A few weeks ago, James Salter spoke at one of Paul Holdengraber’s always-brilliant Live from the NYPL events. We’d bought the ticket the day the event was announced, lovingly looked at that Friday on our calendar as it came closer and closer, and reveled in the fact that we would finally be in a room with this man.
And then, incidentally, we got a migraine and couldn’t go. We were devastated. He is our hero.
When we were younger, we wished we could read different books than we actually wanted to. Publicly, we read Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine, trashy teen novels that we loved for their beyond-the-grave high-schoolers and their symbiotic nerds. Privately, we read Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (once a year, whether we needed it or not), or Louisa May Alcott, or, when we were really feeling it, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. We loved Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 and Frank Herbert’s The White Plague. Nineteen-eighty-four and The English Patient.
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We just finished reading Sarah Thornton’s brilliantly readable and wonderful and didactic-without-lecturing book Seven Days in the Art World. And the thing that struck us, in between parsing the minutiae of Artforum vs artforum.com’s editorial relationship and trying to figure out how to reasonably make friends with L.A. gallerists Blum & Poe, was how much of a period piece it was.
Thornton’s book, which came out earlier this month, is, like most books, the product of years and years of research and (in her case, participant) observation and work and is so rooted in a time before now. What struck us the most about Seven Days, though, was how we were unable to read it without the feeling that this was a historical snapshot rather than a contemporary glimpse. Reading about collectors waiting like nervous racehorses before the opening of the Art Basel gates and seeing the way in which galleries controlled which buyers got access to which artists, how being on the list to buy a piece of art was as much an important accomplishment as the purely fiscal ability to acquire, all seemed like a dramatized version of a past we vaguely remember.
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Every so often, one of our friends will turn to us and say something like “I really don’t know anything about architecture…but I like that building.”
To which we develop critical apoplexy and argue, as we have in various forms since at age twelve discovering the ineffable thrill of good architecture on a summer trip to Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp that no one should ever have to know anything about architecture in order to like — or dislike — a building. Anyone can be a critic. But what makes a good critic?
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We heard from a source close to the ground that BETH CAMPBELL’S new show at NICOLE KLAGSBRUN GALLERY was, in slyly overheard words, “different.”
Okay, so her installation of nine mobiles — a nice reclamation of the word in the wake of ZAHA HADID’S interpretation — might not look like the FOLLOWING ROOM most recently exhibited at the WHITNEY or last year’s POTENTIAL STOREFRONTS at the MAIDEN LANE EXHIBITION SPACE or her MY POTENTIAL FUTURE…. text drawings that outlined the outcome of choices like “I cancel the show” or “Make all kinds of other merchandise as well,” but her exploration of the potential and the possible, the committed and the plausible, is everywhere in these hanging sculptures made of thick and thin lengths of looped and twisted steel wire.
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