Artists in a Marketplace: Art and Multinational Capitalism in Don DeLillo’s Mao II andUnderworld

Abstract

Artists in a Marketplace:Art and Multinational Capitalism inDon DeLillo’s Mao II and UnderworldEunju HwangThis essay investigates DeLillo’s view of art and artist in the late capitalist society. In Mao II, Don DeLillo writes about the disappearance of the aura and the status of author in the late capitalist society. In the novel, he is depicting a world in which art is no more than a consumer product and an artist himself a product to sell. Due to mechanical reproduction and mass media, according to the novel, art has become much inferior to terrorism in its power to shape mass consciousness, and the author has lost his aura as the originator of the meaning of his text. Bill Gray, knowing the principles of the market, walks the tightrope between silence and fame; he deliberately removes himself from the audience in order to increase his fame, his cash values. His anonymous death, the survival of his copyright, and his portraits that would replace him by inheriting his “specious aura” crystalize the reduced status of the author in the contemporary society. On the other hand, in Underworld, DeLillo searches for a redemptive power from art. In a world of waste, where only waste maintains its “aura” due to its “untouchability,” DeLillo still finds the only source for hope from the power of art. Artists like Moonman who is not co-opted by capitalism and people like Esmeralda who can never be contained within the system give people hope in the novel. DeLillo himself also sheds off the “specious aura” of the artist for sale by creating redemptive moments and images in his novel and writing an “underhistory” of the multinational capitalist society.