A full-throated attack on the —new British art,— a movement obsessed with commerce and cults of the personal, that manages to be smarter and more far-reaching than its hyped, hopped-up subject. Stallabrass (Art/Oxford Univ.; Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, not reviewed, etc.) considers how, under —transgressive— veneers, this movement represents a furtherance of Warhol’s beliefs in the primacy of commerce and the creator’s carefully tended persona. Artists like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Chris Ofili have presented provocative and sometimes moving work whose larger effect is inevitably subordinated to whatever catchall —controversial— components have been integrated (e.g., animal decay, promiscuity, elephant dung). Dismissing the theory driving this art as —facile postmodernism,— Stallabrass reveals the concealed privilege and elite education of the artists involved. He finds the external responses to the —movement— reflected in both the crude, glossy tactics and the subjects of the young artists—who see this ultraconceptual art as highly marketable even when it requires little technical prowess—and the egregiously inflationary effect of Charles Saatchi, the movement’s primary purchaser. The ’scene’s— media-savvy harnessing of promotion, positive or otherwise, becomes an artistic component incorporating even the movement’s disparagers, from conservative art commentator Brian Sewell to New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, the former prosecutor whose shameless grandstanding against the Brooklyn Art Museum’s —Sensation— exhibit could have been choreographed by Saatchi’s admen. Stallabrass, fortunately, is no Giuliani: His critique is sensitive in both its artistic interpretation and its exposure of the political calculation of the artists— endeavors. Although Stallabrass appreciates the light their work intermittently throws on modern beliefs about art and culture, he cannot forgive them their aggressive solipsism or their childlike insistence that raunchy cleverness merits reward all on its own. Nimbly written and bolstered by a constellation of critical and cultural referents: a balanced, engrossing, historically framed examination of this latest avant-garde, so startling yet so oddly familiar. (50 color and b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2000
ISBN: 1-85984-721-8
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
A memoir in the form of an answer to a love letter delivered 20 years late, by the second wife of James Agee. ``Wanting so badly to answer'' that letter, mislaid in the interim, from the long-dead Agee, Neuman has finally eased her grief by writing the candid story of her life. As much an account of love and friendship betrayed as a memoir of 1930's intellectual bohemia and of postwar Germany, the narrative also describes a journey to painful self-knowledge and acts as a rueful confession of a tendency never to look back but to look optimistically ``always straight ahead''—with not always happy results. The daughter of mismatched parents—a cultivated mother and a barely literate but successful father—Neuman, an accomplished musician, was attracted early on to intellectual households where music and literature were important. Her first boyfriend, Frisk Saunders, was the son of an eminent professor who, with his wife, befriended the young woman, despite reservations about her Jewish background. It was in Saunders's home that Neuman first met Agee, who soon married Frisk's sister—a union quickly ended by Agee's affair with Neuman. The author traveled to the American South with Agee, visiting the families that he was to write about in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and she came to know Agee's friends; but when Agee was unfaithful, she fled with their son, baby Joel, to Mexico, where she met and later married German refugee Bodo Uhse. After WW II, the couple moved to East Germany, where Uhse, a longtime Communist and respected writer, enjoyed special privileges. His infidelity and an increasing unease with the regime, however, led Neuman to return to the US, where she finally learned how to live without depending on a husband's status. A life of great range and interest, told with disarming frankness by a woman of remarkable zest and experience. More than a literary footnote. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8071-1792-7
Page Count: 165
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
Honestly assessing their own responses and directions after testing HIV-positive, a number of prominent gay artists speak at length in interviews compiled by cultural critic Vaucher (The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, etc.). Vaucher attempts a cross-cultural overview of the effect of the AIDS epidemic on novelists, poets, filmmakers, dancers, painters, designers, and photographers in the US and France. While figures such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring have only a limited presence—dying before the project began—others such as Marlon Riggs (director of the film Tongues United), Edmund White (A Boy's Own Story and other novels), and David Wojnarowicz (painter, filmmaker, author) speak at length about their lives and their art. In remarks arranged thematically and prefaced by Vaucher, the artists, evincing a remarkable degree of acceptance and creative enthusiasm, offer insight into how they approach anger, activism, sexuality, spirituality, death, and freedom in light of testing HIV positive. As Riggs comments about his new-found freedom, ``It's extremely liberating to live with the knowledge that you may die the next moment.'' But despair and rage also are present in these voices, and the complex array of feelings that ultimately emerges- -together with a unanimous renewal of commitment to artistic endeavor—makes the interviews both distinctive and deeply tragic. A valuable addition to AIDS literature—but also striking for what it reveals of today's artistic temperament as filtered through gay experience.
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8021-1413-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
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