That seems to be the assumption in Dave Eggers’s new novel Contrapposto, a portrait of artists as young but also middle-aged and old men and women. It’s one of Eggers’s best novels, and is devoted to non-tech creativity as a work practice and way of life. But it is phobic about universities and I’m trying to work out why.

Eggers is a prominent U.S. writer and also builder of literary institutions. He founded McSweeney’s Publishing House in 1998, two years before the publication of his breakout novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). Contrapposto’s author bio describes him as “the cofounder of 826 National, a network of youth writing centers, and Voice of Witness, an oral history book series that illuminates the stories of those impacted by human rights crises.” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency is as strong as ever and runs a prominent humour column among other things—for example, “I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them Into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform.” Tech and AI distinguish themselves in this novel by their total absence.

Eggers’s institutions are a parallel educational system, where ideas and practices must occur together. These networked school-publishers bring together learning to write, learning to publish and then actually publishing. Eggers rejects the old distinction between doing and teaching, as in the awful saying, “those who can’t do, teach.” He sees art making and art teaching as completely bound together.

He also rejects the distinction between making and thinking. One day, Contrapposto’s key art teacher, Marcus Carpenter, takes his students to an art fair to study and discuss the copies of famous artworks on sale, and remarks, “You know the guitarists in the Rolling Stones cover bands are always more skilled than Keith Richards, right? I would bet the most virtuosic guitarist on earth is currently playing with a Jimi Hendrix cover band in Reno, Nevada. Skill, yes, but no ideas” (189-90). Eggers’s institutions are founded on the conjunction of thought and craft, liberal arts and practical arts, ideas and labour. His own have been remarkably durable.

Eggers is known as a pillar of the “new sincerity” in literature, a (mostly) Gen X revolt against the cynical acceptance of unjust neoliberal capitalism swaddled in the comforts of ironic self-consciousness of one’s own complicity. A pioneer was Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, who spread the term in his landmark 1991 work, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. (His novel Shampoo Planet, published in 1992, is a definitive account of Gen X’s break with both Boomers and the Boomers’ parents.) The project of the new sincerity has been nicely summarised by literary critic Adam Kelly as follows: it is “getting outside our complicity with the system—the task of acting sincerely without that sincerity being contaminated by anticipatory self-interest” of the kind required by the mandatory auto-entrepreneurship of neoliberalism. The Eggers solution, for Kelly, is not to be sincere or call on your readers to believe in your sincerity, but to recognise neoliberalism as an “impasse” that requires ongoing “dialectical engagement with the underpinning realities of the neoliberal debt economy” (126-27). And indeed, Contrapposto follows three young creatives from small town Indiana as they explore different ways of “getting outside.”

If novels had subtitles, this one’s could be “struggles for real education by diverse art people.” As teenagers, born around 1970, Cricket draws, Jed analyses, and Olympia creates art events. A fourth figure appears later in the university art course: Kyle, a conceptual artist. They wind up in very different positions in the art world, but their entanglements are more important than their differences.

I started wondering about Eggers’s view of universities about a third of the way through, during Cricket’s first university art class, a “crit” of new student work. Kyle appears as the first student. He presents a “photo of a Western landscape seen in a Marlboro magazine ad” which is apparently “not the original magazine ad, but an overexposed photo of Richard Prince’s oversized appropriation of it” (160). Kyle gives a short presentation, explaining, “I want the viewer to see the history of the so-called American frontier, the history of so-called American postmodernism, and have it channeled through a mass-market medium that rejects both and gives it back to us all.” The class goes wild, especially the most pretentious professor, a mediocre conceptual artist, and they all praise it to the skies (“it attacks commerce, capitalism, and what it true ...”). 

Then a second student presents her project, which is a painting, and Cricket sees immediately that she can really draw. The student, Sharon, says, “I guess I’ll just let the painting speak for itself.” The class hates it. “I think it’s phony.” “This is all technique and no courage.” “This is a mistake.” The lead professor piles on (162-63). At the peak of the student’s ritual humiliation, the recently retired professor Marcus Carpenter makes a shouty entrance, roaring like Captain Ahab on the quarter-deck, praising Sharon and denouncing the rest. “I would ask that you, that we, resist a new, paradoxical tyranny wherein those without technical skill terrorize those who possess it” (166). Irony (and academic theory) are to be chased from the university temple. Sincerity is to be wedded to laboriously-created skill.

But Eggers sets up Carpenter as an outcast from the university. He’s retired and also dismissed by the faculty as a known crank: before he’s finished his intervention, his former colleagues have walked out on him. In addition, Sharon with the great technical skill, leaves the programme for who knows where. Luckily for Cricket and Co., Carpenter runs a studio on his farm outside of town, and while Kyle stays inside the academic programme, the other three do all their main training in the rural home of this great teacher of deep craft.

Cricket loved drawing as a child and rapidly becomes a master craftsman, famous in his circles for his tremendous skill. Eggers insists on several features of his career as he follows it across the decades until Cricket and Olympia are in their mid-70s. 

First, most predictably, great skill doesn’t bring big commercial success: craft and commerce, labour and exchange-value, are unrelated in this world. It almost goes without saying that the art market is thoroughly neoliberalised in the sense of having (further) commoditised art, inflated the collectable end’s prices as collectable assets, made non-commercial art studios unaffordable, and elevated entrepreneurship—the artist as human capital—over craft and ideas. The capitalist in this group is Kyle, who uses his university art education to learn to own a portion of artists’ creative labour in the process of capturing trends.

Second, the supreme craftsman, Cricket, leads a global itinerant life in which he has wage jobs on projects or in successful workshops for a few years, one after another. In one period he works in Kyle’s Chicago art factory with other very skilled labourers like himself. In another, he works in a shop in Thailand cranking out (very good) copies of famous paintings for middle-class tourists to hang in their suburban homes. In the novel, today’s skilled art worker lives more like a medieval craftsman, moving for work from place to place, workshop to workshop. Cricket’s whiteness allows him to do this, though this goes unremarked in this very white novel. Capitalism has built no infrastructure for creative workers like it has for accountants or tenured university professors. Eggers doesn’t have Cricket suffer, for he retains meaningful agency as a freelance artist. But he lives by his wits and the skills he can sell for a wage, always an outsider to the art world that defines important artists and ratifies artistic influence.

Third, his real education occurs entirely outside of school. As a child, his kind but distracted mother sends him to a local art teacher, one of two immigrant Romanian sisters who teach children in their home. She turns out to be a great teacher of core capabilities in the old-world, pre-commodified sense. A while later, as a teenager, Cricket learns about an independent art studio in Chicago, a longish train ride from his town to an upstairs floor in a nondescript office building, where the same thing happens: everyday people work as models for drawing classes taught by teachers focused on imparting core skills. (This is where he learns the pose known as contrapposto that transformed ancient sculpture.) A third phase in Cricket’s progress as an artist is with Carpenter, in whose workshop he spends most of his time at university, perfecting the very diverse fundamentals of the craft.

Eggers, the institutionalist, believes obsessively in the not-institutionalised atelier-school and in its power to instil deep skill created by the artist’s labour over years and decades. He also believes in the bankruptcy of critical academia. The university doesn’t simply fail to impart skill. Its professors actively lobby against it and shun highly skilled artists like Carpenter, Sharon, and Cricket. To learn to do art you have to take the train to Chicago’s Loop or go to the farmyard studio. 

I felt a little defensive about the portrait of the university. Eggers’s crit scene is overblown and unbelievable—in decades as a student and teacher on university campuses, I never saw any professor either canonise or ostracise a student as happens here, or a dissenting Carpenter figure trash his entire department in front of students. Art professors would line up to work with Sharon. I often wished such (real) hostilities would come out in the open, but Eggers’s staging is taken from some campus novel rather than real academic life. I’m unhappy with the bright line he draws between deep learning (in ateliers) and universities.

The figure holding the book’s world together is Olympia, Cricket’s childhood and lifelong friend, though friend is too weak a word. While they are still children, she figures out a unifying theme for a library art show that Cricket’s precocious drawing skill has encouraged a librarian to install. Olympia goes from child event planner to brilliant curator, the person who finds the trend rather than follows it. She succeeds in the art business, helping Cricket from her odd position as both outside and inside while needing plenty of help herself.

Her life records the costs of neoliberal progress—on-and-off addiction, illness, tie-ups with too many men that unpleasantly merge emotional and business motives. She embodies the kind of ironising detachment s that the new sincerity detests, and yet she can’t survive the art world without it. Even irony bound to her own genius does not enable her to live as an independent curator. She winds up working for Kyle for a while, and helps get Cricket hired into his operation, and later becomes a glorified art shopper for the billionaire class that sets the parameters for collectable art. 

That former university art programme was good preparation for one thing, the gallery world, presented as a graveyard of empty concepts, and also for a related thing, the commercial art company that Kyle has put together through his seamless integration into a labyrinth of corporations, governments, and billionaires. Kyle collects other people’s idea and then brands them as his own. He does this with a drawing of Cricket’s (he has never stopped drawing), paying him off in a lump sum (so Cricket forfeits his share of Kyle’s much higher sales price) and then requiring Cricket to sign a non-disclosure agreement (so he can’t ever disclose himself as the work’s actual author). 

The new sincerity is most powerful as Eggers’s furious rejection of the call for art to compromise with its commodity form. In a low moment Olympia flings the cliché at Cricket—you have to be in the art game to be an artist—and Cricket laughs. The binary opposition between art and business is too crude for wised-up neoliberals who can take ironic distance from their own selling out, but Eggers insists on it.

Discussing a day in the life of the famous Kyle, he writes,

They’d gotten themselves into a never-ending vortex of projects, and every project required a hundred decisions and a hundred other humans, and countless crises, and the best that could come out of any of them was a moment of satisfaction if all went to plan and the work was received as intended. But rarely did anything go to plan, and it was even rarer to have a work of art received as hoped. And so what was left? What was left, what was the only refuge, was the simple joy in creation. In making something appear. But Kyle was not joyful. And Olympia was not joyful. And the workers in the studio were there to pay for their lives outside the studio. And the billionaires who bought Kyle’s work were investors, not lovers. So together, everyone involved, from Cricket on up—they were all engaged in a kind of factory that made beautiful, unnecessary things that meant very little to anyone who made them. (344)

Neoliberalism has in fact never killed off the joy of creation as a baseline reality, no matter how well it hides it from so many people.

Luckily, Kyle’s factory is a temp gig. The book’s ending is happier, in the sense that both Cricket and Olympia escape and wind up in an interesting situation that I don’t want to spoil. It’s a strong novel and I share Eggers’s love of creation and his insistence on it as the most meaningful reality, as well as its “new sincerity” superiority to the art economy.

And yet Eggers is stuck. He believes in craft and the deep education that enables it, which in turn expands human creation. But he scorns the institutions of education, particularly the university, with its critical theories that support the art business while ruining its craft.

Do most people think this? Eggers is the opposite of Peter Thiel, lord of Big Tech’s Mordor who pays handpicked students to quit university to be entrepreneurs. But Eggers’s creatives equally shun university. Do most people associate universities now with training youth for uncreative (if possibly “middle class”) jobs? I’m afraid that Eggers is in the large majority on this one. Since officials have spent decades defining the university as job trainer, why would this majority think anything else?

Neoliberalism rests on roping even the Eggers-style intellectuals into this assumption—that to enter institutions, with their teachings and their salaries, you must check your creativity at the door. That includes abandoning opposition, dissent, deviation, Harold Bloom’s literary “swerves” from tradition, any real breaks with the status quo. The real function of “entrepreneurs” is management. The de facto rule is that institutions like universities must be run by (and for) the anti-creatives, the managers and consultants rather than artists, poets, scientists, or scholars—that managers like Kyle are the natural inheritors of schools and universities, so you artists must flee to the studios and wander the earth.  

Yet in mass societies, in a world of 8.3 billion minds, institutions must support creative capabilities like Sharon’s, Cricket’s, and Olympia’s. They must develop intelligence, change, creativity, creation as a way of life not only in the small-batch ateliers of the scattered creator-teachers. If we can’t imagine our schools and universities better than Eggers does here, and then build them on the studio plan, neoliberalism will never end. And so, we must reimagine them.