RaveThe New YorkerSwats away easy summary. Its barely two hundred and fifty pages are not a biography of Sargent, or a definitive history of the Gilded Age or its trappings, or a definitive account of anything ... Acidly delightful.
Brad Gooch
PositiveThe New Yorker\"Gooch, a seventies downtowner himself and the author of a sensitive biography of Frank O’Hara, is superb on the textures of these New York years, when a young artist seemingly couldn’t cross the street without getting ideas ... Reagan didn’t make a major speech on the subject until 1987, six years after the earliest reported cases and several after Haring began showing symptoms. Radiant never outright claims that he cranked out art in part because he suspected that he was going to die soon, but it doesn’t have to. Everybody he knew half suspected that they were going to die soon ... Gooch makes a valiant effort to present his hero as an artist-intellectual whose creations only seem shallow...Upon the single semiotics class Haring took at S.V.A., he builds a wobbly theory that the artist’s subway drawings were \'cleverly semiotic,\' since they occupied space usually devoted to ads and therefore offered some comment on commercialism, though Gooch is less than his usual articulate self concerning what this comment might have been ... Haring’s style feels—is—the same whether enlisted in the cause of act up or his own bank account, of fighting racism or promoting the Pop Shop. What his images advertised was always changing, but they only ever spoke in advertising’s metallic chirp ... His admirers continue to complain that he isn’t taken seriously enough; in a way, they are correct, though this book may change things ... [a] highly entertaining biography.\
Prudence Peiffer
PositiveThe New YorkerThings that burn bright and vanish are easily idealized, but in The Slip...the critic Prudence Peiffer opts for a tricky blend of mythmaking and myth-busting ... The true hero is an environment, an atmosphere—in the parlance of our times, a vibe ... New York is full of center-edge neighborhoods, and the history of its art scene is largely a matter of the edges becoming more (and ultimately too) central. Peiffer’s main point, though, is right: Coenties Slip had seedy glamour to spare, but for most of the fifties and sixties it didn’t feel like Manhattan ... I read these pages with delight and foreboding: delight because Peiffer is a lively storyteller armed with oodles of great material; foreboding because whenever a writer starts making solemn generalizations about place I start rubbing my temples.
David Mamet
PanForwardMamet’s conspiracy theories aren’t exactly harm-ful (the only two kinds of people who’ll finish this book are those who already agree with it and those who’ve been paid to review it), but they’re often breathtakingly stupid ... Mamet didn’t drift to the Right, he sprinted ... Even a broken clock is right twice a day, though, and every dozen pages or so he’ll say something blunt and insightful and pretty much true ... Recessional has its share of pleasures, mostly unintentional but pleasures all the same ... Somebody at Harper Collins...made him capitalize \'Black\' — imagining how that Zoom meeting went is almost enough to justify the entire book’s existence.
Emily Hall
PositiveNew York Times Book Review[A] sparkling comic novel about art ... [The narrator is] very funny and also a little terrifying: Their brains are nice places to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there ... The conceptual artist believes in the profundity of art — impressively so, since it seems quite possible that she’s never felt it. Like many serious, driven people, she is scared of not being serious or driven enough. Her narration has some of the same endearing stiltedness as the art historian’s, though there are entire paragraphs of The Longcut that are just plain stilted, like a bad Google translation ... Hall is at her sharpest when she’s mocking artsy academic writing, which, luckily, she does lots of ... In the end it’s hard to say whether the narrators achieve enlightenment or false enlightenment — profundity or some shoddy knockoff. Stuffed to the gills with strong convictions, the novels themselves remain cunningly neutral, less manifestoes about what art should be than inkblot tests.
Jean Frémon, Trans. by Cole Swensen
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal...a brief, nimble portrait of Bourgeois by Jean Frémon, a French gallerist and writer and Bourgeois’s friend of 30 years—could never be mistaken for monumental ... By composing in...expressive, loosely connected observations, Mr. Frémon makes it clear that he’s not trying to offer the last word on his subject. This is his book’s greatest strength. Now, Now, Louison doesn’t aim to encapsulate Bourgeois’s life but at its best evokes a plainspoken, unpretentious side of her, and it does so with a clarity that has eluded many of its heavily footnoted predecessors. The effect, somehow, is both to bring her down to earth and to make her more mysterious ... This is, in other words, one of the rare books that actually benefits from being written in the second person. Throughout the work, the narrator sustains the convincing impression that he is addressing a troubled, ferociously observant woman fixated on events that occurred so long ago they almost seem to have happened to someone else ... That Bourgeois’s life and career were largely the products of a traumatic upbringing is a statement that will shock no art historian. Still, one wonders if Mr. Frémon hasn’t ignored some equally essential parts of her character by foregrounding her childhood ... Mr. Frémon barely touches on Bourgeois’s rise to fame ... Mr. Frémon writes eloquently about Bourgeois the daughter, the wife, the mother, the artist and the mourner, but his protagonist feels frustratingly passive and fragile at times because she lacks one crucial piece: Bourgeois the celebrity.
