Dirty Rotten Intellectuals
We love thrash — noun and verb, ideally. Especially since, once upon a time, when scouring the Internet for interviews with thrash gurus was our forte, we came across a guitarist who wished there were more hours in the day. At the time, we didn’t understand. Perhaps it was summer; perhaps we enjoyed ignoring our responsibilities. Now, though, things have changed. Today we blink back against our heavy eyelids. Granted, some days the only reading we do comes from bumper stickers — those ever-dangerous ideological narratives — but can you imagine if someone tried putting the entire text of Julius Caesar on bumper stickers? Surely it’s not Shirley Dent; she just wants people to stop publishing slangish books. Speaking of bad writing, Jonathan Littell won the Bad Sex in Fiction award. The BBC milks the subject, asking authors if it’s difficult to write about the good old holymoly. Word on the street is that gender equality in the art world is still a long ways away, which makes our segue from books on sex to books on war inevitable. When we return, it’s back to Pop Culture, a place where Warhol’s 200 One Dollar Bills always rank higher than anything the treasury can spit out. Thrash on! – Andrew Geer
– I was talking to the journalist Lindsay Johns the other day when a look of pain came across his face. “Have you come across this street slang Julius Caesar?” he asked. I gritted my teeth. “No, but I can imagine,” I replied. — Slang in The Guardian
Sexy Beast!
– Jonathan Littell won the tongue-in-cheek award for numerous passages in his novel The Kindly Ones. It was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 2006 after originally being published in French. It was translated into English earlier this year. His extremely graphic accounts convinced the editors of the Literary Review that he was more deserving of the prize than Roth, who was nominated for a blue account of how a green dildo was used by a pair of lesbians. — Bad Sex Awards in Telegraph
– Over the years, some of literature’s most glittering names have competed for one of its least coveted prizes. Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, John Updike and Philip Roth are titans among novelists, generally acclaimed for their representations of every kind of human experience – except one. — Writing Sex in BBC News
– Two thousand eight turned out to be a good year for women in the New York art world. Although women have historically been given far fewer solo shows than men have, it was the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum that won the International Association of Art Critics’ award for Best Monographic Museum Show in New York City. — The Feminist Evolution in ARTnews
We Love Paris In The Unoccupied Time
– “Read The Poor Folk, and felt like a character out of Dostoevsky, just as I felt extremely Proustian three years ago. I always see myself through the colored windows of my admiration. I’m afraid of having no more great works to immerse myself in. After Balzac, Proust, Dostoevsky and the English, what is left for me?…” — Occupied Paris in The New York Review of Books
– As the auction commenced on the evening of November 11, 2009, the elbows of Tobias Meyer, the auctioneer and Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s, ascended to a position in line with his shoulders. “600,” he said in his steely continental accent. His right arm pointed in the direction of the current bid—$600,000. His angular face turned in the opposite direction. His left arm ratcheted back close to his chin like a spring-loaded trap, palm out. Led by his forehead, Meyer’s torso leaned towards a potential bidder. — The Art Market in The New Criterion
Video: Tobias Meyer of Southeby’s
