Christopher Glazek

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  print December 2022

  What It Takes

  IT JUST TAKES ONE: a single dose that forever halts your breath; a killer product that hatches a monstrous fortune; a dead-set activist who barricades herself across history’s turnpike, lying flat, blocking traffic, screaming, “STOP.”

  In our timeline, there is only one Nan Goldin. A singular woman, she is largely responsible for the moral earthquake that in recent years has shaken the foundations of art and philanthropy. For decades, the art world operated as a high-end laundry service: In exchange for cash, museums and galleries would gently scrub the reputations of wealthy families such as the

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  film November 28, 2022

  What It Takes

  IT JUST TAKES ONE: a single dose that forever halts your breath; a killer product that hatches a monstrous fortune; a dead-set activist who barricades herself across history’s turnpike, lying flat, blocking traffic, screaming, “STOP.”

  In our timeline, there is only one Nan Goldin. A singular woman, she is largely responsible for the moral earthquake that in recent years has shaken the foundations of art and philanthropy. For decades, the art world operated as a high-end laundry service: In exchange for cash, museums and galleries would gently scrub the reputations of wealthy families such as the

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  print December 2019

  Jeremy O. Harris

  LATE ONE MORNING this summer on Fire Island, I crawled out of a shared bed in a forsaken Airbnb and toward a breathtaking beach house owned by a wealthy Austrian. The dwelling had humungous windows overlooking the bay and was populated with antelope masks and Hanuman statues and a collection of beautiful, sensitive-seeming young men who greeted me warmly. Still half-asleep, I assessed that I had entered a queer fairy tale.

  I was there to witness a one-day revival of Water Sports; or Insignificant White Boys (2015), the first script written by Jeremy O. Harris, our fading decade’s most exciting

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  print May 2019

  CASE STUDY

  ONE NIGHT IN THE SUMMER OF 2017, a few weeks before neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, I ran into a well-liked art adviser at a party on the second floor of New York’s Russian Samovar. We knew each other vaguely and greeted each other warmly. The well-liked art adviser asked what I was writing. I answered that I was working on an investigative piece with some relevance to the art world.

  “Oh?”

  I asked if the art adviser was familiar with the Sackler family.

  “The Sacklers, yes, of course. I work with them sometimes.” The art adviser then added, whispering: “And yes, I know all about where the

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  slant April 24, 2019

  Case Study: Nan Goldin and the Sacklers

  ONE NIGHT IN THE SUMMER OF 2017, a few weeks before neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, I ran into a well-liked art adviser at a party on the second floor of New York’s Russian Samovar. We knew each other vaguely and greeted each other warmly. The well-liked art adviser asked what I was writing. I answered that I was working on an investigative piece with some relevance to the art world.

  “Oh?”

  I asked if the art adviser was familiar with the Sackler family.

  “The Sacklers, yes, of course. I work with them sometimes.” The art adviser then added, whispering: “And yes, I know all about where the

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  previews January 2019

  RYAN TRECARTIN/LIZZIE FITCH

  Curated by Mario Mainetti

  It’s always cause for excitement when Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, the poet-oracles and court videographers of our confused, intemperate times, release new work. This April, at Fondazione Prada, Trecartin and Fitch will debut a cycle of films they created over the past three years in Appalachian Ohio broadly focused on the subject, and concept, of land. In the aftermath of 2016’s political earthquake, when rural voters throughout the US slammed the brakes on urban cosmopolitanism, one might have expected that the entire art world, following the entire media, would

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  slant June 12, 2014

  Shopkeepers of the World Unite

  ONE EVENING LAST SUMMER, far from New York City, I was cornered by a senior curator from a prestigious arts institution. The woman, who was urbane, stylish, and in her late thirties, had a pressing question. “You live in Los Angeles,” she noted. “Can you tell me, is Petra Cortright a feminist?”

  I squirmed as I considered how to avoid falling into this trap. I was acquainted with Cortright, a Santa Barbara–raised artist known for her YouTube clips and desktop-stripper animations, but I didn’t know much about her politics. Smelling weakness, the senior curator pressed on: “What about Amalia

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  print December 2012

  Lana Del Rey

  IN A MIDDLING YEAR FOR POP MUSIC, the cleverest piece of cultural criticism nevertheless came in the form of a new hit from Lana Del Rey, aka Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, heiress to an Internet domain-name fortune and proprietor of one of the most promising voices of the Obama era. The track “National Anthem” (Born to Die, Interscope), Del Rey’s parapatriotic send-up of American luxury, may not rank as the year’s greatest song, but its eight-minute video, which reimagines the Camelot fairy tale of JFK and Jackie O, invents a new subset of pop: Call it postironic satire—a Swiftian revival that

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  picks December 06, 2011

  “GERMANY IS YOUR AMERICA”

  In 2004, in the midst of writing a book about Roxy Music, the British writer Michael Bracewell had a portentous dream featuring a Gabriel-like visit from Brian Eno. In the dream, Eno delivered a prophecy both mordant and somewhat enigmatic: “Germany is your America.” Bracewell took this pronouncement seriously and developed a series of essays for the BBC exploring the mutual fascination between Germans and Americans in the twentieth century. Seven years later, Bracewell’s hallucination has grown into an exhibition at Broadway 1602 that attempts to trace what he calls the “modern cosmology of