Vile Days by Gary Indiana
10000 WORDS


by
Ada O'Higgins & Semiotext(e)
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One has to wonder how cold a bath gets after an hour and a half, which is how long Sadaf’s endurance run through the first 45 pages of Gary Indiana’s Vile Days (2018) takes. The book collects output from is three odd years in the middle of the 1980s as an art critic at the Village Voice, “those vile days” of the Reagan era that have come to rear their ugly head again in our continually decaying political moment. A bubble bath is no cure-all, but it’s certainly a good escape from our vile world, and an intimate setting to read Indiana’s portrait of a New York that’s come to pass and of an art world, as his patented bitchiness reminds us, that never really changes all that much.