3 December 2018

Why must Christ obey the law?


"John Dogg and Nadine were quite the couple now. John Dogg was showing with Helen Hellenberger. Helen was wild about him. All the important critics were at his debut opening at her gallery. There were slide projections of blank white light. And patterned light from shallow zinc rectangles of water he'd placed strategically on the floor. He'd aimed film lamps at the rectangular pools, which sent reflections up the gallery wall in veined and fractured shimmers.
John Dogg wore a well-cut linen suit and laughed easily and occupied the role of feted artist with perfect naturalism, no sign of the pushy tactics I'd seen at the Kastles'. He moved through the room confident that he was universally adored, and it seemed that he was. I'd met him the previous September and now it was late April, almost May, and he had been reinvented. This happened in New York, and you could never point to the precise turn of events, the moment when the change in human currency took place, when it surged upward or plummeted. There was only the before and the after. In the after, no one was allowed to say, hey, remember when everyone rolled their eyes about John Dogg? Shunned him, thought he was an idiot? I understood all this now. Sandro disapproved of that kind of ambition, said there was no hurry, but it was a lie, a thing successful people said, having conveniently forgotten that they themselves had been in a rush."

—Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

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