"Life Stories: profiles from the New Yorker" [.]

[fiefoe]

Show Dog (Biff Truesdale) / Susan Orlean (1995)

    Could this be the inspiration for "Best in Show"? There is something almost admirable about people who can clearly state their ambitions thus: "We'd like to be remembered as the boxer people of the nineties." Orlean also notes with a straight-face that she saw an article subtitled "Frozen Semen - Boon or Bain?" in a showdog magazine.
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Forty-one False Starts (David Salle) / Janet Malcolm (1994)

    Malcolm's masterful merging of form and subject leaves me quite in awe. Post-modernism is often accused of being too clever for its own good, and she shows in prose how it can be done otherwise.
 
    As an interviewer, she is very sensitive to nuances and the subtext of her subject's responses:
    'To kind of buy stuff. What is the difference between buying stuff and kind of buying it? Is "kind of buying" buying with a bad conscience, buying with the ghost of of the Frankfurt School grimly looking over your shoulder and smiting its forehead as it sees the money actually leave your hand?'

    There are so many nice little touches. The artist's designer lair is described in passing thus -- 'A slight sense of quotation mark hovers in the air.'

• (Post-modernism) has made a kind of mockery of art history, treating the canon of world art as if it were a gigantic, dog-eared catalogue crammed with tempting buys... Salle's selection from the catalogue have a brilliant perversity. Nothing has an obvious connection to anything else, and everything glints with irony and a sort of icy melancholy. His jarring juxtapositions of incongruous images and styles point up with special sharpness the paradox on which this art of appropriated matter is poised: its mysterious, almost preternatural appearance of originality. ...  For all their borrowings, they seem unprecedented, like a new drug or a new crime.
• The heavy shadow of prior encounters with journalists and critics falls over each fresh encounter. Every writer has come too late, no writer escapes the sense of Bloomian belatedness that the figure of Salle evokes. One cannot behave as if one had just met him, and Salle himself behaves like the curator of a sort of museum of himself.
• I recognize in Schjeldahl's feelings about Salle's work an echo of my own feelings about Salle the man. When I haven't seen him for several weeks or months, I begin to sour on him, to think that I'm overliking him. Then I see him again, and I experience Schjeldahl's "immediate freshening."
• Salle cultivates the public persona, but with the detachment of someone working in someone else's garden.
  

    And this is too mean to pass up:
    '"Little talent, much pretension. Any other comment might seem superfluous," the Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote of Armitage on the latter occasion.'

Some of Salle's recent works I sort of like: 1, 2, 3.