna Tart. Didn't realize the Art/Artifice thing goes back to Joyce in Portrait.
Ask Claude
The Art/Artifice distinction in Martel's book is sourced directly from Joyce's aesthetic theory in Portrait. Here's the brief version:
In Portrait, Joyce calls artifice "improper art" and defines it as art that presents its content so as to induce a state of attraction or repulsion in the viewer.
Artifice divides into two kinds, again after Joyce: pornography — artifice meant to entice the viewer in a particular direction — and propaganda — artifice meant to induce revulsion.
What Joyce calls "proper art," on the other hand, uses the aesthetic to reveal things in their original, preconceptual "suchness" — it doesn't reduce its content to some instrumental end.
True art is static — both demanding calm and creating a calm microclimate of its own, a still space where, as Joyce says, "the mind is arrested and raised above desiring and loathing."
Artifice, by contrast, orients us toward what is flashy and shallow — toward movement, and more specifically toward the predetermined path where it wants us to move.
A key factor distinguishing art from artifice is that a work of art has an unconscious — unlike artifice, it cannot be boiled down to its influences and component parts without falsifying it; its depths are nonlinear, self-renewing, and inexhaustible, always with something new to say, often things the artist could never have consciously intended.
So Tartt's intro and Martel's whole book title are essentially a riff on Joyce's vocabulary — "age of artifice" meaning an era where the manipulative, instrumentalized pseudo-art has crowded out the real thing.