Every marriage is a mystery, especially to its victims.

SoHo Sins

 

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[For Chinese painters] three basic options are available: subsume oneself to the venerable national traditions; abandon the old ways completely and embrace a Western aesthetic; or attempt somehow to reconcile the two. Each of these alternatives is sure to alienate a considerable portion of the potential audience.

New China, New Art

 

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Later, when she and Philip were both burned out from openings and benefit dinners and parties, she would wave the back of her hand in the air and say, “We’ll sleep in another life.” So they plunged on, transported fluidly by their driver, to the next radiant event. The booze helped, as did Mandy’s yellow-and-white pills, but mostly the Olivers seemed to subsist on pure money; it affected them like nuclear fuel.

SoHo Sins

 

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Progressive sculpture in post-Tiananmen China often involves displacement—a sense of parts missing or incongruously conjoined, of the whole work belonging to a realm beyond logic and social norms.

New China, New Art

 

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Even though I had not confined myself to anything so quaint as “one woman” during my own term of marriage, I recalled that the motives for domestic rupture are minutely cumulative, a Chinese torture of minor irritants and small, exasperating quirks—a bill left unpaid, a pillow moved to the wrong side of the bed, a black hair coiled on the bathtub soap. Every spouse keeps a running catalogue of capital offenses, a book of poisonous hours.

SoHo Sins

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Odd Nerdrum has never lacked for nerve. From the time of his first exhibitions as a student, in 1962, this masterful painter has consistently placed himself in opposition to the late modernist aesthetic that prevails in his native Norway, as it does to the detriment of most forms of indigenous and traditionalist art throughout the world.

Odd Nerdrum

 

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“All I’ve ever wanted in my life,” Philip said, “is a woman who’s wise enough to accept a double standard.”

            “What would be so wise about that?” I asked.

            “It just might work, and nothing else does.”

SoHo Sins

 

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At its best, performance art mixes spectacle, protest, and absurdity with something more profound—a sense of penance.

New China, New Art

 

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“Sure,” I said. “In those days, Phil and I used to tomcat around together a bit. Sometimes we’d hang out here, when Mandy was away in Europe. You can guess how it went. . . . Some girls, some drinks, some coke. The usual.”

            Hogan regarded me without any change of expression. “I guess it depends where you live.”

SoHo Sins

 

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Almost everything Nerdrum shows suggests disaster and hopelessness, while almost everything he does—by composing so thoughtfully, by painting so well—testifies to the real possibility, even here, even now, of superb values and genuine skill.

Odd Nerdrum

 

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“Everyone tells me life must go on. Nobody tells me why.”

SoHo Sins

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“Make the past serve the present and foreign things serve China,” goes the old Maoist maxim, still resonant both in the halls of power and in artists’ studios now. We begin, then, with the most basic question: what are the chief factors that determine how art is made and received in the People’s Republic today?

New China, New Art

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The guy was hunky enough, I suppose. Smooth-faced and blue-eyed, an art scene regular. . . . One of those pretty, brutish, young male-model types who look like they’ve just been smacked between the eyes with a brick.

SoHo Sins

 

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Experimental Chinese photography tends to shift individually and collectively from documentation to artifice, from candid reportage to elaborately staged mise-en-scène. . . . [Such] work, by virtue of its personal idiosyncrasy, continues to be a subtle protest against the regimentation of vision and thought, whether by Communist authorities or the global market.

New China, New Art

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“You’re not exactly the maternal type, are you, Laura?”

            “Me? No. I’ve always thought of children as nature’s way of telling you to stop having sex.”

SoHo Sins

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As Nerdrum's desolate setting is both internal and external, both a version of the modern world and an alternative to it, so his characters are at once archetypal figures and quite private dramatis personae. "The strictly personal turns universal by its convincing self-revelation."

Odd Nerdrum

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​​“You can find beauty in anything, Jack, if you look at it intelligently enough,” Mandy said one night. She had just been freed from her hospital regime, and we were all sitting, very drunk, in a corner booth at Jean Georges. She quickly raised her blouse, revealing a stitched slash, a raw and puckered absence over her heart. “How smart are you?”

SoHo Sins

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Because of the Cultural Revolution, extensive information about video art did not reach China until the 1980s, nearly twenty years after its inception abroad, and the means to view and produce it effectively developed even later. . . . So rapidly and astutely were these influences absorbed that all the video artists covered here were showing internationally within a few years of making their first work.

New China, New Art

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“Nathalie was determined, absolutely, not to be jealous. She said, ‘Let’s not be stupid about sex in the naive American way.’ So we weren’t. We were stupid about it in the clever French way.”

SoHo Sins

 

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Thus on the liminal shore between land and sea, time and eternity, consciousness and unconsciousness, the wanderers pause to confront that realm from which all life emerged. Seated with legs open, sometimes with phallic staff by their side, near bays where land and sea embrace, they give themselves over to the primordial ebb and flow.

Odd Nerdrum

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Nathalie died of sophistication the way some people die of cirrhosis.

SoHo Sins

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Chines artists [underwent], virtually overnight, the shift from enforced people’s art to today’s postmodern eclecticism, without ever passing through an era of high-minded modernism.

New China, New Art

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A moral change is like aging. The alterations are subtle and deep, the damages cumulative. There is no way to perceive them, except by looking away and looking again, as one must to see the passage of time on the face of a clock.

SoHo Sins

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One of Deng Xiaoping’s galvanizing precepts was that some people should be allowed to grow reach before others—a virtual prescription for the creation of art collectors.

New China, New Art

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Melissa was crying quietly, her face lowered. I wanted to feel something, the way I did a long time ago. Just about anything would have done, I think. Love or jealousy or rage. Anything. But wishes don’t always come true.

SoHo Sins

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​A joke came into my head in the dark. What if Hogan’s God Almighty had gone slightly nuts like Angela’s ex? It was a funny thought. The result might be the world as we know it. I don’t care what Hogan says, there’s a flaw in the universe, and its name is death. How’s that for profundity—or was it blasphemy? Great, I said to myself, now I’m doing theology on sleep meds and vodka. No wonder that Jehovah, like Hogan, comes into my mind at the oddest times. Often they arrive together.​

SoHo Sins

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