Why I Write About Art

Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, Wayne Koestenbaum has published seventeen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, including The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s and Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol: A Biography, Humiliation, Jackie Under My Skin and The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). His eighteenth book, Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations, will be published this April.

A painter and musician as well as a writer, Koestenbaum has performed on piano at venues including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum; and he has written the libretti for two operas—Michael Daugherty’s Jackie O, and Mohammed Fairouz’s Pierrot. Koestenbaum’s first solo painting exhibition took place at White Columns in New York in 2012, and the University of Kentucky Art Museum mounted a survey in Fall 2015. On the occasion of a solo exhibition of new paintings opening this month at 356 Mission in Los Angeles, Koestenbaum, who has written widely on art other than his own, penning essays on the work of Ryan Trecartin, Cindy Sherman, Glenn Ligon, Peter Halley, and Mika Rottenberg among others, returns to ArtCenter with a demonstration and talk entitled “Why I Write About Art.”

Photo: Wayne in studio, 2015 by Daniel Rothbart.