FICTION
Appreciation
Liam Pieper
Hamish Hamilton, $34.99

Oliver Darling, a “queer country artist”, built his artistic career from a mix of luck, a degree of talent, and manufactured authenticity. He spends more time “talking about himself and fielding questions about art he produced a long time ago” than actually getting around to the canvas.

He’s no Hurtle Duffield, protagonist of Patrick White’s The Vivisector, who scorns the wealth and fame associated with his artistic success. On the contrary, everything Darling does career-wise is about commodifying his artworks to sustain a life of debauchery and leisure. His performative charisma, wooing of Australia’s rich collectors, invention of narratives about life and art that complement the politics of the day — he’s a chameleon.

Art, in Liam Pieper’s Appreciation, is not a romantic arrest of the sublime. It is forever tied to market forces. “The value of a painting is whatever someone is willing to pay for it,” writes Pieper. You can imagine Andy Warhol nodding in his grave.

In this chronicle of a narcissist, Darling’s cruisy life nosedives after a botched appearance on live telly. After a few too many nose beers, Darling, usually full of gruff machismo and enfant-terrible provocations, blunders by insulting the Anzacs and casting himself as a “pilgrim entering a sacred heartland” when recounting a week-long tour of Indigenous communities. There’s some guff about toxic masculinity in there too, ostensibly the subject of his forthcoming exhibition.

It’s all not very PC. None of it has much to do with art. Overnight, the internet becomes a pandemonium of cancelling and denunciation and Darling, whose favourite pastime is Googling himself, experiences a crisis of identity. He is now more terrible than enfant.

On the brink of being cancelled, Darling’s agent Anton devises a scheme for redemption. Anton enlists a ghostwriter to help Darling compose a memoir because there’s always the “possibility that the media attention that Oli’s cancellation has attracted could translate into a bestseller”. What do they say about any publicity?

From there, Darling embarks on a series of misadventures that confirm Appreciation’s satiric impetus. We forgive the improbability of escalation after escalation that moves the plot forward because it’s, well, fun. An all-night bender ends with someone bringing terrible news, a haunted past resonates into the present, a single plot challenges the foundation of Darling’s ego.