Interrogations (para)littéraires sur l’art en tant que destruction

The Goncourt Prize novel of Michel Houellebecq focuses on the parable of a fictional artist, Jed Martin, whose production ranges from photos of road maps to videos on manufactured products’ degradation, via portraits of people representing jobs. The Map and the Territory (2010) ends with a representation of the total triumph of vegetation in a future world museifing the first industrial age. One of the great questionings of aesthetic evaluation criteria is linked to the rise of popular literature, that some intellectuals considerate as a form of the death of art and individual creativity substituted with industrial production. Playing with the codes of detective story, Houellebecq describes his own death and his body transformation in an imitation of a Pollock painting; the crime results to be an attempt to cover up the theft of Michel Houellebecq, Writer, the portrait of the novelist that Jed Martin created to replace another canvas, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons sharing the Art Market, that he destroyed. The contribution analyses the novel of Houellebecq as a reflection on contemporary art and literature that mix ekphrasis, mise en abyme and intertextuality to blend creation and decomposition and to question the possibility of representation.