The Killer Elite The Killer Elite
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood's tenth novel, has just won Britain's prestigious Booker prize, leading one to wonder whether the Canadian author with the impressive oeuvre (fifteen works of fiction, including three novels already shortlisted for the Booker, five collections of nonfiction, thirteen editions of poetry and four children's books) has departed in some measurable way from her signature style or whether she has perfected it. Neither, quite. Satiric and brooding, The Blind Assassin presents a typical Atwood predicament: Women taught self-effacement, obedience, modesty and quiescence resolve to tell their stories, trusting that someone, somewhere will listen. "Because I am telling you this story I will your existence," says the narrator of the futuristic parable, The Handmaid's Tale (1985). "I tell, therefore you are." The storyteller of Blind Assassin is an 82-year-old woman, Iris Chase, with an ailing heart who lives alone in Port Ticonderoga, Canada, where she and her younger sister Laura grew up, the well-starched granddaughters of a wealthy button manufacturer. But the era of cozy Victorian gazebos and twelve-course dinners has long since passed. Their mother died in 1925 after a bloody miscarriage, and their father, a shell-shocked World War I veteran, alternately distracts himself with alcohol or soirees with radically chic artists come to eat his food and criticize his politics. When noblesse oblige gives way to layoffs, shutdowns and outside agitators, to save his business Iris's father arranges her marriage to Richard Griffen, a ruthless industrialist from Toronto, but Griffen swindles Mr. Chase, brutalizes Iris and locks up her sister in a loony bin. Laura escapes, disappears and then, just after the end of World War II, drives her car off a bridge. Now it's 1998. Iris prowls her own small house at night, finger in the peanut-butter jar, taking inventory of her life's rubble--saucerless cups and monogrammed spoons and the tortoise-shell comb with missing teeth. By day, she writes about that life with a new black plastic pen, hands shaking as she tries to get the story straight and figure out, at the same time, why she's writing it at all. No longer consecrated to the ladylike regimen of silence and complicity, she determines to speak the truth. "The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read...," Iris declares and pauses. "Impossible, of course." Iris's saga is the linchpin of Atwood's Dos Passos-like mélange of newspaper clippings, interior monologues and social history, all interspersed with yet another tale, a sci-fi cult classic called "The Blind Assassin" and said to have been written by Laura. Published posthumously, "The Blind Assassin" is the story of Sakiel-Norn, a city on the planet Zycron, where enslaved children weave carpets until, blinded by their work, they graduate as hired killers. Meantime, the Sakiel-Norn business is itself a product of a romance into which it's folded: A nameless couple cooks up the fable during secret trysts that take place in two-bit hotels and fetid rooms borrowed for the occasion. Sound complicated? Not really. Best-known of Canada's living novelists, Atwood writes with the precision of crack short-story writers Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant and the wit of the late, prolific Robertson Davies; but most often one hears an echo of Margaret Laurence's cranky women in Atwood's narrators. With a cool confidence all her own, Atwood expertly shuffles among her various plots, historical periods, locales and characters. There's no mistaking Port Ticonderoga for Sakiel-Norn, and anyway the features of the anonymous lovers turn recognizable pretty quickly. During the Depression, when Iris was 18 and Laura 14, the Chase girls attended the annual button-factory company picnic and met the former divinity student and career proletarian who, it happens, supports himself by writing pulp fiction. For most of the novel, however, Alex Thomas is on the lam, having become chief suspect in the factory fire that lays waste the dwindling Chase fortune. Both Laura and Iris find the hard-boiled Thomas appealing, if for different reasons. Laura, an idealist with "the infuriating iron-clad confidence of the true believer," hides Thomas in the mansion's cellar. (There's a radical in the woodpile of every family estate, it seems.) Not to be outdone, Iris joins the Thomas relief effort, as much to rob her quixotic sister of her moral and emotional superiority as to protect Thomas. "Laura touches people," Iris says, toting up their differences. "I do not." Competition supplies the necessary psychological heft to the novel's otherwise spurious mysteries. (Who really wrote "The Blind Assassin"? Who are its unnamed lovers?) After their mother's death, a 9-year-old Iris resentfully takes charge of Laura, and when Laura one day plummets into the Louveteau River (obvious harbinger of her later death), Iris hauls her out. "I couldn't get out of my mind the images of Laura, in the icy black water of the Louveteau--how her hair had spread out like smoke in a swirling wind, how her wet face had gleamed silvery, how she had glared at me when I'd grabbed her by the coat. How hard it had been to hold on to her. How close I had come to letting go." In fact, just three pages into the novel, a newspaper headline announces that the precipitate death of Laura Chase, 25, sister of Mrs. Richard Griffen, has been ruled an accident. But dutiful Atwood readers understand that there are no accidents in her novels, and so ironic auguries topple over one another with a kind of slick inevitability. We read a 1937 society page in Mayfair magazine that some of Toronto's elite will travel to France and Italy this season, "Mussolini permitting." We learn from another headline that Iris's oily husband, Richard, praises the Munich accord. We discover that Iris and Laura's grandmother was one of those wistful women who "went in for Culture," believing it made you a better person. "They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house," Iris tartly observes. This same grandmother christened the Gothic-turreted family mansion Avilion, after Tennyson's utopian "island-valley" in Idylls of the King--but Avilion, as we might have guessed, suffers the slings and arrows of change and neglect, its splendor turned food for silverfish. After it's sold, it's renamed Valhalla and run as an old-age home. O tempora! O mores! All this historical canniness begins to sound a bit smug. Partly, of course, the problem lies with Iris, who recollects trauma from the relative tranquillity of hindsight. She's also a woman without affect who nightly accedes to her husband's savagery, insulates herself from her sister's suffering and refuses to see the incest and adultery and suicide committed before her eyes. Yes, yes, she is a kind of blind assassin, cutthroat and complex, herself a wounded child impassively doing what she has to do. But we learn little about Laura Chase, whom we desperately need to know. "It was ill will, the ill will of the universe, that distressed her," Iris glibly portrays her. "Laura believed words meant what they said, but she carried it to extremes," Iris says in another of Atwood's foreshadowings. "You couldn't say Get lost or Go jump in the lake and expect no consequences." Similarly, Iris's buccaneering husband is a villain without a cause, committing all the usual atrocities: fraud, physical abuse, child molestation. His sister, a camp version of the social arriviste, brandishes a mean Waldorf salad, organizes theme-obsessed charity balls (Xanadu is the pick for 1936) and wears alligator pumps the color of chlorophyll chewing gum: amusing but arch. Actually, all these characters succumb to Atwood's deadpan style, her penchant for static tableaux, her anxiety-ridden refusal to feel. "I can see people moving like bright animated dolls, their mouths opening and closing but no real words coming out," comments the narrator of Cat's Eye. "I can look at their shapes and sizes, their colors, without feeling anything else about them." There's much good prose here and much wit, but one wants more than that. Winking at the reader familiar with Coleridge and Dickinson and T.S. Eliot and Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin, Atwood structures her novel with the cerebral precision of a gymnast performing flips for the cognoscenti. Even the novel's organizing images--fire and water and gardens made of rock--occur in diagrammatic, self-satisfied fashion. More successful is Atwood when she plies her own stock in trade, those prodigal similes ("over the trenches God had burst like a balloon"), merciless descriptions ("I look sick, my skin leached of blood, like meat soaked in water") and recurrent props, like the graffiti in bathrooms or photographs that commemorate our lives in their weird and flattened way. Laura steals the picture of herself, Iris and Alex Thomas taken at the factory picnic. She makes two prints, one for Iris and one for herself, and in each, cuts one of the sisters out, leaving only a hand. It's the novel's talisman. Distance is Atwood's forte and her nemesis. Though her trademark understatement often contributes to the sharp humor of her work, at times it seems crudely facile. "The war takes place in black and white," Iris informs us in one particularly grating paragraph. "For those on the sidelines that is. For those who are actually in it there are many colours, excessive colours, too bright, too red and orange, too liquid and incandescent, but for the others the war is like a newsreel--grainy, smeared, with bursts of staccato noise and large numbers of grey-skinned people rushing or plodding or falling down, everything elsewhere." During the Great War, Iris's father writes chillingly from France, "I cannot describe what is happening here, and so I will not attempt it." One suspects that for Atwood, scenes of emotional carnage take place at a remove, as in newsreels, and therefore remain indescribably unreal--not exactly a virtue in a novel with history its tacit subject. At her best, though, Atwood's suppressed women of precocious sensibility tell their stories with prickly precision, sparing neither themselves nor anyone else. They hold on; they let go. Such is the Scylla and Charybdis of Iris's life, not just in relation to her sister but to the past and to herself. "But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it," Iris speculates, "but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented." For Atwood, however, one also memorializes oneself to stave off atrophy and despair. "The temptation is to stay inside," Iris acknowledges, "to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighbourhood children regard with derision and a little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and allow my hair to lengthen and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism." So too Atwood. She chooses not to plunge inside, preferring instead the cool, hard, protective edge of classicism to the deeper, often sloppier emotions. Nonetheless, she confers a certain dignity on her female outcasts and artists and the solitary, aging everywoman who smells of kitty litter. "I'll tell you this story," Iris offers. "What is that I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener." It's not a bad trade. Atwood writes an entertaining and bracing tale, fun to read, forgettable when finished.
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Brenda Wineapple
Our Books, Ourselves Our Books, Ourselves
"Simone de Beauvoir said 'Books saved my life.' I think that's true for me," announced Gloria Whelan in accepting her National Book Award recently for Homeless Bird (which won fo...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Art Winslow
The Martian Chronicles The Martian Chronicles
Long before Carrie-Anne Moss rips open Val Kilmer's shirt and begins pounding his chest, providing him with a version of CPR that she must have learned from a Japanese drum troup...
Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
The ‘Ism’ That Won the Century The ‘Ism’ That Won the Century
To buy or not to buy turns out to have been the question of the century in America--Just Do It or Just Say No. And in the past fifteen years, consumer society has moved to the ce...
Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Lawrence B. Glickman
Remembering Ring Remembering Ring
The quiet grace of Ring Lardner Jr., who died the other week at 85, seemed at odds with these noisy, thumping times. I cannot imagine Ring playing Oprah or composing one of those...
Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Roger Kahn
Romancing the Screen Romancing the Screen
VINCENT CANBY As a memorial tribute to Vincent Canby, the "Arts & Leisure" section of the New York Times recently published half a page of excerpts of his prose, as se...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Ring Lardner Jr. (1915-2000) Ring Lardner Jr. (1915-2000)
The last chapter in Ring Lardner Jr.'s new memoir, I'd Hate Myself in the Morning (Nation Books), is called "Sole Survivor." When Lardner, who died October 31, wrote it he was in...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Victor Navasky
Coronation by Cornet Coronation by Cornet
LOUIS ARMSTRONG AT 100 In 1927 a young cornetist led his band into a meticulously hilarious version of a classic composition Jelly Roll Morton had made famous, "Twelfth St...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro
Mr. Sammler’s Planet Mr. Sammler’s Planet
What ought to be read--and why--are questions that have a unique urgency in a multicultural milieu, where each group fights, legitimately, for its own space and voice. In the pas...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans
Death in the Gallery Death in the Gallery
Damien Hirst is 35 years old, and since 1988, when he organized and starred in the legendary exhibition of young British artists titled "Freeze," he has been what one London critic felicitously called the "hooligan genius" of British art. The hooligan genius belongs to artistic mythology, but we have not had an example of one in the visual arts since perhaps Jackson Pollock, and Hirst's hooliganism is evidently of the same ruffian order we associate with the English soccer fan--he even composed an anthem for that brawling brotherhood in which the only identifiable word is "Vindaloo." There is a photograph of him glowering in a meadow, wearing shorts, low boots, an open jacket; and we cannot but wonder about the fate of the cow standing behind him, considering that Hirst has been responsible for having some of her sisters sliced into sections, immersed in formaldehyde and distributed in no particular sequence in so many glass tanks. Such works, like the affecting lamb or the bisected pig in last year's "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, have touched off a debate in ethics as to whether it is a better fate for an animal to wind up as a work of art when its destiny would otherwise be the dinner table--or, in the case of the magnificent tiger shark that was also on view in "Sensation," as dog food. Whatever the outcome of these disputes, Hirst uses death as a way of expressing thoughts about death. "His most celebrated work," according to a press release, "has never shied away from the terrible beauty that lies in death and the inevitable decay contained in beauty"; Hirst himself, on a web page, is quoted as saying, "I am aware of mental contradictions in everything, like: I am going to die and I want to live forever. I can't escape the fact and I can't let go of the desire." The title of one of his most controversial, and somehow most sublime, works--the tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde solution--is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. "It is possible to avoid thinking of death," the novelist Leo Litwak recently wrote me, "but that would require me to stop thinking." The work is very frequently shocking, which is the hooligan side of his genius. Shock is a means, however, of advancing the Heideggerian reflections on death that have driven him from the beginning, very much in evidence in the exhibition of Hirst's work now on display at New York's Gagosian Gallery (555 West 24th Street). Hirst did a photograph in 1991 called Self Portrait With Dead Head, which perhaps only a hooligan would have thought of. It shows his vividly youthful face, grinning merrily at the viewer, while his head is placed, literal cheek by literal jowl, with what appears to be the decapitated head of what had been a much older man. Perhaps any such head would be frightening, but this looks as if its owner had been frightening while alive: It is like the convict's head in a particularly scary film version of Great Expectations. The photograph could scarcely be in worse taste: It violates our sense of the dignity owed the dead, whatever they may have deserved from us when alive, and it stirs some primordial, ill-understood sense of fittingness. Perhaps only the very young would be sufficiently without squeamishness to pose intimately with a cadaver. However, once one's disgust is overcome, as much with the artist as with his subject, one realizes that he has created an unforgettable image of life-and-death and an artistic path that takes us through the body of his work from that moment on. The theme of death, at least as expressed through animals and animal parts, is muted in "Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings," as Hirst has titled the Gagosian show. It is, however, obliquely implied in the title Concentrating on a Self Portrait as a Pharmacist, this time a painting of--and I assume by--the artist. It is a fine, expressionist picture that shows the skeptics not only that yes, Hirst can paint, but that even in an earlier period of art, when painting was art's primary vehicle, he would have been a marvelous artist. It is, however, not on the wall. It is on an easel, from which a white coat hangs down. Painting of this sort being so old-fashioned a medium, one infers that this is an artist's smock. In fact, it is a laboratory coat, of the sort doctors and pharmacists wear. Easel, painting and lab coat are enclosed in a glass booth, itself set into a large vitrine. Outside the booth, hence unreachable by the artist in the act of painting, is a taboret with brushes, rags and tubes of paint. Pharmacognosy--to use the old-fashioned word--has obsessed Hirst for nearly as long as death has, and in the present political preoccupation with prescription drugs, the exhibition could hardly be more topical. In 1992 Hirst created an installation specifically titled Pharmacy--which, according to the label, contains "medicine cabinets, desk, apothecary bottles, fly zapper, foot stools, bowls, honey, glass. Overall dimensions 28'7'' 22'7'' (variable)." It is like a play drugstore for a privileged child. In "Sensation," there were several shallow vitrines arrayed like medicine cabinets, with vials and boxes aesthetically arrayed. These were used as decorative items in the instantly fashionable restaurant Pharmacy, which Hirst opened in London in 1997. The present show is like a museum of pharmaceutical displays. There is, for example, a wall cabinet containing "8000 individually hand crafted model pills"--though I am insufficiently drug literate to be able to identify any of them. The work is somewhat mysteriously--unless the pills modeled are stupifiants--called The Void. There are in addition two quite large wall cabinets with arrays of surgical instruments, anatomical models, skeletons, basins and the like. One of them is called, somewhat irreverently, Stripteaser. Perhaps it refers to the skeletal condition in which we are stripped of our flesh by the various items of surgical cutlery (in another room, one finds a glass cabinet displaying several animal skeletons, titled Something Solid Beneath the Surface of Several Things Wise and Wonderful). There is an overall tone of nervous merriment, of giggling in the face of our mortality. I can imagine a hooligan joke about the stripteaser who peels the flesh off her bones and, now a skeleton, capers about the stage grinning at the patrons, oblivious of the fact that there are no erotic skeletons. One of the works in the show consists of a skeleton on a cross of glass panels, above whose skull a pair of eyes (painted Ping-Pong balls) bobbles in a spirited danse macabre on what I guess are airjets. It is called Death Is Irrelevant. The show brings together in a way both sides of Hirst's persona, concerned respectively with death and with healing. I got an understanding of one genre of his paintings, for example, that, superficially at least, doesn't seem to have much to do with the preserved carcasses of animals. These are arrays of dots, regularly arranged--like pills--in neat rows and columns. They are painted with glossy household enamel on canvas, and it feels as if Hirst uses the entire spectrum of colors made available by the manufacturer. There is, despite the orderliness of the matrix, no chromatic pattern that I could discern: It is as if the choice of colors were randomly determined, except that Hirst has said that no two hues in a given painting are identical. So there would be no way of projecting the pattern past the edges: There are no "repeats." The paintings have the all-over patterning of wallpaper (a similar thing used to be said of Mondrian). As art, they have the look of Minimalist paintings of a few decades ago, less austere than the dot paintings done by Robert Irwin but generated by comparable imperatives. A recently published dictionary of twentieth-century artists describes these works as "plumbing the repetitious possibilities of painting," as though they were merely formal exercises "produced in seemingly endless series by Hirst's assistants." I previously saw very little in these paintings, nor could I see any way of connecting them with the rest of his work, viewed as a collective meditation on death. Recently, however, I began to pay attention to their titles. One of the paintings in "Sensation," for example, was called Argininosuccinic Acid. A chemical involved in the synthesis of arginine, argininosuccinic acid is one of several amino acids used to form proteins, fundamental components of all living cells. Several paintings in the show are named after cobras--Naja Naja, Naja Naja Atra, Naja Melanoleuca, Naja Flava, Naja Haje and so on. Naja Naja is the asp, the venom of which is legendarily deadly. According to an ancient authority, the Egyptians employed a form of relatively humane execution by means of asp bites, and it must have been with Naja Naja that Cleopatra committed suicide. There are antivenins, made of venoms, however, and one wonders if Hirst has in mind the idea that certain toxins can generate their own cure. Digging around a bit, I encountered reference to the fact that he may actually believe that these paintings have specific pharmacological properties. I was unable to see any relationship between the (not well understood) chemistry of snake venom and the formal properties of the dot paintings--but in any case, the idea that painting is a form of pharmacology makes it a literal possibility that the artist can be a pharmacist. It is not necessary for viewers themselves to share this belief, but it strongly connects these otherwise incongruous paintings with the rest of the work. And it incidentally underscores the fact that formalism alone will not get you very far in art criticism. The first thing one encounters upon entering the gallery is a colossal figure, twenty feet high and weighing six tons, in luridly painted bronze. It monumentalizes a toy, called Anatomy Man by its manufacturer and designed so that children can learn the shapes and placement in the body of the major organs. "I loved it that it was a toy," Hirst told an interviewer. "I wouldn't have done it with a teaching hospital one." The fact that the immense figure (titled Hymn [= Him]) is an enlarged educational toy underscores the element of play that I felt was in the 1992 Pharmacy and in Death Is Irrelevant. A work called The History of Pain is a high white box, with a number of knife blades sticking up, threatening a bleached beach ball, suspended above them. It is, I suppose, an allegory of mind and world, the former rising and falling on a jet of air in the spirit of a striptease, as the viewers wait for the ball to fall onto the knives to be shredded. Its message--the ball as consciousness, the world as knife blades--may be somewhat obvious, but I find it difficult to think of another artist concerned to deal with the concept. It is this readiness to take on the questions of the ages that causes my overall admiration of the Young British Artists, even if they cross the line in sometimes trivial, sometimes juvenile ways. There is nothing obvious, trivial or juvenile about two of the works, titled respectively Love Lost (Bright Fish) and Love Lost (Large River Fish). As with Concentrating on a Self Portrait as a Pharmacist--like most of the works in the show--these are installed in very large vitrines or aquatic tanks. Each of the Love Lost tanks contains the furniture of a gynecologist's examining room, with stirruped tables and surgical instruments. In one there is a computer, in the other, more humanly, a clothes stand. The furniture in both is submerged, and fish swim freely, as in aquariums. The works are inevitably mysterious, as there is no clear narrative that connects the examination equipment with the water and the fish, nor is there any available allegory one can easily seize. Any interpretation that occurs to me seems instantly superficial, so I think it best to let the mystery stand. There is, however, one truth worth considering, which is that both works are extremely beautiful, and while I do not know how to connect beauty with (what I suppose is) abortion, it seems to me that one possibility is that beauty heals, as the artist Robert Zakanich once said to me. There is something universally aesthetic in watching the movements of fish through water, like dancers through space. But in Love Lost, this beauty is somehow related to, well, lost love, embodied in the abortionist's setup, and the idea may be that the beauty heals the pain of loss, or that it can. It at any rate suggests a meditation on the pharmacology of beauty. What cannot avoid notice, however, is fish excrement drifting down, beginning to soil the immaculate equipment; and we know, unless steps are taken, that the water will grow murkier and murkier, and the fish will die, and beauty will vanish. Water is not formaldehyde. The beauty cannot be preserved. And the fragility of beauty is like the fragility of life. The title of the show--"Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings"--is also the title of one of its works, which consists of two vitrines, each with noisy blowers and a small population of Ping-Pong balls. It seems a sullen, pointless work, and one cannot but wonder how it connects with the title, which could be a postmodern name for an anthology in the philosophy of science. The work is like one of those devices with which lotteries are decided, where each ball has a number. Here the balls are unmarked, rise and fall meaninglessly, without deciding anything. If I see it as suggestive of anything, it is by way of a pessimistic answer to the meaning of life. Luckily, the desire to go on living does not depend on getting deep answers to our question of why. In an interview conducted in 1996, Hirst was asked to make an Artist's Statement. His first answers were yob irreverences, not worth reprinting here. But then, abruptly, he tells the interviewer that he likes a piece by Bruce Naumann, of which he gives an exceptionally sensitive reading: It's a neon sign that's a spiral that goes into nothing in the center and you have to tilt your head when you read it and it says "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths," and you go "Oh, yeah, great" and then you go "Oh god" and there's nothing there. Naumann did this work in 1967, as a sort of window or wall sign. I had always taken the work as a piece of Naumannian irony, but it is clear that this is not Hirst's attitude. It never occurred to me that part of the meaning of the work is that it gives no answer to the question of which are the mythic truths. If one were to see it in a show of Naumann's work, and look at the pieces it is surrounded by, one would have to say that Naumann is not a true artist by his own definition: His pieces are all more or less jokes, which makes this work a joke. I had not considered the spiraled words just ending in empty space to mean: There are no mythic truths, there is only nothing. As an artist's statement, "Oh god, there's nothing there" is pretty deep. Whatever your cultural agenda, if you're in New York between now and mid-December, then, you owe it to yourself to pilgrim up, down or over to Chelsea, to look at the spectacular exhibition of Hirst's art in the scarcely less spectacular setting of the remodeled Gagosian Gallery. It is a little early in the twenty-first century to speak of high-water marks, but it's difficult to believe that Gagosian's space--23,000 square feet, the size of a small museum--will soon be superseded; and if a body of work comes along that in ambition and achievement puts Hirst in the shade, we are in for a remarkable era. I cannot imagine what it would be like to afford, let alone live with, one of Hirst's pieces, but someone has to be paying for works of this sort, each of which requires a substantial capital investment in hardware. And I am again overwhelmed by the generosity of the gallery system, which opens its doors to the general public free of charge. Free admission to the other high arts are rare and uncharacteristic. The walls at Gagosian have even been decorated with a tasteful green graph-paper motif, to imply the atmosphere of a natural history museum that Hirst's pieces seem to create. The show really feels, however, like a toyland, a Halloween extravaganza with something for everyone. Take the kids. In memory of Saul Wineman.
Nov 2, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto