The publication of David Foster Wallace's The SufferingChannel in 2002 most likely marks the very moment when the artworld became saturated by scatological artworks: sculptures and paintingsthematising excrement had become a conceptual genre in their own right,making it necessary to address this class of artworks in yet a differentgenre ‒ literature.

In fact, Wallace wrote the novella at a time when ‒ with the exceptionof Wim Delvoye's startling Cloaca (2000) ‒highly promoted artworks such as Marc Quinn’s ShitHead and Shit Paintings (1997/1998) and theoeuvre of Andres Serrano had successfully capitalised on these ideas, andhad been feeding the mainstream art market with blunt reinterpretations ofprovocations raised decades earlier, for instance by Andy Warhol'sOxidation Paintings (1977/1978), Paul McCarthy'sShitFace Painting (1974), and especially by PieroManzoni's multiple Merda d’artista (1961).Yet, the continued success of the genre proves that the perception of humanexcretion as indecent had not changed over time. The SufferingChannel revolves once again around the question of decency: thestory narrates a journal's difficulties in publishing an article onthe fecal creations of a fictive sculptor, Brint Molke, and theartist's shy resistance to publicity, which results in a distressingperformance of his art of defecation, and eventual death.