Glenn O'Brien – författare

“Enclosed in this beautiful package, please find: an agile mind, a perfect style, a canny and undeceivable heart, and a welcome, enduring presence in the reader’s life.” —Michael Chabon“Glenn O’Brien may be the most important cultural critic of celebrity culture who never accredited his importance... Could he also have been the most important magazine editor of the 1970’s and 1980’s? These two claims complicate one another. The celebrity culture he dissected mercilessly was the same one he was complicit in creating, at Interview, which O’Brien credits with inspiring People... This puts him in a neighborhood with figures like Marshall McLuhan and Andre Breton, who seem to stand both enmeshed in and to one side of their cultural moment.” —from the introduction, by Jonathan Lethem.Intelligence for Dummies is a portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last fifty years of cultural life, captured through a vivid selection of Glenn O’Brien’s writings on music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, the political temperature of America. O’Brien’s essays, aphorisms and tweets create a portrait of the artist as cultural bellwether, complimented by artwork and photographs from his collaborators. A full-color, hardcover edition, Intelligence for Dummies is a deeply personal look into Patti Smith and Jean Michel Basquiat’s New York, and the culture of money and celebrity politics that ensued.

Since his 1974 arrival in New York, James Nares has been a central member of the vibrant downtown art and music scene. Once described by Glenn O'Brien as the last of the Action Painters, Nares attempts to capture his work's own creation. Produced with handmade brushes, his monumental strokes are almost three-dimensional in the degree of detail and depth they reveal. In 2008, the artist rediscovered numerous of his experimental Super 8 films from the 1970s. Now Nares is renowned as both a filmmaker and a painter singularly concerned with physicality and ways to illustrate the unfolding of time. Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this definitive monograph surveys the entirety of Nares's career, including many unpublished works. With essays and commentary by critics including Amy Taubin, Ed Halter, and Glenn O'Brien, the book also includes an illuminating and personal conversation between the artist and Christopher Wool.