Hickey’s description of a “real book,” an essay collection by Terry Castle, fits his own distinctive book to a T: “piece by...
Diverse essays from the iconoclastic art critic.
Hickey (25 Women: Essays on Their Art, 2016, etc.), former executive editor of Art in America, returns with more entertaining, surprising, and delightfully written pieces. Framing the collection are two previously unpublished personal pieces, one on the author’s love of surfing Southern California, the other a reflection on his life as a “journeyman artisan in a marginal industry.” The remainder is an eclectic mix. Whether it’s an insightful appreciation of a “genuinely amazing, some kind of rocket science” pop single by the Carpenters, “Goodbye to Love,” that “just blew me away” or journalistic pieces on traveling the campaign trail in post–George W. Bush America with his state senator or a visit to Disney World and the Magic Kingdom, they’re all written in Hickey’s usual witty, sarcastically friendly, and slangy style. He doesn’t just look; he observes. “After the Prom” is an example of his sharp skills at close-reading art—in this case, a Norman Rockwell painting that “opposes the comfortable, suspicious pessimism of the 1950s and proposes, in its place, a tolerance for and faith in the young as the ground-level condition of democracy.” In “The Real Michelangelo,” Hickey discusses the films of Antonioni, who makes “narrative motion pictures that live in experience and memory the way art does.” For Hickey, Robert Mitchum “was the counterculture—a one-man zeitgeist.” Compared to fellow actors Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, and Ronald Reagan, “he was like a switchblade on a plate of cupcakes.” William Claxton was the “dean of jazz photographers and one of the heroes of my youth,” and Morris Lapidus’ Fontainebleau in Miami Beach was the “first freestanding building designed not just to house commerce but to facilitate it.”
Hickey’s description of a “real book,” an essay collection by Terry Castle, fits his own distinctive book to a T: “piece by piece, everything falls sweetly into place.”Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-226-33313-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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