Description
Book SynopsisA reconsideration of queer American art culture of the mid-twentieth century
Trade Review“
Between You and Me is a brilliant read that flirtatiously winks and kisses its way through the New York art world of the postwar period, turning our favorite icons inside out and back in again. It’s all in the gossip. Larry Rivers painted a ‘visual gossip column’ and was described by Frank O’Hara as a ‘demented telephone,’ but it takes a smart flirt (the best kind) like Gavin Butt to see gossip’s methodological promise. Taking gossip into his own mouthy hands, Butt slurs the studios of Rivers, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol with their own reckless talk: kisses turn into smacks, and winks into home runs. (Between you and me, that’s how I like it.)”—
Carol Mavor, author of
Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden“
Between You and Me is boldly original and beautifully written. Gavin Butt renders a rich (which is to say dishy) description of a queer past that might enable us to imagine a queer futurity. His book will stand as a lasting contribution to queer theory and visual cultural studies and, perhaps more importantly, serve as a political and methodological wake-up call to the discourse of art history.”—
José Esteban Muñoz, coeditor of
Pop Out: Queer Warhol“Queers do sing, if only in each other's ears. In his new Queer Studies book
Between You and Me, art historian Gavin Butt . . . delves into the rampant gay social scene that accompanied the Pop Art era, in which so many pivotal figures were as gay as periwinkle pasta.” -- Roberto Friedman * Bay Area Reporter *
“Between You and Me is a nimble book—balancing a self-consciousness about what it means to work on the most ephemeral of subjects, what it means to deploy gossip as a critical strategy, and how gossip figures in both the content and the form of art from this period. The result is a portrait of the evolution of new kinds of artistic personas, and a map for producing new methodologies for writing about them.” -- Jennifer Doyle * American Quarterly *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xii
Introduction: Gossip: The Hardcore of Art History? 1
1. The American Artist in a World of Suspicion 23
2. Idol Gossip: Myths of Genius and the Making of Queer Worlds 51
3. The Gift of Gab: Camp Talk and the Art of Larry Rivers 74
4. Dishing on the Swish, or, the “Inning” of Andy Warhol 106
5. Bodies of Evidence: Queering Disclosure in the Art of Jasper Johns 136
Afterword: Flirting with an Ending 163
Notes 167
Bibliography 189
Index 201
