Ira Silverberg at Vulture:
Gary Indiana, who died on October 23 at 74 years old, was a brilliant and scathing critic of contemporary art and literature — and sometimes of those who thought they were his friends. His work at the Village Voice in the mid-to-late 1980s, when Jeff Weinstein edited him to perfect fever pitch, positioned him as the sharpest, most influential, and most feared art critic in New York of the time. It was a role that both defined and ruined him. He relied upon a persona that was about having come from nothing (not entirely the truth), knowing he wasn’t traditionally attractive to most men (he was short, skinny, and if he was ever a twink, those days were long past), was smart and used that to intimidate people, and eschewed money and fame (um, not really).
Not exactly the usual art-world type, he left it and retreated into fiction, where he could work out his issues with characteristically dark humor in ultracontemporary social satires. He was full of contradictions, and his explanations of them were always brilliant and self-focused — plaintive, often exasperated wails from the last bohemian standing about the injustices he faced.
more here.
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