July 24, 2023

Last Week's New Yorker Review: July 31, 2023

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 31

Must-Read:

“Money on the Wall” - Patrick Radden Keefe looks deep into the eyes of Larry Gagosian, art dealer extraordinaire. A phenomenal, hilarious, loopy, endless dive into the world of commerce-art that swirls around Larry. Especially brilliant on the level of the individual word: “Wildcatting,” “arriviste,” “chutzpah,” “squiring,” “parvenu,” “tetchy,” “cantankerous,” “jockeyed.” These aren’t just thesaurus-bombs; in Keefe’s hands they’re firecrackers which spark off the page. Keefe also clearly read an entire library of art texts for research, and has picked exactly one key quote from each; the greatest find is the Woody Allen interview in the Gagosian magazine, which somehow provides a flawless segue from one kind of pestilential patron to another. (Turns out, there are two skeevy Romans in the billionaire Rolodex.)

This piece basically demands you find Your Larry in the reams of anecdote; here, then, is mine: If Trump is, as Fran Libowitz put it, a poor person’s idea of a rich person, Gagosian is basically a rich person’s idea of a person with taste, an ex-fake-hippie, the ultimate Boomer, with a famed “eye” that favors bold statements of masculine hypocrisy with the good sense to proclaim themselves masculine and hypocritical. (“Twombly, Ruscha, Serra.”) But Keefe supplies enough descriptions of Gagosian you could stock a mini-fridge. Some of my favorites: Cecily Brown calls him “like someone ‘you would see on TV when you were little... the looks. the attitude. very male.’” Art advisor Allan Schwartzman says he has “the eye of an industrialist.” Keefe says, “fundamentally, he does not seem to be an introspective person,” but he is “a scholar of appearances.” Better than any portrait is the reflection we get just from Gagosian’s constant denials, which begin with major statements of innocence and gradually deflate until, toward the end, you arrive at “(Gagosian denies he was drunk or requested Aerosmith.)”

There’s plenty of other fun stuff here too — the piece is a bit disingenuously coy on the details of Gagosian’s relationship with art star Anna Weyant (“It is easy to suppose that this improbable liaison involves a familiar transaction,”) yet makes it nearly impossible not to start thinking about exactly what kinds of sex they are having. (Gallery owner Ellie Rines: “She kind of likes to be naughty and subversive, and there's something naughty and subversive about being with Larry.” See also: The section on Gagosian’s mommy issues.) There’s also a double act of Steve Martin as the comedic celebrity-world presence and dealer Stefania Bortolami as the comedic art-world presence. The latter is entirely unafraid to give on-the-record quotes or to make enemies — and it’s probably no coincidence that, for my money, her gallery is by far the best of those mentioned in the piece.

Look: This piece only works because Keefe makes it consistently funny. Otherwise it could just read “it’s tax fraud, you idiot!” The ending section tries to up the stakes and doesn’t nail it. Everything else is endlessly pleasurable, and also just plain endless — this is easily the longest piece in the magazine since I’ve been writing this newsletter. In honor of that, I’m premiering the first ever Last Week’s New Yorker Review visual gag. I’ll sell it for the right price.

Window-Shop:

“Panic at the Disco” - Helen Shaw lifts her spectacles at two unusual productions. The Imelda Marcos musical is such an odd and complicated idea that just explaining it in brief takes up two thirds of the review. Still, the meat of the matter is worthy as ever, from character assessments (one actor “exaggerates a honeyed sensuality, letting his performance rot a little in the heat”) to the difficulty of casting an audience as complicit without making complicity seem fun (“…can you bake your critique and eat it, too?”) As for the second review… I appreciate Shaw’s desire to highlight shows that have already closed, but perhaps that could be a more frequent, online-only feature? With Twitter collapsing, she’ll need a new home for quick takes — although the just-launched site Staff Picks is aiming to be just that, for experimental and short-run theater.

“Breaking News” - Paige Williams stops the presses at the McCurtain, Oklahoma Gazette, which got an inflammatory scoop on the local sheriff’s office. A riveting tale, one I hadn’t heard about though the piece says it was a “global” story. The quotes Bruce gets from the spy-pen recorder are so gruesome they manage to shock a bit, even in the age of Trump. There’s something odd about a story this news-pegged appearing in this magazine; it’s not clear which morsels come from Williams’ reporting. Just as she describes the Gazette’s publisher as not “one to preach about journalism's vital role in a democracy,” Williams thankfully keeps most of the politicizing subtextual. But because she sticks mostly to facts, Williams’ few bits of specificity are highlighted, and come across as quite oddly, randomly chosen. (“The playback physically sickened him,” a weird euphemism; the section-ending sideline about the upcoming eclipse.) It’s also hard to read about scanning QR codes to access audio files and not wish this magazine would try something similar.

“Shock Waves” - Anthony Lane plays rough. I was eagerly awaiting Lane’s take on Barbie, since his Little Women rave was his best review in years. Unfortunately, he finds it a “deep disappointment,” and soothes his pain with lots of dumb jokes about pink. His Oppenheimer screed is more stoic; I’m not sure if he liked it, but I can tell he was paying close attention. Who needs friends with toys like these?

Skip Without Guilt:

“Sickening” - Adam Gopnik gets a tummyache with Chris van Tulleken’s new book, Supersize Me for people that can read. Like your grandmother’s unprocessed souffle, this starts off looking good but mostly collapses. The first few paragraphs briefly achieve weirdo profundity (“Sushi is the dream of pure sensation, but herring is the normal state of life…” “Spoilage [is] …the most urgent reason we transform nature into culture — we’re desperately trying to keep what we’re about to eat from going bad”) but after a few inedible Gopnik quips (“The raw, the cooked, and the rotten: It sounds like a Sergio Leone movie,” “Sisyphus’ famous boulder… is better represented in our daily lives by… lox”) the piece becomes a straightforward review of van Tulleken’s “exhausting” new book, which rotely slanders processed food in the same oversimplified and grossed-out register as previous iterations on the theme. I broadly agree with Gopnik’s critique, that processed food may be aesthetically iffy, but when compared with famine is small (blighted?) potatoes. In making that point, though, Gopnik continually pauses to make weird, sometimes offensive assertions. (After describing a heroin addiction: “Nobody feels that way about Cocoa Puffs,” which might be news to many with eating disorders.) Gopnik is correct that “the history of humanity is the history of processing foodstuffs,” but the key thing Gopnik and van Tulleken both miss is the labor in that equation. The real issue with processed food isn’t its junkiness or the negative aesthetic qualities of its artifice, it’s that it’s pre-processed: It alienates the eater from its creation. You don’t even really know what you’re looking at.

“Brothers in Law” - Jennifer Wilson appreciates Dostoyevsky’s complex Brothers Karamazov.1 Much of this material is redundant with other recent coverage of Russian literature: Keith Gessen on Fathers and Sons, David Denby on teaching Crime and Punishment, and Elif Batuman’s excellent piece on rereading Russian literature in the shadow of the war. Given this, it would be nice if Wilson focused on the minutae of the new translation at hand, apparently the “voiciest… of the novel thus far” or just of Brothers in general. But there’s lots of puttering around Dostoyevsky in general, and Wilson (who’s new to the magazine but writes frequently for the Times) struggles at making her synopses snappy. There are so many Russian names, so much historical reference — too little voice. It’s also distinctly possible I’m just slow.

“Courting Fame” - Sheelah Kolhatkar plays to the jury with Alex Spiro, trial lawyer to the rich and famous. The lengthy opening and closing sections on Elon Musk in court will be redundant to anyone who’s followed that story in real time through, say, Matt Levine’s newsletter. I don’t mind the repetition, but the staleness of much of the narrative, which is largely pegged to the “summer of 2018,” does rankle. It’s not only the public’s perception of Musk that’s changed since then, it’s notions of justice and celebrity power in general. How might the last five years have changed Spiro? This piece doesn’t say. And the halfhearted stabs at profile, which all boil down to “he sure likes to argue,” never really address what makes Spiro special: He’s a celebrity lawyer who’s also a lawyer-celebrity. Is there tension between those two roles, or do they feed into one another? Kolhatkar doesn’t make that clear.

Letters:

Kit wrote a wonderful critique of Rivka Galchen on Multiple Sclerosis treatment, far outpacing my own: “It was a pleasure to read a medical story where people are getting better, and I learned so much about MS, but the style kept really rankling me, maybe exactly because it was — I think? — aiming to charm. There were just too many kinda cutesy metaphors or descriptions that didn't land for me; there was the observation that — wow! — Dr. Sidiq also cares about his patients' feelings (evident from every previous detail shared about him!!! Not a profound insight!!!), the “tiny brains!” bit that the research scientist quoted clearly disliked, and then just the general random ambling vibe with (to me) overly simplistic syntax and, maybe, effort to convey childlike wonder that I just bounced right off of. …I wanted to like it and not be such a curmudgeon but I couldn't help it.” On the contrary, your curmudgeonliness is encouraged here, especially in the form of detailed and convincing notes like those.

Dara liked Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ profile of Gretchen Whitmer more than me, saying it made “her seem surprising for a Midwest politician, and charming, to New Yorker readers who care about but don’t otherwise follow politics, who are a decently important constituency in the invisible primary.” I wanted to be charmed — I find Whitmer charming enough in clips! — but I didn’t get it from the piece.

Regular correspondent Michael “didn’t get much new from” the Emily Nussbaum piece on country music, and Dara has “some first person experience with Bush-era radio sausagemaking that leads me to think both you and Nussbaum are a little wrong” on programming’s present and future. That’s certainly probably correct!

And Caz didn’t like Anthony Lane on Indy, calling it "funny that he thought a nearly three hour long film had too many words, when a nearly 30 minute car chase has almost no dialogue. Someone should send Lane picture books.”