Self-portrait of the artist: when literature reflects itself

It's always a challenge to write fiction about art - of any sort - music, fine arts, performance arts, literature itself. There are lots of examples of novels about artists/musicians/writers but, other than the portrait of the artist as a young man/woman genre (in which we generally don't see examples of the work other than juvenile pieces), anything successful? The best would probably be Mann's Doctor Faustus. Perhaps Doctor Zhivago, as a novel about a poet (and physician, obviously). Many, many mediocre pieces in which we're never convinced that the artist/writer/etc. is as good as the narrative wants them to be (The Stranger's Child, e.g.) or in which we smothered with tedious accounts of the art of pottery making (The Children's Book), among many possible examples. Particularly an issue for novels about writers: if the interpolated literature is better than the novel, it calls the whole novel into question; if worse, it lowers the level of the whole work - unless worse in a telling or comical manner? Now reading Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers which is a dual-themed novel as its narrator and protagonist is an aspiring artist and part of the downtown NYC arts scene in the 1970s and also a speed demon, an expert skiier as a kid and now obsessed with motorcycle racing - an odd combo to be sure. The motorcycle racing is obviously the more unusual - not many novels about that, especially female-driven novels - whereas the NYC arts scene is overly familiar ground. As it's incredibly difficult if not impossible to actually describe the artwork in a convincing or compelling way, Kushner has come up with a pretty good solution in conveying the arts scene of this time and place - her characters are concept artists - and as with all such concept artists, the idea for the art project is as important or more important than the actual execution - so this works well in fiction (I faced a similar problem in a piece I wrote, as yet unpublished, and came up with the same solution, but I tip my hat to Kushner as she handles this problem dextrously, better than I did I think). Narrator's art concept is to race her bike on the salt flats and then take photos of the trail her tires left in the salt; does sound kind of visually boring, and the narrator realizes she has been unable to pull off her concept. This novel will, I think, live or die based in part on how far Kushner can push these concepts - will the narrator and her boyfriend, Valero, heir to an Italian tire-manufacturer fortune, some up with better and more daring concepts? It's kind of a bind for a writer - if you can come up with the great concepts for concept art, might as well be an artist, right? What would be really cool is to come up with a concept that is conceptual but impossible to execute except in fiction - that would push the form as far as it could go. I had a professor way back when who had this as a specialty: the interaction of art forms, novels about artists, etc. - his field was aesthetics, in the philosophy department (Teddy Brunius, of the University of Upsala, Sweden). He, too, had a concept - maybe more interesting in the conception than the execution, but enough on which to build an entire academic career.