Douglas Crimp is the rare art critic whose work profoundly influenced a generation of artists. He is best known for his work with the “Pictures Generation”—the very name of which Crimp coined to define the work of artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman who appropriated images from mass culture to carry out a subversive critique. But while his influence is widely recognized, we know little about Crimp’s own formative experiences before “Pictures.” Before Pictures tells the story of Crimp’s life as a young gay man and art critic in New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s. Crimp participated in all of what made the city so stimulating in that vibrant decade. The details of his professional and personal life are interwoven with this the particularly rich history of New York City at that time, producing a vivid portrait of both the critic and his adopted city. The book begins with his escape from his hometown in Idaho, and we quickly find Crimp writing criticism for ArtNews while working at the Guggenheim—where, as a young curatorial assistant, he was one of the few to see Daniel Buren’s Peinture-Sculpture before it was removed amid cries of institutional censorship. We also travel to the Chelsea Hotel (where Crimp helped the down-on-his-luck couturier Charles James organize his papers) through to his days as a cinephile and balletomane to the founding of the art journal October, where he remained a central figure for many years. As he was developing his reputation as a critic, he was also partaking of the New York night life, from drugs and late nights alongside the Warhol crowd at the Max’s Kansas City to discos, roller-skating, and casual sex with famous (and not-so-famous) men. As AIDS began to ravage the closely linked art and gay communities, Crimp eventually turned his attention to activism dedicated to rethinking AIDS. Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp’s life and the life of New York City. At the same time, it offers a deeply personal and engaging point of entry into important issues in contemporary art.

Before Pictures

Arts & Photography

Crimp, Douglas

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

"We didn't think of our movies as underground or commercial or art or porn; they were a little of all of those, but ultimately they were just 'our kind of movie.'" -- Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was a remarkably prolific filmmaker, creating more than 100 movies and nearly 500 of the film portraits known as Screen Tests. And yet relatively little has been written about this body of work. Warhol withdrew his films from circulation in the early 1970s and it was only after his death in 1987 that they began to be restored and shown again. With Our Kind of Movie Douglas Crimp offers the first single-authored book about the full range of Andy Warhol's films in forty years -- and the first since the films were put back into circulation. In six essays, Crimp examines individual films, including Blow Job, Screen Test No. 2, and Warhol's cinematic masterpiece The Chelsea Girls (perhaps the most commercially successful avant-garde film of all time), as well as groups of films related thematically or otherwise -- films of seductions in confined places, films with scenarios by Ridiculous Theater playwright Ronald Tavel. Crimp argues that Warhol's films make visible new, queer forms of sociality. Crimp does not view these films as cinéma-vérité documents of Warhol's milieu, or as camera-abetted voyeurism, but rather as exemplifying Warhol's inventive cinema techniques, his collaborative working methods, and his superstars' unique capabilities. Thus, if Warhol makes visible new social relations, Crimp writes, that visibility is inextricable from his making a new kind of cinema. In Our Kind of Movie Crimp shows how Warhol's films allow us to see against the grain -- to see differently and to see a different world, a world of difference.

Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol

Mit Pr

With photographs by Louise Lawler On the Museum's Ruins presents Douglas Crimp's criticism of contemporary art, its institutions, and its politics alongside photographic works by the artist Louise Lawler to create a collaborative project that is itself an example of postmodern practice at its most provocative. Taking the museum as the paradigmatic institution of artistic modernism, Crimp surveys its historical origins and current transformations, from the plans for the Berlin Museum in the 1820s to reinstallations of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modem Art in the 1980s. But it is the breakup of this modernist paradigm that is the central subject of On the Museum's Ruins. The new paradigm of postmodemism is elaborated through analyses of art practices broadly conceived, not only the practices of artists Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Serra, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Mapplethorpe - but those of critics and curators, of international exhibitions such as Documenta and Zeitgeist, of new or refurbished museums such as the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. Louise Lawler's photographs expand the investigation to include private and corporate collecting, art auctions, and the banishment of objects to museum storage. Douglas Crimp is Visiting Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester and Visiting Professor of Lesbian and Gay Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. His previous books include Aids: Cultural Analysisl/Cultural Activism and AIDS Demo Graphics. The essays: Photographs at the End of Modernism. On the Museum's Ruins. The Museum's Old, the Library's New Subject. The End of Painting. The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism. Appropriating Appropriation. Redefining Site Specificity. This Is Not a Museum of Art. The Art of Exhibition. The Postmodern Museum.

On the Museum's Ruins

Winner, Trade Illustrated Category, 2003 Association of American University Presses (AAUP) Book, Jacket, and Journal Show. In Melancholia and Moralism, Douglas Crimp confronts the conservative gay politics that replaced the radical AIDS activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He shows that the cumulative losses from AIDS, including the waning of militant response, have resulted in melancholia as Freud defined it: gay men's dangerous identification with the moralistic repudiation of homosexuality by the wider society. With the 1993 march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, it became clear that AIDS no longer determined the agenda of gay politics; it had been displaced by traditional rights issues such as gay marriage and the right to serve in the military. Journalist Andrew Sullivan, notorious for pronouncing the AIDS epidemic over, even claimed that once those few rights had been won, the gay rights movement would no longer have a reason to exist. Crimp challenges such complacency, arguing that not only is the AIDS epidemic far from over, but that its determining role in queer politics has never been greater. AIDS, he demonstrates, is the repressed, unconscious force that drives the destructive moralism of the new, anti-liberation gay politics expounded by such mainstream gay writers as Larry Kramer, Gabriel Rotello, and Michelangelo Signorile, as well as Sullivan. Crimp examines various cultural phenomena, including Randy Shilts's bestseller And the Band Played On, the Hollywood films "Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia," and Magic Johnson's HIV infection and retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers. He also analyzes Robert Mapplethorpe's and Nicholas Nixon's photography, John Greyson's AIDS musical "Zero Patience," Gregg Bordowitz's video "Fast Trip, Long Drop," the Names Project Quilt, and the annual "Day without Art."

Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

The most widely admired paintings by Andy Warhol - and the most reviled - are his portraits. About Face, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum, presents the first overview of Warhol's portraiture to embrace all periods and media. About face refers both to Warhol's fascination with images of the human face and to his characteristic method of reversal. For example, Warhol reverses the portraitist's goal to capture the essence of a subject's individuality in his factory production of Warhol portraits. His portraits are about the creation of faces (as the public masks onto which identity is projected) rather than the revealing of a true self. Warhol's portraits, which reveal the artificial aspects of public identity, intitiate a democracy of fame and beauty, where everyone has superstar potential.

About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits

Baume, Nicholas

Wadsworth Atheneum

Meyer, Richard

WARHOL, Andy.

Miami Art Museum of Dade County

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

The Wadsworth Atheneum/The Andy Warhol Museum/MIT Press

A celebrated writer on contemporary art and queer culture argues that Andy Warhol's films enable us to see differently, and to see a different world.
“We didn't think of our movies as underground or commercial or art or porn; they were a little of all of those, but ultimately they were just 'our kind of movie.'” ―Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was a remarkably prolific filmmaker, creating more than 100 movies and nearly 500 of the film portraits known as Screen Tests. And yet relatively little has been written about this body of work. Warhol withdrew his films from circulation in the early 1970s and it was only after his death in 1987 that they began to be restored and shown again. With Our Kind of Movie Douglas Crimp offers the first single-authored book about the full range of Andy Warhol's films in forty years―and the first since the films were put back into circulation.
In six essays, Crimp examines individual films, including Blow Job, Screen Test No. 2, and Warhol's cinematic masterpiece The Chelsea Girls (perhaps the most commercially successful avant-garde film of all time), as well as groups of films related thematically or otherwise―films of seductions in confined places, films with scenarios by Ridiculous Theater playwright Ronald Tavel. Crimp argues that Warhol's films make visible new, queer forms of sociality. Crimp does not view these films as cinéma-vérité documents of Warhol's milieu, or as camera-abetted voyeurism, but rather as exemplifying Warhol's inventive cinema techniques, his collaborative working methods, and his superstars' unique capabilities. Thus, if Warhol makes visible new social relations, Crimp writes, that visibility is inextricable from his making a new kind of cinema.
In Our Kind of Movie Crimp shows how Warhol's films allow us to see against the grain―to see differently and to see a different world, a world of difference.

The literature on AIDS has attempted to teach us the "facts" about this new disease or to provide a narrative account of scientific discovery and developing public health policy. But AIDS has precipitated a crisis that is not primarily medical, or even social and political; AIDS has precipitated a crisis of signification the "meaning" of AIDS is hotly contested in all of the discourses that conceptualize it and seek to respond to it . AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism is the first book on the subject that takes this battle over meaning as its premise.
Contributors Leo Bersani, author of The Freudian Body; Simon Watney, who serves on the board of the Health Education Committee of London's Terrence Higgens Trust; Jan Zita Grover, medical editor at San Francisco General Hospital; Suki Ports, former executive director of the New York City Minority Task Force on AIDS; and Sander Gilman, author of Difference and Pathology.
Also included are essays by Paula A. Treichler, who teaches in the Medical School and in communications at the University of Illinois; Carol Leigh, a member of COYOTE and contributor to Sex Work; and Max Navarre, editor of the People With AIDS Coalition monthly Newsline. In addition to these essays, the book contains a portfolio of manifestos, articles, letters, and photographs from the publications of the PWA Coalition, an interview with three members of the AIDS discrimination unit of the New York City Commission on Human Rights; and presentations for the independent video documentaries on AIDS, Testing the Limits and Bright Eyes.
An October Book.

AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism (October Books)

On the Museum's Ruins presents Douglas Crimp's criticism of contemporary art, its institutions, and its politics alongside photographic works by the artist Louise Lawler to create a collaborative project that is itself an example of postmodern practice at its most provocative. Crimp elaborates the new paradigm of postmodernism through analyses of art practices broadly conceived, not only the practices of artists―Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Serra, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Mapplethorpe―but those of critics and curators, of international exhibitions, and of new or refurbished museums such as the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.
The essays:
- Photographs at the End of Modernism.
- On the Museum's Ruins.
- The Museum's Old, the Library's New Subject.
- The End of Painting.
- The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism.
- Appropriating Appropriation.
- Redefining Site Specificity.
- This is Not a Museum of Art.
- The Art of Exhibition.
- The Postmodern Museum.

Essays challenging the increasing denial of the AIDS crisis and the rise of conservative gay politics.

Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Mit Press)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Diseases & Physical Ailments

MIT Press]

OCTOBER 47: ART/ THEORY/ CRITICISM/ POLITICS - SUMMER 1988

KRAUSS, ROSALIND

Copjec, Joan

Michelson, Annette, (Editors)

MIT Press Journals

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Crimp, Douglas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Crimp, Douglas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Crimp, Douglas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Before Pictures

Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol

On the Museum's Ruins

Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics

About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits

Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol

AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism (October Books)

On the Museum's Ruins

Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Mit Press)

OCTOBER 47: ART/ THEORY/ CRITICISM/ POLITICS - SUMMER 1988