Forty-One False Starts (39 page)

The pink raybow of light dawns on you as the ribbon of the wrapping unfolds the tales of light about never being able to see all light at once. You can only get the heads and tails of this if you reshuffle the wrapping to cover the adjoining body of the riddle getting an ellipse of the senses; you have to have blindness to have insight.

The light issue has become a famous, interesting failure of Sischy's—people in the art community talk about it indulgently, as if speaking of the endearing foibles of a beloved, brilliant child. Sischy herself has no regrets about it, and of all the issues she has produced, it may be the one that most tellingly elucidates the character of her editorship. Its mysterious amorphousness is akin to her own boundless and restless energy. She is the Ariel of the art world, darting hither and yon, seeming to alight everywhere at once, causing peculiar things to happen, seeing connections that others cannot see, and working as if under orders from some Prospero of postmodernism, for whose Gesamtkunstpatchwork of end-of-the-century consciousness she is diligently gathering material from every corner of the globe as well as from every cranny of the East Village. Sischy not only travels to the big international art expositions, such as the Venice Biennale and the Kassel Documenta, but will impulsively get on a plane to check out a show in London or Paris that she thinks the magazine might want to review. She will spend a week in Spain or Italy recruiting reviewers and writers; she will fly out of town to give a talk at a museum or a university; she will journey to Japan on an exploratory mission for some possible future inscrutable special issue. While in New York, she tries to see as many as possible of the fifty or sixty gallery and museum shows that open every month, to attend as many openings and after-opening parties as possible, and to pay as many studio visits as she can.

During this ceaseless activity Sischy remains unhurried, relaxed, and strangely detached. “In a world where all kinds of people—from editors to curators to collectors to dealers—want control, where control is of the essence, she doesn't seem to want it,” the critic Donald Kuspit observes to me over a drink at a bar near Gramercy Park. Kuspit is a fifty-one-year-old professor of art history at Stony Brook who has been writing art criticism of a dense prolixity for
Art in America
,
Arts
, and
Art Criticism
, as well as for
Artforum
, for the past dozen years. He goes on, “She's not looking to be the Archimedes of the art world, with a lever that can move it. I think one of the things she realizes is that that whole way of thinking is obsolete. She's smart. There's a kind of canniness to her, what Hegel calls ‘the cunning of reason'—insofar as there
is
reason in the art world. Frankly, I think the art world would be a terrible place without her. It would be a macabre place. Even as it is, it's a dreadful place. The megalomania that is rampant among artists is unbelievable, and so is the self-importance. Bankers must be the same, but the cry for attention from artists—the ruthlessness of their sense of what is due them—is extraordinary. When I first moved to art criticism, which was a natural extension of my work with Adorno in critical philosophy, I had a great need to concretize the importance of art. Now I go through bouts of wondering whether art isn't just a matter of fashion and glamour. The artists are getting younger by the minute, and, increasingly, anything with a little flip to it gets visibility. It used to be that when art was made, people would be unsure of its value until—slowly, through all kinds of critical discourse and debate—the art would acquire cultural significance. And
only then
would people arrive with money and say, ‘I want that.' Now—and I think this started with pop art—there's money waiting like a big blotter to blot up art, so that the slightest bit of inkiness is sponged up. That's a very hard thing to keep a distance from. Ingrid walks around it. She doesn't let her magazine serve as a little subservient blotter for whatever powers there may be. She is fearless. Nobody owns her, yet she doesn't give offense because of that. I'm not saying that the editors of the other art magazines are owned, but somehow this free-spiritedness seems a more vivid part of Ingrid—almost as if she doesn't want to be owned even by herself.”

During the year that Sischy and I have been meeting for interviews, she has been unsparingly frank about herself. She has confessed to me her feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy, she has told me stories of rejection and mortification, she has consistently judged herself severely. At the same time, she has not been altogether uncritical of me. I have not lived up to her expectations as an interlocutor. She fears that I do not understand her. As I ponder this tension between us, a story that she told me early in our acquaintance comes back to me with special weight. It was an account of a small humiliation—one of those social slights that few of us have not in our time endured—that she had suffered the previous day at a public lunch honoring a sculptor who had done a work for the city. Sischy had sat down at a table next to a stranger, a sleek, youngish man who, as soon as they had exchanged names, turned away from her and began talking to the person on his other side. The guests at the lunch were from both the art world and the city government, and this man was a city politician. “He was clearly disappointed that someone who looked like me should have sat down next to him,” Sischy told me. “I could see him thinking, What a waste of a lunch! I considered getting up and going to sit with some people I knew at another table, but then I thought, No, I'll stay here. A little later, a woman who had sat down on my other side asked me my name, and when I told her, she figured out who I was, and she was very interested. And then two people across from me figured me out, and they started talking to me. And eventually this guy, taking it all in, said, ‘I'm terribly sorry—I didn't get your name.' So I told him again, and the woman beside me told him what I did, and his whole manner changed. He suddenly became very interested. But he'd lost me by then.” Sischy told me this story with no special emphasis—she offered it as an example of the sexism that women still regularly encounter—but I obscurely felt it to have another dimension besides its overt one. Now, a year later, the latent meaning of the story becomes clear to me: it is a covert commentary on Sischy and me. I had formed the idea of writing about her after seeing
Artforum
change from a journal of lifeless opacity into a magazine of such wild and assertive contemporaneity that one could only imagine its editor to be some sort of strikingly modern type, some astonishing new female sensibility loosed in the world. And into my house had walked a pleasant, intelligent, unassuming, responsible, ethical young woman who had not a trace of the theatrical qualities I had confidently expected and from whom, like the politician at the lunch, I had evidently turned away in disappointment.

In a charming and artful essay of 1908 entitled “A Piece of Chalk,” G. K. Chesterton writes about taking some brown paper and colored chalks to the Sussex downs on a fine summer day to do Chestertonian drawings of “devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper.” But as he begins drawing, Chesterton realizes that he has left behind “a most exquisite and essential” chalk—his white chalk. He goes on:

One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is that . . . white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black . . . Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

Since Chesterton wrote these buoyant words, the world has seen two world wars and a holocaust, and God seems to have switched to gray as the color of virtue—or decency, as we are now content to call it. The heroes and heroines of our time are the quiet, serious, obsessively hardworking people whose cumbersome abstentions from wrongdoing and sober avoidances of personal display have a seemliness that is like the wearing of drab colors to a funeral. In “Why I Write,” George Orwell said, “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is, I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” One feels about Sischy that at another time she, too, might have been less grave, less morally weighted down, and more vivid. She told me that as a child she had been extremely naughty and wild. What remains of this naughtiness and wildness finds expression in the astonishing covers, the assertive graphics, and the provocative special issues of
Artforum.
Just as Sischy's personal mutedness is the by-product of an Orwellian sense of cultural crisis, so her vision of contemporary art is shaped first by societal concerns and only secondarily by aesthetic concerns. Her interest in the neo-Expressionist painting that is coming out of Germany today, for example, is bound up less with the painting's aesthetic claims than with its reflection of the anguished attempt of young German artists and intellectuals to come to terms with the Nazi past. Sischy once said to me, “My greatest love is conceptual art. I may be even more interested in thinking than in art.” She added, “Rene and I used to have an argument. He'd say something like, ‘Well, that work is really beautiful,' and I'd say, ‘So?' and he'd say, ‘Well, you hate art if you say “So?” about something being beautiful,' and I'd say—and I've come to realize that it's more complicated than this—‘Well, maybe I just hate art when the only thing going for it is that it's beautiful.' ”

ADVANCED PLACEMENT

2008

As Lolita and Humbert drive past a horrible accident, which has left a shoe lying in the ditch beside a blood-spattered car, the nymphet remarks, “That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store.” This is the exact type of black comedy that Cecily von Ziegesar, the author of the bestselling Gossip Girl novels
*
for teenage girls, excels in. Von Ziegesar writes in the language of contemporary youth—things are cool or hot or they so totally suck. But the language is a decoy. The heartlessness of youth is von Ziegesar's double-edged theme, the object of her mockery—and sympathy. She understands that children are a pleasure-seeking species, and that adolescence is a delicious last gasp (the light is most golden just before the shadows fall) of rightful selfishness and cluelessness. She also knows—as the authors of the best children's books have known—that children like to read what they don't entirely understand. Von Ziegesar pulls off the tour de force of wickedly satirizing the young while amusing them. Her designated reader is an adolescent girl, but the reader she seems to have firmly in mind as she writes is a literate, even literary, adult.

As the first book opens, Blair Waldorf—who is almost seventeen and lives in a penthouse at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street with her divorcée mother, Eleanor, her younger brother, Tyler, and her cat, Kitty Minky—is sulking in her room. Blair, in the description of a classmate, is “the bitchiest, vainest girl in the entire senior class, or maybe the entire world” and an antiheroine of the first rank: bad-tempered, mean-spirited, bulimic, acquisitive, endlessly scheming, and, of course, dark-haired. The blond heroine, Serena van der Woodsen (who lives at an even better Fifth Avenue address, right across from the Metropolitan Museum), is incandescently beautiful, exceptionally kind, and, in the end, it has to be said, somewhat boring. The series belongs to awful Blair, who inspires von Ziegesar's highest flights of comic fancy.

Blair is sulking because her mother's new boyfriend, a Jewish real-estate developer named Cyrus Rose, “a completely annoying, fat loser,” and her mother are in the kitchen eating breakfast in matching red silk robes. When dressed, Rose “looked like someone who might help you pick out shoes at Saks—bald, except for a small, bushy mustache, his fat stomach barely hidden in a shiny blue double-breasted suit. He jingled the change in his pocket incessantly . . . He had a loud laugh.”
What?
We're only on page 6 and already reading about a fat, vulgar Jew! Doesn't von Ziegesar know that anti-Semitic stereotypes are no longer tolerated in children's literature? Of course she does. Cyrus Rose is only one among many tokens of her gleeful political incorrectness. An elderly guest speaker at Blair's high school graduation is another:

“Auntie Lynn,” some old lady who'd basically founded the Girl Scouts or something, was supposed to talk. Auntie Lynn was already leaning on her metal walker in the front row, wearing a poo-brown pantsuit and hearing aids in both ears, looking sleepy and bored. After she spoke—or keeled over and died, whichever came first—Mrs. McLean would hand out the diplomas.

Only someone very hard-hearted wouldn't laugh at this. The way von Ziegesar implicates us in her empathic examination of youth's callousness is the Waughish achievement of these strange, complicated books. And in Blair she has found a powerful pivot for her feat.

She has equipped this girl with an excess of the most unattractive but also perhaps most necessary impulses of human nature—the impulses that give us such up and go as we have. Unlike her forerunners Becky Sharp and Lizzie Eustace, who ruthlessly elbowed their way into wealthy aristocratic society, Blair already has all the money and position anyone could want. She is pure naked striving, restlessly seeking an object, any object, and never knowing when enough is enough. However—and, again, unlike her prototypes—Blair never harms anyone but herself. She thinks malevolent thoughts about everyone, but she does not act on them. It is her own foot that she invariably shoots. Her goals of the moment—to lose her virginity to her boyfriend, Nate Archibald, and to get into Yale University—elude her. Something always gets in the way of her doing it with Nate, and her Yale interview is a catastrophe beyond imagination.