Looking at Kristin Calabrese’s 1998 painting Stove & Fridge (Love), I couldn’t help but focus on the houseplant, which shares space with the dustpan, broom, and mop, as well as the fridge-mounted valentine, snapshots, and fortune-cookie slips. It reminded me of the scene in the 1987 film Wall Street where Bud Fox, a working-class boy with big dreams, stands in the living room of a corporate raider/art collector and gets read like a tea leaf by Darien, a socialite decorator who describes Bud in terms of the type of living space that includes a houseplant. Calabrese’s paintings cover a range of

By 1974 Paul McCarthy had already made more than two dozen performances and videotapes and parodied AbEx by painting with his penis. Around that time, John Waters was preparing to shoot Female Trouble (1975), perhaps his greatest film. When Dawn Davenport—played by Divine, in one of his most enthralling performances—wakes on Christmas morning to find that her parents had decided not to indulge her desire for cha-cha heels, she throws a tantrum (which ends with her mother pinned beneath the Christmas tree) and bangs out the door in a flimsy green negligee to begin a life of crime and extreme