All Tomorrow’s Parties

People are praising Jennifer Egan for her incisive take on the music industry in her 2010 bestseller A Visit From the Goon Squad. In her review on the Fiction Writers Review website, Jackie Reitzes says, “At the novel’s heart is the role of music as both an agent and a subject of nostalgia. Rock acts as a bygone era and the conduit on which we may resurrect what has been lost.”
(very minor spoilers ahead)

Either way, everything will be fine

Since everybody else blessed with fingers has been writing about Tina Fey’s book, I guess I will too. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a copy of Bossypants because I was home for the weekend and my mom had it. God knows, I can’t buy hardcover anymore. What am I, Pia Zadora?

I love Tina Fey. I have to. It’s the law. I’m a white, Jewish girl from the suburbs who reads Jezebel, works in media, and in high school I had bangs that covered my eyes like Boober from Fraggle Rock. I basically am her target audience.

The Object of Beauty Tour: Lacey Yeager’s New York

Everybody’s been talking about Steve Martin, modern Renaissance man. While most known for acting and comedy, Martin is also a playwright, juggler, acclaimed banjoist, and novelist. Last fall he published An Object of Beauty, a novel inspired by his interest in collecting art. I wasn’t surprised that I enjoyed the book (especially considering my revere for the man who played George Banks), but upon finishing the last chapter, I was surprised by its literary merit.

The book tracks the rise and fall of the artworld climbin’, man-eatin’ Lacey Yeager, with Daniel Franks serving as the Nick Carraway-esque narrator. Franks maintains peripherally involved in the plot while vividly recounting Lacey’s shrewd art deals as a lowly Sotheby’s employee, boosting both her career and bank account. I love how Frank slips in, imperceptibly and without much elaboration, his own love story and subsequent heartache by the end of the novel, all the while describing Lacey’s sordid affairs in detail.

While reading the book, though, I kept thinking one thing: Lacey’s artworld is very different from my artworld. Even though we live in the same city, we are on the opposite ends of the art spectrum, after all. I teach kids about art, treating the object as a source of intellectual exchange; for Lacey, art is a commodity that measure its worth by its price tag. I decided to get a taste of Lacey’s New York art world by visiting the very venues she frequents in the novel.

View An Object of Beauty: Lacey Yeager and New York City in a larger map

So go on, print out the map and go on your very own An Object of Beauty tour! Conversely, you can experience her world remotely by exploring my Google map above. I’ve included descriptions of the venues, excerpts straight from the book, and personal notes. Access these by clicking on the various thumbtacks.

Key:

Blue Auction houses, the corporate side of the art world and where Lacey got her start. It’s all about making the art look as attractive as possible to yield the highest big. And they let prospective collectors touch objects when considering buying them. I mean, I know we all want to touch the art, but for real?!

Pink For-profit galleries, from stuffy Old Money venues selling unknown images by known names, to the galleries showing contemporary monoliths that make you wonder what kind of collector would keep this in her or his house.

Green Museums, we all know and love these. Crossing over the the non-profit world, these institutions house and care for aesthetic treasures in order to share them with the public. Their collections are typically limited to artists with more established careers.

Yellow Alternative art spaces are perhaps my favorite type of venue, and the furthest you can get away from an auction house. I only noticed one mentioned, quite briefly, in the book. These are scrappier non-profit venues that aid emerging artists as well as allow for more experimental (and therefore less commercially-driven) project.

Dye It Blonde

It’s the ultimate teenage fantasy. You spend every afternoon jamming in the basement with your buddies until your mom starts complaining that the chandeliers are shaking and your father starts yelling about how all he asks for is a little god damn peace and quiet after a long day of work. You turn down your amp, crack open a beer, and keep going.

Sean Snyder at Artists Space

The Media vs. the Truth is a theme that I have studied since middle school TV production classes, and it has cropped up continually in everything from art exhibitions (Martha Rosler juxtaposes images from the Vietnam and Iraq wars!) to women’s studies syllabi (look how the media creates and reinforces patriarchal gender norms!). I was prepared to dismiss Sean Snyder’s self-titled show at Artists Space as just another installment of the same-old-same-old, but his bizarre cultural references drew me in. Any art show that starts with Wile E. Coyote and ends with Japanese game shows has to be good, right?

There’s No There There

Many have criticized Sofia Coppola’s latest directorial effort, Somewhere.  In this film her flaws as a director have become too magnified, too blown up.  They are Godzilla-sized and they are taking over the film, knocking down buildings; so that it is no longer its own entity, but rather, an extended study of the mistakes Sofia Coppola makes.