Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985-1988

by Gary Indiana, Bruce Hainley (Editor)

Gary Indiana's collected columns of art criticism from the Village Voice , documenting, from the front lines, the 1980s New York art scene. In 1985, the Village Voice offered me a job as senior art critic. This made my life easier and lousy at the same time. I now had to actually enter all those galleries instead of peeking in the windows. At times, the only tangible perk was having the chump for a fifth of vodka whenever twenty more phonies had flattered my ass off in the course of a working week.
—from Vile Days From March 1985 through June 1988 in The Village Voice, Gary Indiana reimagined the weekly art column. Thirty years later, Vile Days brings together for the first time all of those vivid dispatches, too long stuck in archival limbo, so that the fire of Indiana's observations can burn again. In the midst of Reaganism, the grim toll of AIDS, and the frequent jingoism of postmodern theory, Indiana found a way to be the moment's Baudelaire. He turned the art review into a chronicle of life under siege. As a critic, Indiana combines his novelistic and theatrical gifts with a startling political acumen to assess art and the unruly environments that give it context. No one was better positioned to elucidate the work of key artists at crucial junctures of their early careers, from Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince to Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, among others. But Indiana also remained alert to the aesthetic consequence of sumo wrestling, flower shows, public art, corporate galleries, and furniture design. Edited and prefaced by Bruce Hainley, Vile Days provides an opportunity to track Indiana's emergence as one of the most prescient writers of his generation.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Essays

600 pages, Hardcover

Published November 13, 2018

About the author

Gary Hoisington, known as Gary Indiana, was an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of "depraved indifference" that characterized American life at the millennium's end. In the introduction to the recently re-published edition of Three Month Fever, critic Christopher Glazek has coined the phrase 'deflationary realism' to describe Indiana's writing, in contrast to the magical realism or hysterical realism of other contemporary writing.

Reviews

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful, acerbic, and gorgeously written essays that refuse to separate artworks from their cultural environment. From week to week, Indiana shifts the form of his column so you never know what you'll encounter next. Although he's writing about the 1980s, his aesthetic perceptions remain trenchant and his social views feel eerily prophetic. But the main reason to check this out is that it contains some of the best essays on art I've encountered. Indiana repaid the editorial freedom he was granted with his finest work. Sadly, it's impossible to imagine any major outlet publishing these today....

[lia 🐩 · Rating 3 out of 5]

wow me tardé un montón pero pues es q es digerir 3 años del mundo del arte del east village de p^tazo. hay unas reseñas equis pero pues no me imagino tener que escribir algo todas las semanas sin parar!! unas muy muy buenas,,,, los compendios son muy difíciles de calificar.....

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful rendering - specific as he lived it for him, presently-then - for anyone to read now as a kind of time-travel to a specific time and place as one who saw and lived.