Welcome to The Big Picture, where CULTURED’s critics zoom out for a wider view of the art world. While reviews remain the focus of The Critics’ Table, this space is reserved for longer reflections—treatises, prognostications, diaries, and meanderings. Really, anything goes.
The great novelist and art critic Gary Indiana, who passed away last week in his East Village apartment, leaving a hole in the city’s literary firmament the size of his name state, isn’t generally remembered for his favorable reviews. Maybe it’s because even his positive assessments were not positive—not in tone. They emerged from a deep anticapitalist snobbery; his caustic disdain for the commercial structures and depraved characters of the (art) world was justified, implicitly, on aesthetic as much as political grounds. Though in the universe of his writing—by the rules of his bitchy radicalism—no such distinction exists.
Yet Indiana did love many things. I know that from the conversations I was lucky enough to have with him over the years (mostly at parties). And I found or remembered more examples, flipping sadly through Vile Days when I learned of his death. The book, which I keep close at hand, anthologizes the writer’s Village Voice columns from 1985–1988, his years as the paper’s senior art critic. The day before, I had attended the press preview for Nicole Eisenman’s new public sculpture in Madison Square Park, and so, as I was thinking about Indiana—and this collection particularly—I was also mulling over Eisenman’s monumentally-scaled anti-monument, Fixed Crane.
