Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery.

Jeanette Winterson's Art Objects is the kind of vanity item a well-regarded author can sometimes pressure a publisher to issue at an otherwise fallow moment in the author's career. Here are ten more or less meandering, more or less platitudinous meditations on art, mainly literary art, fashioned around the central premise that Winterson is something powerfully important in the history of literary Modernism, perhaps even its culminating event. The author's steamy self-involvement is reflected on every page. "Like Orlando and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," writes the author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, "the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a fiction masquerading as a memoir." "I have never understood how anyone can read the Deuteronomy chapter of Oranges and not catch on to my game...." "When I wrote Art & Lies, I said it was a question and a quest." "But I have said these things in The Passion." "What have I said in Written on the Body?"

I'm not sure that such enraptured narcissism is ever a welcome quality in a writer, but it's particularly galling in a book as unevenly balanced between semiprescience and outright banality as Art Objects. Like Madame Blavatsky, Winterson is full of lofty thoughts, delivered from an altitude high above the reader, who is assumed to be a sense-impaired victim of television and technology. The first essay establishes the tone. Awakened to the power of visual art by a chance encounter with a picture in an Amsterdam shop window, Winterson describes her subsequent ardors of autodidacticism, then proceeds to lay down the law on how to really look at a painting. A portentous buildup is followed by a veritable blizzard of cliches: "Art, all art, as insight, as rapture, as transformation, as joy." "Art takes time." "The true artist is connected." "The calling of the artist, in any medium, is to make it new."

Having exhausted painting, Winterson moves on to literature. "The ordinary reader," like the ordinary viewer, is typically unaware of "questions of structure and style." "It is difficult," Winterson sighs, "when the writer is serious and the reader is not." Few people know how to really read a book, or how to let a book show them the way into "other realities, to other personalities." Winterson proceeds to regurgitate various Modernist platitudes: the true artist is always ahead of her time, everything shocking eventually becomes commonplace, art has the power to heal emotional damage, etc. While decrying as irrelevant the stacking of works into hierarchies of "major" and "minor," "high" and "low," Winterson busily does this herself, according to her own tastes. But her tastes are parochial. She has no use for prose works that aren't self-consciously "poetic," and views content as disposable matter that evaporates over time, leaving only the glories of style. Winterson trusts to her own quirky style of evangelical pot-stirring to make homilies sound new; they don't. At best one can admire her lyricism when she discusses specific features of works she admires.

A piece on Gertrude Stein begins promisingly, with the observation that Henri Matisse and others attacked the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas for doing in prose what Modernist painters were doing on canvas. But the essay quickly bogs down in a tar pit of questions explored several decades ago in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis. Two pieces on Virginia Woolf are similarly laden with the overfamiliar. "At the end of a piece of work there should be a feeling of inevitability; this could not have been made in any other way." "The poet must communicate through language or not communicate at all." "It seems so obvious, this question of pace, and yet it is not."

The problem isn't always that Winterson's perceptions are untrue, but that she presents unoriginal statements as feisty challenges. At the same time that she patronizes the reader, Winterson displays a mundane quality of mind that makes her sound ridiculous, rather than merely flat. Her asides about popular culture and the consumer society echo writers of the Frankfurt School, the Situationists, and many others, on topics that have been on everyone's critical plate for the past fifty years; yet Winterson tosses out her truisms as though no one had ever thought of these things before. But then, in her writing, the confusions of modern life serve only as dramatic contrast to her own monkish pursuit of the Word, which the book's final two pieces describe in overheated detail. Though Winterson goes to some pains to establish that art - "all art," as she would say - reveals to us the existence of other minds, Art Objects tends to imply that Winterson's is the only reliably functioning mind of her generation. An idea is not an idea until some version of it has passed through her brainpan. How else account for the triteness of such epiphanies as "the enjoyment got out of literature is not the enjoyment to be had from a ball game or a video." Or, "Readers who don't like books that are not printed television... are not criticizing literature, they are missing it altogether." Or, "New work is not just topical ... it is modern; that is, it has not been done before."

Not everything in this book is so shopworn. In fact all the essays contain passages of fine writing and thinking. But even a sympathetic piece like "The Semiotics of Sex," which discusses the misunderstandings that beset the serious writer who happens to be gay, comes bracketed at both ends by self-serving anecdotes about fans approaching the author in bookstores. (A "bad" reader wants to know what she has in common with Radclyffe Hall; a "good" one gets that her Sexing the Cherry is "a reading of Four Quartets.") Winterson's interest is not communication but idolatry - idolatry of the artist, first of all, as the clairvoyant engine of cultural mutation that Modernism has always touted, and idolatry of Winterson, by implication, as the contemporary exemplar of this mystic type. "The artist cannot occupy middle ground," she writes, "and the warm nooks of humanity are not for her, she lives on the mountainside, in the desert, on the sea." "I wake and sleep language." "The passion that I feel for language is not a passion I could feel for anything or for anyone else." These essays address an audience that has never read a work of critical theory, and invite it to indulge itself in a sort of vicarious Luddite estheticism. For such readers, the rhapsodic swells and martial diction of Winterson's style - so eerily reminiscent of those cranky letters Laura (Riding) Jackson used to send to magazines in the wake of reviews - may adequately veil the poverty of insight and the egregious self-promotion being offered as oracular wisdom.

Winterson is a cult figure, and Art Objects bears all the markings of a high priestess' instructions to her coterie. For the less devoted, the book merely confirms the impression that she is, to use her own nice distinctions, a minor writer with delusions of grandeur.

Gary Indiana's collected essays, Let it Bleed, will be published in July by Serpent's Tail. His Faber & Faber anthology, Living with the Animals, was recently issued in paperback.