Ben Eastham's The Floating World: Art Meets the Arms Trade

By Daniel Okafor

Ben Eastham's debut novel The Floating World puts an art critic on the payroll of an arms manufacturer. That's the premise, and it's a good one. The Guardian's review, published 15 October, calls it "a compelling debut of art's relation to money and power."

The setup is economical. After the unnamed narrator's wife dies in an unnamed war zone, he takes a job with the Morel Foundation. The foundation is the cultural wing of an arms-manufacturing multinational, a textbook case of art-washing (sponsoring culture to launder a corporate reputation). Its job, in the novel's economy, is to prop up the ego of the company's CEO while the parent firm extracts profit from wartorn regions.

The narrator is a critic turned reluctant schoolteacher. He is, by his own account, somewhat hapless. Eastham gives him a voice full of ideas, and the Guardian finds the result "cinematic".

What does the novel say about art and power?

The book's thesis arrives early, in a London pub after last orders. Three friends joke about which roles they'd take on a desert island after a plane crash. The critic says he'd become an artist. He is mocked, naturally.

His friend Sybil, an actual painter, casts herself as the island's demigod-queen and hires him to "certify her glory". Then she delivers the novel's sharpest line:

"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."

It's bitter, and it's precise. As the Guardian's reviewer notes, this is about as clear a statement as one could wish for on contemporary art's relation to power: the boot of the latter sits firmly on the former's throat. The review identifies this relationship as the novel's central theme.

Why the premise cuts deep

Art-washing is not a fictional invention. Corporations, including defence contractors, have long funded museums, biennials and prizes. Eastham's move is to place a critic — the person whose job is supposedly judgment — inside the machinery, on a salary, grieving, with few alternatives.

The widowed narrator gives the arrangement its sting. The company profits from war zones like the one that killed his wife; the foundation then pays him to decorate that operation with culture. The Guardian calls the book full of ideas, and the structure suggests why: every scene doubles as an argument about who pays, who certifies, and who drinks.

The title does its own work. The Floating World borrows from the Japanese ukiyo-e tradition — pictures of the transient pleasure quarter — and Eastham's floating world is the art circuit itself: weightless, well-funded, detached from the wars that finance it.

For a first novel, the ambition is considerable. The Guardian's verdict, "compelling," is not a word that newspaper hands out lightly to debuts, and the review frames the book as a serious treatment of money and power rather than a satire of the art world's usual foibles.

Readers of fiction about compromised institutions — the critic on the patron's coin is an old story, from Samuel Johnson's pension onwards — will find the contemporary update pointed. Whether the Morel Foundation's overlord CEO reads it is another matter. Eastham's next move will tell us if this debut was a fluke or a career.