I know yesterday was the autumn equinox, but still, this morning it really feels like fall in New York City.
So far September has been a nonstop swirl and I can’t believe the month is almost over. After a taking a summer break, “Private Life”—the podcast I’ve been doing for The New York Review of Books—is back! Season two launches today with Lucy Sante discussing an amazing, infamous essay by Renata Adler, deconstructing the film criticism of Pauline Kael.
New episodes will be out weekly for the rest of the year. Next week’s will be a full reading of Adler’s “The Perils of Pauline” (1980)—all 8,000 words of it!—by legendary actor Holland Taylor! (While recording, I started speculating about Adler’s motivations. Holland wisely, dryly, replied, “it’s call murder.”)
You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, on the NYRB site, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like it, do me a favor of rating/commenting and sending it along to a friend.
Last week at The Critics Table, the inimitable Johanna Fateman corralled a number of “one sentence” reviews covering a slew of shows around the city. I was happy to write four. I really love this format (even if my idea of a “sentence” is closer to a grammatically unsound paragraph…) and the way it harkens back to old school ARTnews short reviews. Here’s one I wrote on Joseph Yaeger’s show at Gladstone:
Assertively scabrous grounds of pockmarked and thickly brushed gesso with dumb shit archaeologically embedded into them, like iPhone cords or coins (an observation) or cumrags (a guess), underscore the extreme thinness of the images painted on top of them in watercolor, as though mere projected light, while the images themselves are derived largely from cinema, acutely and ambiguously, tweaked beyond recognizable source material to hover somewhere in the emotional-erotic unconscious, which, it appears, is violent, scary, and misogynistic, bracketed by stylized beauty.
Lastly, if you’ve run into me anytime since June, when I saw the Willem de Kooning Drawing show at the Art Institute of Chicago, you’ve gotten an earful as I read and thought my way through an essay on de Kooning—as far as I’m concerned, the very best New York painter ever—which also partly an homage to my two late friends, who wrote brilliantly on de Kooning: Bill Berkson and Peter Schjeldahl. That piece is in the current issue of the New York Review of Books under the title “De Kooning Draws a Picture.”
After all that, I just want to say: I hope you’re enjoying the weather as much as I am.
Your De Kooning essay in the NYRB was brilliant..one of your best pieces of writing ever.
I loved the "crisis in criticism"...""crisis in art" section. Gallery after gallery of market inspired vacuous canvases..many of us are finding hard to take. Thank you for you important contribution to culture.