Is David Foster Wallace Shit?

This chapter analyses Wallace’s comments on avant-garde art alongside his depictions of avant-garde artworks in Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion; I show that Wallace conceives of the avant-garde in terms of the crisis of trust that it creates between artist and audience. I argue that the short story ‘Octet’ (1999) can be seen to pose a question about its own value, or status as art, in a similar way to avant-garde provocations such as Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (1961). Stanley Cavell has written about the experience of uncertainty that modernist art causes for its audience, and compared it to the experience of uncertainty produced by philosophical scepticism; in the absence of agreed criteria, there is no obvious way to know what ‘counts’ as art. The absence of criteria also causes a crisis for sincerity – we have no way of knowing whether an artist means their artwork (whether they are sincere). For Wallace, questions about the sincerity of his work are woven into questions about whether it ‘counts’, since he seems to have taken seriously Tolstoy’s claim in What is Art? (1897) that only sincere works of art should count as art.