2022 NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
The novelist, cultural critic, and indie icon serves up sometimes
bitchy, always generous, erudite, and joyful assessments from the last
thirty-five years of cutting edge film, art, and literature.
"One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche." --The
Guardian
Introduction by Christian Lorentzen
Whether he's describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet
Schroeder ("Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that
we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and
impulse....") or the installations of Barbara Kruger ("Kruger compresses
the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our
lives are..."), Indiana is never just describing. His writing is
refreshing, erudite, joyful.Indiana champions shining examples of
literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist
or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has
nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver
the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes;
speaks in the same breath--in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent
way--about high art and pop culture.
Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And
when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of
fun on the page.Here is Gary Indiana on Euro Disney resort park in
Marne-la-Valée outside of Paris: John Berger compares the art of Disney
to that of Francis Bacon. He says that the same essential horror lurks
in both, and that it springs from the viewer's imagining: There is
nothing else. Even as a child, I understood how unbearable it would be
to be trapped inside a cartoon frame.
