Wendy, Master of Art

Starred review from April 6, 2020
Scott (Wendy’s Revenge) continues the saga of his round-eyed, loose-limbed heroine with this delightful volume, the best of the bunch, which parodies the worlds of fine art and art education. Wendy is stuck in the tiny town of Hell, Ontario, working toward her MFA. There she meets a motley crew of fellow millennials, among them Yunji, who is obsessed with using string in her art; Maya, an overachieving, globe-trotting wunderkind; and Eric, a hypernervous type eager to prove his “woke” credentials. Wendy navigates fraught relationships with each of them, as well as a romance with an attractive young man who is also involved with another woman, while she battles alcohol dependence and creative blocks—and desperately attempts to create meaningful art. Scott’s drawing style is loopy and cartoony, to consistently funny effect. He’s also a skillfully economic storyteller with a sharp wit, especially sending up academic art-speak. (Eric introduces himself to the class: “My work seeks to propagate systemic qualities of erasure in non-human logic (inhale) IN speculative environments, HOWEVER.”) But Scott never loses sight of his characters’ humanity, conveying a genuine sweetness under the snark. The flaws and foibles of Wendy and crew prove hilarious, relatable, and highly entertaining.

June 1, 2020

An aspiring artist named Wendy experiences the best and worst that the contemporary art world has to offer while working toward a master's of fine arts degree at a prestigious Canadian university. Her professor is a has-been, obsessed with his past success and more concerned about beating traffic on the drive home than mentoring his students. Her classmates range from a glamorous, globe-hopping pseudocelebrity to an intense, awkward try-hard planning a thesis project on "the geometry of bee dances and post-human art practices as a combined proposal towards anti-accelerationism." Author/illustrator Scott skewers the art world, narcissistic performative activists and academia, but goes beyond satire as Wendy's solipsistic bubble bursts, exposing her as a young woman grappling with existential despair and profound questions about her own place in the world. Scott also examines the complexities of interpersonal relationships as Wendy's classmates alternately bicker, hook-up, and grow codependent upon one another, and through Wendy's fraught romance with an artist named Xavier, who's in a polyamorous relationship with another woman. VERDICT A savage lampooning of the art world's self-seriousness that makes some serious points about the artistic establishment and the difficulty that accompanies dedicating oneself to creative expression.

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