In 1985, after a decade of writing plays, art-house movies, and reviews, Gary Indiana became The Village Voice’s senior art critic. He quit in 1988 and published his first novel, Horse Crazy, a year later. It’s a love story, sort of, between an art critic and a heroin-addicted waiter during the AIDS epidemic. I say “sort of” because, in the novel, “affection is the mortal illness of lonely people,” as the art critic says, and sex is “if one person jerks off at one end of a room, and someone else jerks off at the other, both trying to hit the same spot.”
Since then, Indiana has published ten novels, a memoir, and several dozen more art, book, and film reviews. This week, he releases Fire Season, a collection of 39 essays and reviews spanning 1984 to the present. His subjects range from food writing (Jamie Oliver is a “fey and gigglesome, teen-idolish James Dean simulacrum”) to Barbara Kruger (her “rich raw material is this bizarro world of media that surrounds us and gurgles in our living rooms”), to assisted suicide (“hardly a legal argument but simply a question of taste or, to be more exact, tastelessness”).
