Over at Frieze:
Gary Indiana, the novelist, playwright and critic who rose to prominence in the art world as a writer for the Village Voice in the 1980s, has died aged 74.
Born Gary Hoisington in Derry, New Hampshire in 1950, Indiana briefly studied at the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out to pursue a career in ‘narrative porn’. After living among drug addicts in a rundown Los Angeles made famous by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Indiana moved to New York City in 1978, where he became an actor and playwright in the downtown theatre and cinema scenes.
From 1985 to 1988, Indiana served as an acerbic, fearsome art critic for the Village Voice, at once elevating the underrated and skewering the well-established. His commentary was informed yet personal, and it drew an intense readership for his reflections on the political and social situation facing artists at the time. ‘I was lucky to have a public voice in those faraway days,’ he later recalled. ‘Of course, the primary task was to cover exhibitions, but much of the art being made in the ’80s deal with the world beyond four walls of a gallery, and it seemed perfectly natural to blend art criticism with commentary on the state of things.’
More here.
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This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of “McNeal,” his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel. He wanted the title character, played by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, to deliver a monologue that sounded like a computer wrote it. So Akhtar uploaded what he had written into ChatGPT, gave the program a list of words, and told it to produce a speech in the style of Shakespeare. The results were so compelling that he read the speech to the cast at the next rehearsal.
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Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at 