Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we're tackling
someone who's less like a single academic or
artist and maybe more like a, well, a force of
nature. Someone almost designed to shake up how
we think about disciplines. Definitely. I mean,
try to picture this. One person who's a distinguished
professor teaching high level English lit. Okay.
And also painting with a style clearly influenced
by Andy Warhol. Right. And writing this really
experimental poetry using a method he actually
calls trance writing. It sounds impossible, but
that's Wayne Kostenbaum, born 1958. He's this
incredibly prolific intellectual, and his whole
career seems built on just refusing to accept
those neat little boxes between art forms. Yeah,
absolutely. So what we've done is pulled together
everything we could find, academic papers, biographical
details, you know, the usual suspects to give
you a kind of shortcut, a way into understanding
this really unique, sometimes pretty complex
cultural critic. And our goal here, our mission,
if you like, is to quickly synthesize. Well,
maybe not quickly, but synthesize his, what,
20 plus books, his academic work, his art. Yeah.
And really focus on that key idea about his work.
The idea being how he just, quote, obliterates
any vestigial divide between play and thought.
That's a great line someone wrote about him.
It really is. And he does it across every single
genre he touches. And look, if you need proof
that this genre obliteration isn't just him being
provocative for the sake of it, but that it's
actually seen as profoundly significant, well,
you just have to look at the recognition he's
received. Like the American Academy of Arts and
Letters Award in literature he got in 2020. That's
a huge deal. It absolutely is. And that award,
it signals more than just, you know, a single
achievement. Yeah. It points to his endurance.
cultural impact over time. You really can't pigeonhole
his work easily. And yet these major institutions,
the ones dedicated to sort of preserving serious
literature, they recognize him as, well, essential.
That's the paradox, isn't it? Yeah, it is. He
operates right at that intersection of like high
theory, serious academic thought, but also camp.
And the deeply personal. It's that mix, that
synthesis that we're going to try and unpack
today. OK, so where do we start? Maybe with the
foundations, because you need that grounding
to understand how he gets away with being so
spectacularly unconventional later. Exactly.
You need the establishment credentials before
you can properly dismantle the establishment.
Right. So let's unpack that foundation. Yeah.
If you look at his origins. The commitment to
intellectual rigor, it's really clear from the
start. Tostenbaum, born and raised in San Jose,
California. But his family life, it sounds like
it was just steeped in writing and philosophy.
Oh, completely. This wasn't just like a casual
hobby in the house. His mother, Phyllis Kostenbaum,
she was a respected writer herself. And his father,
Peter Kostenbaum, was a leadership consultant,
but also a philosopher. So you've got this blend
right there in the household. The creative internal
focus of writing. Yeah. And then the more structured,
outward facing analysis of philosophical thinking
and consulting, it feels like that environment
set a baseline where, you know, the subjective,
the personal and the really rigorous could always
coexist. It wasn't an either thing. That makes
sense. And his academic path, I mean, just confirms
he started out as a very serious, you could say,
traditional scholar. Totally. He did the whole
academic trifecta, as you called it earlier,
a B .A. from Harvard. Right. Then an M .A. from
the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, which is
known for being incredibly focused on the actual
craft, the mechanics of writing. OK, so deep
into the practice. Deep into practice. And then
finally, the Ph .D. from Princeton. So, you know,
top tier institutions all the way. And this context
is really important, isn't it? Because he wasn't
just, say, a poet who sometimes write criticism
or a critic who dabbled in poetry. a treat. Exactly.
He trained at the absolute highest level in both
fields, the academic side, literary theory, and
the practical craft of writing. And it's this
deep theoretical grounding, I think, that gives
his later, sometimes more delirious claims their
actual weight. Because he knows the rules he's
breaking. Precisely. He knows the game inside
out, which is why he's so effective when he decides
to subvert it. And we should also mention the
Whiting Award he got back in 1994. Ah, yes, for
emerging writers. Yeah, which wrecked... Recognizes
writers with exceptional promise early on. And
looking back, that recognition seems incredibly
prescient, doesn't it? Given everything that
came after. Definitely. But maybe the most transformative
period wasn't even the structured Ph .D. work
at Princeton. Hmm. But those years he spent kind
of orbiting it, living nearby, when that. high
theory brain crashed headlong into this year
energy and reality of New York City. Oh, absolutely.
That period, roughly 84 to 88, while he was still
doing his grad work, that seems to have been
the real crucible for him. He was living in New
York City. Right in the thick of it. And he talks
about this as the time he really discovered things,
discovered opera, discovered literature in a
new way, and importantly, discovered gay culture.
And all this against a pretty intense backdrop,
right? The 1980s in New York. The AIDS crisis,
the art scene booming. Exactly. It was a turbulent,
explosive time. And importantly, his engagement
wasn't just abstract academic observation from
afar. No, he was in the trenches. He really was.
He started flexing his critical muscles right
there, writing book reviews for these really
vital, sometimes politically charged publications
like the New York Native and the Village Voice.
We should pause on those venues, actually. Because
especially in the 80s, they were crucial. Hugely
significant. The New York native was absolutely
central for the queer community. It gave a platform
to voices and perspectives that, frankly, mainstream
criticism was often ignoring. It dealt with the
immediate, often visceral reality of that era.
And the village voice, well, that was just the
epicenter of downtown cultural critique, wasn't
it? It was the nexus. Writing for outlets like
these, it forced him to do something really specific
to synthesize that high theory he was learning
at Princeton with the immediate, the personal,
the urgent cultural conversations happening right
then. He had to be relevant. He had to be relevant,
quick, sharp, witty, grounded in the messy reality
of the city, even when he was talking about high
art forms like opera. And I think this is really
where you see the core of his unique voice developing.
That blend of the personal. the accessible, maybe
even a bit campy perspective. Yeah, but applied
to really serious subjects. That voice was forged
in that. specific time and place, I think. And
then if you look at where he is now, institutionally,
it almost feels like a deliberate performance
piece, embodying that refusal to stay in one
lane. It really does. It's a perfect summary
of his whole approach. So on one hand, you've
got the very serious academic title, Distinguished
Professor of English, French, and Comparative
Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. And he
teaches poetry there. A traditional, high -level,
rigorous boast. Exactly. But then at the same
time, he's also teaching painting over at Yale
University. Which is just wild when you think
about it. He's literally being paid by two of
the most prestigious universities in the world
to teach two disciplines, literary studies and
fine art, that are usually kept totally separate.
Different departments, different buildings, sometimes
different philosophies entirely. That whole CUNY
Yale setup, it's like a living mission statement,
isn't it? It just reinforces his core identity.
He refuses to partition his own mind or his career.
He just flows between them. He flows between
the theoretical demands of analyzing poetry and
the immediate material physical demands of making
visual art. And in doing so, he kind of forces
the institutions themselves to recognize the
validity of this cross -disciplinary way of being.
It's like the ultimate act of professional genre
obliteration. Okay, so let's get into the actual
work, the output, because this is where that
whole philosophy really comes alive, right? You
mentioned that quote earlier from Stefania Heim
in the Boston Review. Yeah, it's such a perfect
description. She said his work obliterates any
vestigial divide we might hold on to between
play and thought. Obliterates. It's such a strong
verb. Not just ignores the divide, but actively
destroys it. Exactly. And she also said he celebrates
and broadcasts risky joys and joyful risks, which
I think is key. It gives him this license somehow
to explore really subjective stuff, queer experience,
messy personal feelings, but using the tools,
the high standards of Siri. academic inquiry.
It's like personalized critical theory almost.
Okay, so let's dive into some specifics. We're
better to start than the book that really put
him on the map critically. The Queen's Throat,
Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
came out in 1993. Right, and the subject on the
surface seems pretty straightforward, trying
to understand that well -known, often intense
connection between gay men and opera, especially
the figure of the diva. But the way he analyzes
it is anything but straightforward. Not at all.
The book uses opera more as a lens than just
a topic. You know, he digs into how opera with
all its like huge emotions, its repression, its.
spectacular way of staging suffering and desire,
how all that acts as a kind of psychic space,
a container for aspects of queer experience,
particularly maybe the experience of being closeted.
The sheer drama of opera mirrors the internal
drama society sometimes forces on people. So
it goes beyond just saying, oh, gay men like
opera. He found a deeper critical insight there.
He did. His conclusion was that this relationship,
this affinity between gay men and divas, it tells
us just as much about opera itself, about its
built -in questions around performance, masculinity,
spectacle, what constitutes too much emotion
as it does about homosexuality or gay identity.
He's really probing those fundamental questions
about how culture shapes our desires and then
how our desires in turn shape how we read culture.
Like diva worship, for instance. Yeah. It's not
just like... No, he frames it as more like identification.
It's about watching someone perform these incredibly
heightened emotions, emotions that might be forbidden
or impossible to express in everyday life. And
the risky joy here, I think, was the intellectual
risk he took. Oh, so? Well, fusing that high
formal analysis of opera with these intensely
personal, subjective, often quite campy cultural
interpretations, that combination felt pre -revolutionary.
Okay, let's jump forward quite a bit to 2011.
He shifts gears pretty dramatically, doesn't
he? Takes on this huge abstract feeling that
everyone experiences, but hardly anyone dares
to analyze so directly. Yeah. Humiliation. The
book is just called Humiliation. Yeah, it's a
brilliant move because humiliation is maybe the
ultimate subjective, intensely personal feeling,
right? But Kostenbaum approaches it with that
same critical rigor. He treats it like a cultural
phenomenon that actually deserves scholarly attention.
How does he do that? He manages to analyze the
shame, the vulnerability, the... sometimes absurdity
of being humiliated. And he weaves together personal
anecdotes, moments where he felt humiliated with
this broader cultural commentary about. power
exposure social dynamics and the reception really
highlighted that unique tone he strikes didn't
it remember the quote from john waters oh yeah
the filmmaker john waters himself a master of
blending camp and critique he called humiliation
the funniest smartest most heartbreaking yet
powerful book i've read in a long time funny
and heartbreaking about public shame That really
is Kostenbaum's sweet spot, isn't it? It perfectly
captures it. And typically, he didn't just stop
with the book itself. The promotion, the way
he presented it, became part of the whole analysis.
That's the web series? Exactly. He created this
online video series called Dear Wayne, I've Been
Humiliated, where people could write in with
their own stories. The New York Observer called
it the mother of all book trailers, which was
hilarious. That's brilliant. And it really cements
that strategy you mentioned, the critical work
and the playful multimedia. way he presents it
are just two sides of the same coin. Totally.
The book is the theory, you could say, and the
trailer, the web series, is the performance of
the theory. It's all integrated. OK, this seems
like the perfect point to bring up the book that
maybe pushed the boundaries of his delirious
scholarship the furthest. The Anatomy of Harpo
Marx from 2012. Oh, boy. Yeah. Harpo Marx. I
mean, taking a silent film comedian. Someone
who communicates mostly with honking horns and
wild physical comedy and giving him this incredibly
dense theoretical treatment, usually reserved
for, I don't know, Shakespeare or Joyce. It was
bound to cause a stir. And it did. The reviews
were just all over the place, completely polarized,
which honestly is often a pretty good sign that
Kussenbaum's hit a nerve. So what was the positive
take? Well, you had genuine high praise. Brian
Dillon, for instance, called it charming and
rigorous and significantly an excellent example
of a kind of delirious scholarship. Delirious
scholarship. That phrase just nails it, doesn't
it? It's perfect. It captures the whole method
using the tools of serious academic inquiry,
but applying them to subject matter that seems
almost designed to induce, well, delirium or
absurdity. But then there were the critiques.
And they really highlight just how far he's willing
to push those theoretical limits. Big time. Saul
Osterlitz, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle,
basically felt Kostenbaum sexualizes Harpo beyond
all recognition. And there was that one specific
line that everyone seemed to quote. Ah, yes.
The anus line. Osterlitz cited it. It's where
Kostenbaum posits quite seriously that courtesy
of the anus, we can imagine Marxist style a path
away from family and state. I mean. Wow. That's
the flashpoint for the whole controversy right
there. It absolutely is. But you have to understand
that sentence as maybe barmy, as it sounds on
the surface, it's a deliberate critical provocation.
He's plugging into specific theoretical frameworks,
psychoanalysis, queer theory. He's taking Harpo,
the silent comedian who's constantly resisting
normal speech, normal gender roles, normal social
behavior, and reading his physical comedy, his
body, as a kind of radical political text. In
queer theory and psychoanalysis, the anus is
often discussed as a site that resists normative
reproduction, traditional family structures,
state control hence, a potential path away from
family and state. So he's arguing that Harpo's
silent anarchic body embodies this theoretical
concept. And essentially, yes. He's making the
argument that no subject, not even a seemingly
silly silent comedian, is too frivolous to bear
the weight of really radical critical theory
if you apply the right lens or maybe the wrong
lens in the most productive way. So the apparent
absurdity isn't a bug. It's a feature. It's a
calculated theoretical move. That's exactly it.
And critics like Joe Queenan, even when they
were clearly frustrated by it, kind of... inadvertently
hit on Kostenbaum's genius. Queenan wrote that
Kostenbaum peppers his story with just enough
tidbits of fascinating information that readers
may fleetingly overlook the fact that his theories
are barmy. But the barmy theories are the point.
They force you, the reader, to question your
own assumptions about what counts as a serious
academic subject, what deserves deep theoretical
attention. Okay, beyond these really... deep
focus monographs. He's also produced a massive
amount of work in essays, right? Covering a huge
range. Oh, absolutely. His essays tackle pretty
much everything. Celebrity culture, classical
music, contemporary art, literature, aesthetics.
His critical gaze seems restless. And the collections
themselves have these great provocative titles.
They do, like cleavage, essays on sex, stars,
and aesthetics, or my 1980s and other essays
and figure it out. Essays. These titles alone
show you he sees high culture and pop culture,
or even celebrity culture, as equally valid fields
for serious, nuanced thinking. He'll analyze
the aesthetic meaning of a celebrity's cleavage.
Yeah, or a pop star's public meltdown. With the
same kind of theoretical intensity he brings
to an opera libretto or a complex poem. Exactly.
And then there are the other key non -fiction
books that solidify his role as this major interpreter
of modern icons. His monograph on Andy Warhol,
for instance. And that seminal book, Jack...
Yes. The Jackie book is brilliant because he
doesn't treat Jackie Kennedy Onassis just as
a person to be biographized. He treats her as
a cultural text, a kind of screen onto which
America projected all its complex desires and
anxieties about things like style, money, tragedy,
resilience, image itself. So combining that work
on icons with his other critical books like Double
Talk, The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration.
Right. Which looks at the intense relationships
between male writers. You just get this picture
of staggering. intellectual output, but with
a real consistency in his approach to high -level
cultural theory. Now, while all that critical
work kind of defines his public persona as this
intellectual powerhouse, his poetry offers a
different window. It really shows an evolution
in his relationship with language itself. He
moves from this intense engagement with literary
tradition all the way to some pretty radical
experimentation later on. And what's fascinating,
connecting back to what we just discussed, is
that the same person writing those barmy theories
about harpo marks actually started his poetry
career with incredible structural control. Totally.
His very first book of poems, Ode to Anna Moffo
and Other Poems, named after an opera singer,
naturally. Of course. That was mostly written
in things like syllabic verse and other really
fixed traditional forms. It shows that mastery
of craft we talked about from his Hopkins training.
And David Baker, who reviewed that collection
for Poetry Magazine, he picked up on this tension
early on. What did he say? He noted that Kostenbaum
was, quote, willing to exert the pressures of
traditional formality. So he embraces the rules.
Right. Yet he is also likely to let the voice
and experience of a poem grate against his own
formal gestures. Ah, that's interesting. That
friction, the personal voice kind of pushing
against the constraints of the form. That sounds
like the energy of his early work. Exactly. And
he proved he could go back to that intense rigor
whenever he wanted to. His book -length poem,
Model Homes. Oh, yeah. The Otava Rima one. The
Otava Rima one. For anyone listening who isn't
familiar, Ottavarina is this incredibly demanding
classical Italian verse form. Yeah. Eight line
stanzas, usually iambic pentameter with a really
specific rhyme scheme. A, B, B, B, A, B, C, C.
Think epic poetry, Byron, that kind of thing.
So to write an entire book in that structure.
That takes serious technical chops and stamina.
It's like the ultimate proof of his foundational
seriousness, isn't it? It really is. It's like
saying, look, I can do this perfectly traditional
thing at the highest level, which, again, gives
him more license to break the rules later. And
break them he does. The real revolution in his
poetry comes later with works where he fully
embraces that riskier side, the play side of
the play and thought idea. We're talking about
books like The Pink Trance Notebooks and Camp
Marmalade. Right. These are pure experiments
in what he himself calls transfer. writing. Trans
writing. What does that actually mean in practice?
Well, it seems to be the poetic equivalent of
that delirious scholarship we saw with Harpo
Marx. Coast and Bound describes it as a kind
of automatic writing process. Like the surrealists?
Sort of, yeah. Writing very fast. deliberately
not revising, trying to bypass that internal
critic or editor we all have. The aim is just
to let the language pour out. Unfiltered. Unfiltered,
yeah. Unrestricted by the usual expectations
of, like, clear themes or logical syntax or narrative
coherence. The Paris Review had a good description
saying it allows language to move freely. But
mechanically... If he's writing without revision,
what does that actually produce and why is that
method important to his overall philosophy? Well,
what it produces is essentially raw process.
The text becomes a document of thought, emotion,
aesthetic association happening in real time,
unedited. It often works through sound, through
leaps of association rather than straightforward
logic. So the complete opposite of the painstaking
precision needed for Otavarima. Exactly. It represents
maybe the total obliteration of that gap between
the spontaneous impulse of the mind and the finished
polished artistic object it values the flow over
the finish and the books themselves even look
different right yeah They do. Publishers Weekly
described the Pink Trance notebooks perfectly,
saying, it looks and feels like the cut and paste
fragments of a journal. So an embrace of the
fragmentary, the collage, the immediate. Precisely.
The aesthetic value is found in that sense of
imperfection, maybe, and the speed of thought
captured on the page. And you see this restlessness,
this need to keep moving, and his shifts across
narrative forms, too. He hasn't just stuck to
poetry and criticism. No, not at all. He's published
fiction as well. There's Moira Warfay in Egg's
Moira. Mortis, which later got reprinted under
the title Circus, and another novel called Hotel
Theory. And then most recently, another shift
again, moving towards even shorter, more stylized
allegorical forms with his 2021 collection, The
Cheerful Scapegoat. Right. It's like this constant
quest for the right container for his ideas at
any given moment. As soon as he seems to have
mastered one genre or pushed it to its limit,
he jumps into a new one. It's relentless. OK,
so now we really cross the line, don't we? We
move completely beyond analyzing culture and
aesthetics through writing. and into him actually
creating visual art and performance pieces. This
is where the theory and the philosophy get physical,
get enacted. And this move into painting, it's
actually relatively recent in his long career,
isn't it? It started around 2005? That's right.
And the origin story is just... Classic Kostenbaum.
It wasn't like he just woke up one day and decided
to paint. The critical thinking came first, literally.
Oh, so? He apparently started painting right
after he finished writing an essay for a museum
show. The exhibition was called Contemporary
Erotic Drawing, held at the Aldrich Museum. So
writing about drawing made him want to draw?
Or paint, yeah. It's as if the act of critically
engaging with the subject unlocked the creative
impulse in him. It made the act of making visual
art feel kind of necessary. unavoidable even.
And right away, his style connected back to those
themes we've seen in his writing, pop culture,
celebrity, the idea of reproduction or copies.
Definitely. Ella Kuhn, writing in Art News, pointed
out that his early paintings were figurative.
They depicted things, people, and crucially,
were explicitly influenced by Warhol. Warhol
again. So he's adopting the visual language of
one of the key cultural icons he'd already analyzed
so deeply in his writing. Exactly. The critic
becomes the practitioner using the master's tools.
Let's talk about his technique for a minute because
it sounds like it mirrors that immediacy we saw
in the trance writing. He uses a specific monoprint
technique. Yes, the monoprint is really key to
understanding the look and feel of his paintings.
A monoprint basically is a single unique print.
You prepare a surface, ink it, maybe draw into
it, and then take just one impression onto paper.
You can't make an identical second one. Okay,
so each one is unique. Right. And Kostenbaum
used this technique often to trace images of
male nudes figures he'd originally drawn from
life onto a dark, usually black background. Why
the monoprint, do you think? What does that process
offer him? Well, it forces that unique immediacy,
that singularity. It reflects the spontaneity,
maybe, of the trance writing. The image feels
raw, transferred quickly, and it's one of a kind.
It prioritizes that moment of creation over slow,
layered revision or perfection. And the subject
matter, the male nude, captured in this raw,
immediate way. It feeds directly back into all
his critical work on queer identity, desire,
the body as a site of meaning or spectacle. All
the stuff he explored way back in the queen's
throat, just in a different medium now. And we
should stress this isn't just a professor's weekend
hobby. Yeah. He's exhibited this work quite seriously.
Oh, absolutely. He's had solo shows at really
significant contemporary art venues, places like
White Columns in New York, the Art Museum at
the University of Kentucky, 356 Mission in L
.A. The serious art world takes this work seriously.
It's recognized as a valid parallel artistic
practice. And the performance side doesn't stop
with visual art. He also stepped into music and
performance art itself. He released a record.
Yeah, his first piano and vocal record called
Lounge Act. It came out in 2017 on Ugly Duckling
Press Records, which is primarily a poetry quest,
interestingly enough. Lounge Act. I mean, that
title alone is perfect Kostenbaum, isn't it?
It suggests that blend of high art, serious vocal
performance, piano composition, the kind of camp,
maybe slightly faded, aesthetic, the lounge singer.
It's spot on. And this connects directly back
to his lifelong critical fascination with opera,
classical music and the whole theatricality of
identity and performance. And he performs this
material live. He does. He's performed these
kind of combined pieces featuring his music,
maybe visual projections of his art, readings
from his texts at major cutting edge cultural
institutions, places like the Kitchen in New
York, Red Cat in L .A., even the Center Pompidou
in Paris and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Wow. Those are major. contemporary art veneers.
They really are. They validate his performance
work as sophisticated, high -level contemporary
art, not just a literary reading with some music
tacked on. And then, to bring it all full circle,
he actually worked as a librettist for an opera.
Yes. The opera Jackie O. He wrote the words The
Libretto. So he took one of those cultural icons
he'd spent so much time critically interpreting
and provided the text for her story to be told
in that ultimate high -drama, high -art form
he loves. opera it's amazing how it all connects
if you try to link up all these different disciplines
he works in yeah that's the real brilliance isn't
it how cohesive the underlying vision feels despite
the incredibly disparate mediums his critical
thinking about aesthetics about celebrity about
icons like warhol and jackie o It directly fuels
the subjects and even the styles of his painting
and his performances. The critic and the artist
aren't separate entities. They're locked in this
constant, really productive conversation within
the same person. He kind of proves through his
own career that maybe the deepest way to understand
something, whether it's opera or Harpel Marx's
comedy or the painted nude body, is to actually
get your hands dirty and participate in making
it yourself. So to really get a handle on the
sheer scale of what he's done and the sustained
quality of it, maybe we should quickly recap.
the scope of his recognition and just the volume
of work we're talking about. He shows this consistent
influence over decades, right? Absolutely. The
awards alone tell a story of real staying power.
You've got the Guggenheim Fellowship, really
prestigious, just in 2023. That American Academy
of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 2020
we mentioned earlier. Go back further, the Whiting
Award in 94. And even earlier, the Discovery
of the Nation Poetry Award way back in 1989.
This isn't someone who just had one big moment.
It shows his challenging work has become kind
of fundamental to the conversation in contemporary
arts and letters. Okay. So for you listening,
if you're now intrigued and want to actually
dive into reading Coast and Balm, let's try to
give a quick structured overview of the key works
we've touched on, maybe grouping them by the
genres he loves to blur. Good idea. So under
poetry, you'd want to look at the contrast. with
that early, rigorous, formal mastery you see
in books like Ode to Animalfo or that incredible
feat Model Homes, the one written entirely in
a Tava Remer. It's a traditional foundation.
Exactly. And then contrast that immediately with
the radical freedom and experimentation of his
trance writing books, like the Pink Trance notebooks
or Camp Marmalade. Seeing those side by side
gives you the map of his poetic journey. Okay.
Then criticism. This is where you find those
foundational texts that made his name as a public
intellectual. Right. The absolute must -reads
are probably the ones tackling those big icons
and big emotions. The Queen's Throat, his defining
book on opera and desire. Humiliation, that brilliant
analysis of a universal difficult feeling. And
the Harpo Marx book. And yes, the controversial
but totally essential theoretical firework that
is the anatomy of Harpo Marx. You have to read
it, even if it makes your head spin. And alongside
those, the key texts on aesthetics and celebrity.
Jackie under my skin and maybe his Andy Warhol
monograph. Oh, and notes on glaze. 18 Photographic
Investigations is a fascinating later work looking
at surfaces. and aesthetics. And finally, we
have the works that kind of defy easy categorization.
Exactly. His specific forays into fiction with
novels like Hotel Theory or Circus, his more
recent turn towards Fables and the Cheerful Scapegoat,
and of course his contribution to the operatic
stage as the librettist for Jackie O. It's just
an immense body of work when you lay it all out
like that. Spanning visual art. performance,
criticism, poetry, fiction, fable. It's the collective
evidence of his lifelong project of genre obliteration.
It really is. Hashtag out outro. So after all
that, what does this incredible sprawling output
really mean for us? How do we synthesize Kostenbaum's
legacy, his contribution? Well, I think you could
say he's maybe the preeminent example of a scholar
who uses the most rigorous tools of academic
criticism, drawing a lot from queer theory, psychoanalysis,
literary theory, but uses them to exploit these
incredibly subjective, sometimes messy aspects
of popular culture, celebrity and classical art.
He manages to treat huge, painful emotions like
humiliation or seemingly lightweight subjects
like a silent comedian with this amazing combination
of spectacular wit and really profound, sometimes
unsettling depth. He basically changes the rules
for what counts as serious critical thinking,
doesn't he? He fundamentally does. His whole
career is like this powerful argument that the
highest forms of intellectual thought often demand
that you consciously embrace play, that you allow
for those risky joys, that you sanction delirious
scholarship. So the lesson for anyone engaged
in critical thinking is? The lesson seems to
be, don't be afraid to sound barmy. Don't be
afraid of risking dismissal if that risk, that
provocation, might lead you to a genuinely fresh,
maybe even radical, insight or truth. It immediately
makes you think about how relevant that method
is right now. Yeah. I mean, if Kostenbaum used
figures from the past, like Jackie O or Harpo
Marx, as these really complex mirrors for the
desires and anxieties of their time. Yeah. How
should we be applying that same kind of lens
to our own contemporary moment, our own culture?
That's a great question. And maybe that's the
provocative thought to leave you, the listener,
with. If the critical mission is partly about
finding the serious hiding within the seemingly
frivolous... Finding the Marxist path away from
family and state, hidden inside the laughter.
Exactly. Then what current contemporary figure,
maybe a pop star, a reality TV personality, an
influencer, some piece of viral media that we
currently dismiss as just cultural fluff, as
meaningless. What seemingly shallow thing today
would actually provide the best subject for a
really deep, serious, maybe even delirious Kostenbaum
style critical investigation whose anatomy, which
cultural phenomenon's anatomy, is just waiting
to be written by the next. generation of critics
willing to take that risk. A fantastic challenge
for the critical, curious minds out there. Thank
you so much for guiding us through the wonderfully
complex, genre -destroying, fascinating world
of Wayne Kostenbaum. It was my pleasure. A wild
ride. It certainly was. And thank you all for
listening. We'll see you on the next Deep Dive.