The Floating World by Ben Eastham review – a compelling debut of art’s relation to money and power
Following the death of his wife, a critic-teacher takes a job with an art-washing multinational, in a cinematic novel that is full of ideas At the end of a night in a London pub, after last orders have been called, three friends are joking about what role they’d serve on a remote desert island, with no one but their fellow plane crash survivors for company. When one of them, an art critic turned reluctant…
Key points
- Ben Eastham's debut novel The Floating World follows an unnamed art critic turned schoolteacher who takes a job with the Morel Foundation, an art-washing arm of an arms-manufacturing multinational.
- The narrator moves from London to a tiny Greek island where Morel is building a domed techno-utopian settlement called The Floating World, celebrated by a major artistic event.
- The review calls the book full of ideas and curiosity but surprisingly sentimental despite its disillusion with the art world.
Ben Eastham's debut novel The Floating World is reviewed as a compelling work about contemporary art's ties to money and power. The story is narrated by an unnamed art critic turned reluctant schoolteacher who, after his wife dies in an unnamed war zone, is offered a job with the Morel Foundation.
The Morel Foundation is described as an art-washing offshoot of an arms-manufacturing multinational that profits from a wartorn world while its cultural wing flatters its CEO. The narrator weighs a nine-month contract involving research, press releases and publications, which would move him from London to a tiny Greek island.
The island project
Morel is building The Floating World, a techno-utopian settlement inside a giant dome, with a spectacular artistic event planned to mark its official opening. One of the narrator's friends calls the project a doomsday bunker for billionaires. The narrator takes the job and lands first in Athens, where graffiti in English decries the spread of short-term tourist rentals.
That’s what artists are for, I pay you in fermented coconut water and you tell yourself you’re free and drink yourself to death.
— Sybil
Art and capital
The review notes that Eastham, a co-founder of the White Review and an experienced critic and curator, knows the art milieu well. It says he has seen the tightening bonds between the globalised art market and international finance, from sponsorship by oil and opiate sellers to projects such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the use of artworks for money laundering and tax breaks.
The book weaves these examples throughout, at times directly, as when a museum visit is interrupted by a young woman throwing red paint at a painting and screaming, "This is happening, open your eyes!" The review says Greece suits the novel because it lays bare contradictions between free-moving capital and restricted human movement.
