James Frey Can Still Buy and Sell You, You Know
We were trolling for pictures of hipsters standing in front of taxidermied animals this morning when we stumbled across an essay that intrigued us in the online version of this month's BlackBook magazine. Some kidder had decided to write an essay about cover photographer Alex Soth, imitating James Frey's signature tics his punctuationless prose and repetitition repetitition repetition for emphasis. Kind of untimely, we thought, but still funny. In fact, when we reached the end of the first sentence we chucked aloud at the parody's broadness:
Another afternoon. Finished working, watching Law and Order. Baby is taking a nap, wife is reading a book. I'm bored. A friend from Gagosian calls she speaks.
Ha! Like even James Frey would write something so lame.
A few sentences later, though, we realized that the joke was, in fact, on us. BlackBook had actually run an essay by James Frey. Moreover, BlackBook had actually run an essay by James Frey in which he bragged about his multimillion dollar art collection.
(context: Frey has just been shown a Soth photo of Johnny Cash's boyhood home by his friend at Gagosian)
Don't you want to know how much it's gonna cost you?
I don't care.
It comes the next day. We put it in a room with a Gursky, a large-scale Hirst painting, a Picasso collage. It blows everything off the walls. We move it from room to room, it blows everything we have, Matthew Barneys, a Matisse, a de Kooning, off the walls. I move it into my office. Put in a room by itself. Put it in a room where I spend most of my time, where I can see it more than I would anywhere else. It lives with my favorite books, my desk, my work, my dreams. Sometimes when I look at it I think of Johnny, sometimes I think of life in America its ups and downs, sometimes I think of what I want to achieve and wonder if I will. There is no other art in the room. There is none needed. None needed.
Sometimes we think of what we want to achieve and if the only thing we ever acheive is that we've made a single unreconstructed Frey fan realize that the man is a pompous egomaniacal prick liar asshole then there is no more achievement needed. None needed. None needed.
Photographer Alex Soth [BlackBook]