• print • Dec/Jan 2009

    BUBBLE TROUBLE

    Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton • Andrew Hultkrans

    Timing, as a great sage once said, is everything. Seven Days in the Art World—purportedly an ethnography, according to its access-obsessed author, but really a Vanity Fair article writ large—seeks to limn the go-go, gaga art world of the early twenty-first century in all its bubbliciousness. Problem is, it arrives on the shelves at the very moment a global economic meltdown is under way, a total implosion of bad debt and illiquid assets that could make every financial downturn since the Great Depression seem like a gilded age. As go hedge-fund bonuses and global petrodollars, so goes the art

    Read more
  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    SCHMOOZE SNOOZE

    Four Jews on Parnassus—A Conversation: Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem, Schönberg by Carl Djerassi • Michael Roth

    The mythological Mount Parnassus is not only the home of the arts and literature but the Hall of Fame of learning and culture. The heroes who dwell there are those whose works live on after them and inspire creativity down on earth. Carl Djerassi tells us early in Four Jews on Parnassus that the book’s “underlying theme” is the “desire for canonization,” but its imaginary dialogues between a quartet of deceased thinkers—Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem, and Arnold Schoenberg—instead betray an anxiety about being remembered. “How did I get here?” and “Do I deserve to be here?”

    Read more
  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    BODY OF EVIDENCE

    A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns by John Yau • James Gibbons

    Among the work of living artists, the oeuvre of Jasper Johns, or at least its first half, seems the least assailable of monuments. His breakthrough 1958 show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, featuring the iconic “Flag” paintings, resolved the impasse at which American painting found itself during Abstract Expressionism’s twilight stage; by reintroducing the image as well as the Duchampian readymade, and by creating works that emphasized flatness, Johns signaled the way toward both Pop art and Minimalism. The critically entrenched view of Johns imagines the artist as a crucial bridge

    Read more
  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    EXHAUST GRIPE

    Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly • Ian Volner

    Historians of Los Angeles have tended, even when critical of the city, to re-inforce its long-standing reputation as a place of fantasy. Among the first to examine LA as an object of serious scholarship was Reyner Banham, who, in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), imagined La La Land as a series of discrete laboratories for democratic life, an exciting but highly romanticized LA of sun, fun, and motoring. A generation later, that book found its dark opposite in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990), which turned LA’s penchant for unreality against it, revealing a bloated

    Read more
  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World

    A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World by Marcia Tucker • Martha Schwendener

    You could quibble with a few things in Marcia Tucker’s posthumously published memoir, A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World. For instance, it takes a bit long to get to the art-world part; one travels first through Tucker’s early life, growing up in Brooklyn and New Jersey with a beautiful, critical mother and a withdrawn, workaholic father. Given the thin boundary between fiction and fact, we’ll never really know whether a twenty-four-year-old Tucker actually called up all of her “so-called friends” and told them “the relationship wasn’t working out,” or whether she

    Read more
  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008

    William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008 by Elisabeth Sussman and Thomas Weski • Albert Mobilio

    In the mid-’60s, William Eggleston, influenced by Robert Frank’s depiction of a drama-charged everyday, began producing color prints of commonplace scenes, sites, and objects, primarily in the American South. At the time, color photography was associated with decidedly commercial venues and applications—Look magazine, billboards, and Kodachrome snapshots, for instance. But Eggleston exaggerated the true-to-life feel that color processing lent; by employing the ink-heavy dye-transfer method of printing, he deepened the hues till they appeared luxuriant, lurid, even unreal—thus undoing the very

    Read more
  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People

    Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People by William L. Iggiagruk Hensley • Deb Vanasse

    Of late, referring to Alaskans as “real people” smacks of a political agenda. But the indigenous people of the North, the Iñupiat, have been “real” for thousands of years. This simple fact resounds in the straightforward voice of Alaska’s native rights advocate William L. Iggiagruk Hensley.

    His memoir’s title, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow, refers to the distance between the international date line and the remote place in which he was born in 1941. Hensley’s Iñupiat mother could barely care for herself, and his Lithuanian father never acknowledged him. His first memory is of an adult on an alcoholic

    Read more
  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America

    You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America by John R. MacArthur • Brian Cook

    It’s not until the acknowledgments arrive on page 261 of Harper’s publisher John R. MacArthur’s You Can’t Be President that readers learn the book was first conceived in French (and written jointly in French and English) as a means “to ‘explain’ U.S. democracy to a foreign audience.” The belated revelation explains quite a bit. For Gallic readers who often find themselves asking, “What’s the matter with the United States?” the account that MacArthur offers will serve as an excellent introduction to the distinctive dysfunctions of our democracy. But domestic prisoners trapped in the damned thing

    Read more
  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange

    The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange by Mark Barrowcliffe • Paul la Farge

    As someone who played Dungeons & Dragons obsessively from age nine through fourteen, I have my share of regrets, but they are as nothing when compared with those of Mark Barrowcliffe, an English novelist and ex-gamer, whose memoir, The Elfish Gene, chronicles a D&D habit the likes of which few people have known, or at least survived.

    The son of a working-class couple in the suburbs of Coventry, Barrowcliffe came to Dungeons & Dragons in 1976, when it was less a fad than a cult. An encounter with older players at his school’s war-gaming club led him to order the rule books from America, which

    Read more
  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet

    The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet by David Okuefuna • Nicole Rudick

    In historical photographs, events from long ago are easy to distinguish from more recent ones: The distant past is always in black-and-white. Even though experiments in color photography began in the mid-nineteenth century, color wouldn’t be widely used until the mid-1930s, and even then mainly for documentary and commercial purposes. But in 1909, two years after the Lumière brothers invented the Autochrome process, French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn initiated a twenty-two-year project (brought to an end by his ruin in the Great Depression) to photograph the world in color. Known as

    Read more
  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    Dust

    Dust by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko • Natasha Randall

    “Length is measured by the speed of a moving shadow. Is seaweed beautiful? A change in a narrative’s temporal modality rids us of our Cartesian arrogance—it’s autumn now, but back then it was spring. Is it possible to say that seaweed is much more beautiful than the dryness in your mouth?” These are lines from the first paragraphs of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Dust, a book of essays that is certain to rid its readers of any Cartesian arrogance when it comes to narrative.

    Dragomoshchenko’s prose doesn’t read quite like prose as we know it. If its lines were broken up, they might easily be poetry.

    Read more
  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    Land 250 and Trois by Patti Smith

    Land 250 and Trois by Patti Smith • Nicole Lanctot

    IN STEVEN SEBRING’S DOCUMENTARY Patti Smith: Dream of Life (2008), the godmother of punk is seen roaming cemeteries, scribbling in notebooks, reading poetry, and peeling open freshly snapped Polaroids. Smith’s music anchors the film, but Dream of Life’s unspoken theme is that she is an old-school romantic, one whose art-as-life approach to creativity makes her a sanguine torchbearer for the Beats and the nineteenth-century French poets she deeply admires.

    On the occasion of Smith’s exhibition at Paris’s Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain last spring, Thames & Hudson published Land 250

    Read more