"Not much happens in "Art": three bourgeois friends disagree on a matter of taste, and, instead of talking normally about it over a drink, they make increasingly savage personal attacks whenever they meet. Reza, a Parisian playwright and novelist, won a Tony for "Art" in 1998 and another for her even sluggier slugfest, "God of Carnage," in 2009. In these influential insult comedies, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton, Reza satirizes the vapidity and pettiness of the upper-middle class;"
""Art" was a mile marker in the last quarter-century's march toward bad-faith argument as popular entertainment, which is another way of saying-I can't laugh at it now. The setup, at least, is tidily comic. Serge (Harris), a shallow dermatologist with deep pockets, pays three hundred thousand dollars for a white-on-white minimalist painting. It's by an artist, he says proudly, collected by the Centre Pompidou, but when he shows the canvas off to his longtime friend, the aeronautical engineer Marc (Cannavale), Marc says it's "shit.""
Civic argument increasingly favors bad-faith confrontation and rage-driven spectacle over good-faith exchange and productive thinking. Yasmina Reza's play Art dramatizes that shift through three bourgeois friends whose disagreement about a white-on-white painting escalates into personal attacks. Serge pays $300,000 for the canvas; Marc bluntly calls it "shit" and pressures the conciliatory friend Yvan for responses. Reza's work, translated by Christopher Hampton, earned a Tony and later inspired similar satires like God of Carnage. The plays expose upper-middle-class vanity and pettiness, showing how social bonds can unravel into performative hostility.
Read at The New Yorker
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