About Gossip

Abstract

Gavin Butt: Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2005), 48 b&w illns, 4 colour plates, 232 pp., paperback ISBN 0-8223-3498-4, £14.95. Recent research in the social sciences has revealed that two-thirds of our conversation is taken up with gossip. It becomes then a curious fact that this ‘low’ discursive practice remains either the un-thought philosophical discourse, or is considered to be its undoing (for Heidegger, we are told, gossip amounts to ‘perverting the act of disclosing’ the truth). And as for the repudiations of philosophical discourse, so it is with art-historical discourse. In Between You and Me, Gavin Butt wants to set the record straight. What happens to art-historical accounts, he asks, when gossip is admitted therein, as if by contamination? Addressing this question, the book constitutes an important and ambitious self-proclaimed challenge to the ways we do art history in the academy. It does so in a tone that is frequently witty, playful and irreverent, which is to say ‘queer’.