Sarah Nicole Prickett

• 

  film March 2014

  You Can’t Always Get What You Want”

  PORNOGRAPHY: You know it when it sees you. The most erotic scene in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac—a two-volume, four-hour tour of force—contains no penetration, no fucking, and almost no nudity. Instead, an ice-cool sadist (played in a gray sweatshirt by Jamie Bell) shows us violence without glory, hitting our titular nympho, Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), because she needs it—not because he wants to, although he does. In a film by a lesser director, or one less versed in what Leo Steinberg called “the condition of being both deathbound and sexed,” what this protagonist needs (orgasm)

• 

  slant February 04, 2014

  Writing on the Wall

  IF CAVE PAINTING is the start not of art but of communication, graffiti is also not art. If art makes history, graffiti cannot be art.

  I devised this solution—like all my solutions, one part each ill logic, viscera, and things I read for the purpose—to address the problem of why I so loathe gallery or museum shows of Citibank-able graffiti. It isn’t that I have a predilection for authenticity. Nor is it a category thing. Many of the artists I’ve loved longest are writers, too: Cy Twombly, Ana Mendieta, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jenny Holzer used (respectively) ink and paper, blood and walls,

• previews January 2014

  Dries Van Noten

  Two decades ago, Pamela Golbin became curator of fashion and textiles at Les Arts Décoratifs, and when “Dries Van Noten” opens at the Parisian institution this March, it will be one of her few shows of a designer’s work that includes not a stitch of couture. The reason is easy: Dries Van Noten doesn’t do couture. Nor does he make conceptual, Icarusian showpieces à la Hussein Chalayan or Margiela. Instead, at fifty-five, the Belgian designer is cult-worshipped for a lush but grounded sensibility that defies an old argument: that fashion’s unwearable and unpurchasable

• 

  diary December 09, 2013

  Real Talk

  OVER THE PAST FIVE ART BASEL MIAMI BEACHES—I first attended in its worst-selling, most-fun year, 2008—the insiders have changed, but their complaint remains the same. It is uttered in an anal, intransigent outside voice, the voice of someone doubtless named Johan, and it’s this: “All these hipsters/rich kids [who are young and beautiful] are flying to Miami [where it is sexy and wildly nice out] in December [when it is disgusting and cold in most of art’s first world] to drink free vodka and eat [or get] crabs while having [blitzy, filmic] sex on the [literal] beach—and they’re not even going

• 

  diary December 04, 2013

  Auto Didact

  ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, the Miami Herald reported that Paul Walker was not in a relationship with local woman Genesis Rodriguez. I read it at the nail salon. Paul Walker is dead in his Porsche. The manicurist says the Miamiest shade of nail polish is Essie’s “Penny Talk,” which looks like sunset on a silver, ridiculous car.

  Imagine your name were Genesis Rodriguez. Would you live anywhere but Miami? I adore this place: It’s so fictional that nothing here seems strange. Nowhere else have I seen money float free of class and this close to the sun, and in no other city I know—certainly not in New

• 

  print December 2013

  Sarah Nicole Prickett

  Novels were the first television shows, and Sergio De La Pava doesn’t forget it. This past summer, I read all 690 pages of A Naked Singularity (University of Chicago Press, 2012) in two days, the way that tens of thousands of Americans watched a whole season of Breaking Bad or Orange Is the New Black on Netflix. The suspense was episodic; the characters not “flawed” but jagged, uneasily memorable; the throughline a high-wire moralism plus boxing allegory that makes this putative Crime and Punishment update feel more like David Foster Wallace off drugs. Not once did I begrudge my commitment. I

• 

  film November 22, 2013

  Teenage Riot

  1. HIGH SCHOOL IS NOT LIKE WAR. College admissions and the job market are not like war. A reality show is not like war, and neither is love. When books and movies made for teens are recast, by critics, as allegories for teenage life, you know it’s the grown-ups who can’t hack the world as it is. What are The Hunger Games books, and now movies, really about? Exactly what it looks like: war.

  2. As The Hunger Games (2012) opened in theaters across a post-Occupied, pre–Obama ’12 nation, we wanted to talk its politics. Those to the left saw the systematic impoverishment of the Districts by the Capitol

• 

  slant October 24, 2013

  Sein und Zit

  THIS WEEKEND IN LYON there was a streaker. For two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday, a man whose stage name is Monico Chiquito wandered the biennial wearing black briefs and Asics and using his iPhone to post selfies to Instagram, Vine, and more. These photos were published on disembodiedselfie.tumblr.com and on the New Museum’s website, where from 7 to 9 AM EST you could also watch a livestream of the photos occurring—“performance art,” by the non-present artist Xavier Cha. Since I wouldn’t open a stall door in a public bathroom, find someone shitting or masturbating, and leave the

• 

  film August 05, 2013

  Skin Deep

  HERE IS A WOMAN who rode liberation to the top, becoming the first porn star in America, gigantically famous, beloved by Hugh Hefner and Johnny Carson alike, a lover of Sammy Davis Jr.’s, author of two best-selling autobiographies, and later, rose with the second wave as the nation’s number-one babe against pornography, friend of Gloria Steinem, author of two more best-selling autobiographies, both utterly and believably contra the first two, and yet—nobody looks at Linda Lovelace and thinks, “Now she was smart.”

  A new biopic feels unlikely to change that. Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey

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  diary July 12, 2013

  Money, Cash, Picassos

  IN 1998 it was a “Hard Knock Life” and I was thirteen, living in small-time suburban Canada, and that song was the first I’d heard of Jay-Z. I loved that music video and most of the rap and R&B videos I saw in high school, graduating with “Bonnie and Clyde,” and I wanted (without trying at all) to look like the girls in them. Mariah was my favorite, in “Heartbreaker,” when Jay drove a Benz and made millions. Now he drives a Maybach halfway to a billion. That part even my dad could have predicted, you know? But if you’d told me at thirteen that all a skinny suburban-Ontario white girl had to do