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“... and ‘the asparagus-like stench’ of a run-over skunk. On a holiday at Garnet Lake near New York the food goes mysteriously bad, bloated horseflies and red ants share the bedroom, and the nearest farm breeds vermin –‘a whole mess of crawling, flying, stinging filth’. The division between desire and talent colours so much of the book that it is ...”

“... the globe seems to have earned him condescending and scurrilously ad hominem coverage from the New York press. At the same time, of course, Enwezor has included a number of European and US-based artists in Documenta 11. Twenty of them are based in New York, including Louise Bourgeois, Leon Golub, Alfredo Jaar, On ...”

“... 4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived with the message wrongly punctuated: ‘Season’s Greeting’s ...”

“... 847’ (1950) by Clyfford Still Perhaps the single most significant aspect of the New York art scene in the late 1930s was the presence of European artists fleeing Nazi Germany and its poisonous effluent elsewhere in mainland Europe. Many of them spoke little or no English and quite a few seem to have taken American artists to be hicks or ...”

“... what was an area of salt marsh on the west shore of Staten Island. It began to be filled with New York garbage in 1948. When legislation was passed in 1995 announcing that it would be closed in 2001, it spanned nearly 2200 acres – about two and a half times the size of Central Park. Its life as a dump was extended following the destruction of the World ...”

“... is 1976, the year John Szarkowski, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organised an exhibition of William Eggleston’s colour prints. Many people were shocked: first because the leading museum of modern art was willing to exhibit colour photographs, second because subject matter and composition seemed so ...”

“... have of it, or that our behaviour implies that we have. This exhibition comes to London from New York, where it was mounted in the Hispanic Society of America. Both there and here in London, Alÿs’s requirements – that the pictures be seen in the context of collections of old-master paintings, and that they be fully catalogued – have been met. An ...”

“... Art After Modernism , a collection of essays published in 1984 by the New Museum in downtown New York, Kathy Acker wrote: ‘The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.’ She once said she didn’t expect anyone to read any of her books all the way through from beginning to end: ‘even in Empire of the Senseless , which ...”

“... family’s trajectory of escape from the confines of Wesleyanism. But although he became known as Peter from undergraduate days onward – ‘Selwyn’ must have spelt social death at Magdalene – he never seriously purported to be other than he was. He exhumed his Christian name in post-war politics and made it into a distinctive trademark, whereas to ...”

“... scoutmaster who stalked him across America until Carr pulled out a knife and killed him in New York, no longer emits much light. Nor does poor Herbert Huncke, ‘sad, sweet, dark, holy’, as Kerouac describes him in Desolation Angels. Parts of his notebooks were published in the 1960s, but he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an ...”

“... for novelty, difficulty and complexity: that is to say, by Modernists such as Greenberg, the New York critic who formulated and led the assault on kitsch in the 1940s and 1950s – an anti-kitsch campaign which, as he saw it, was necessary if the meaning and value of artistic Modernism was to be recognised in America and, subsequently, the value of the new ...”

“... on the Moon. And that, only yesterday, was said by Astronomers Royal and leader writers on the New York Times to be, demonstrably, not on. Why should one be talked down from one’s tree by the kind of people who made that booboo? Regis’s cast includes visionary scientists, Science Fiction writers, Nobel Prize-winners, boffins, rocket engineers and plain ...”

“... and adolescence of Enid Stevick, one of four children of a second-hand furniture salesman from New York State. This history circles around crucial, scarring events in Enid’s life: the sexual abuse from her father’s brother that turns into a dangerous love-affair, a clear-headed and almost successful suicide bid and a hurriedly arranged back-street ...”

“... in the wilderness. Time alters the past. Gods, too, change ... The exclamatory staccato style is Peter Vansittart’s, and so are some of the words. Many sentences get no further than half a dozen words, some are mere singletons. The manner is intentional, but no more digestible for that. Its chief purpose would seem to be the conveyance of chunks of ...”

“... For 27 years Michael Wharton has written the ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph. He was only 43 when he secured this good, steady job and now he has published an autobiographical account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia ...”