the royal flush
by Charlie Finch  
 

Made from 9,000 pounds of resin so toxic that publicist Lynn Richardson told us that Whiteread's team had to wear spacesuits, the water tower nevertheless disappears into the evening light, just like the dead and gone SoHo art scene it memorializes.

Congratulations to the artist, and the Public Art Fund and its staff on a triumph. New York should be grateful.

Loeb is unquestionably physically formidable at 6 foot 4 inches, with spiked hair and black muscle shirt, a thinner better-looking Billy Idol.

One easily understands how Loeb's raw frisson tickles Deitch's predeliction for the polymorphous perverse. But that doesn't justify his lousy art. The guy rips a famous press image of two white photographers being gunned down in Africa (see the current Flash Art cover), does it in a shitty way, as if to say, "So what?"

This bad appropriation has gotta stop.

Meanwhile, a source close to Deitch, responding to our last column on Mariko Mori's discontent, defends Jeffrey thusly:

"Mariko's pieces are very expensive to make -- she is unaware of the complex technical process used to create her 3-D videos and Cibachromes. Even in editions of three, the margin of profit for Deitch is less than 10% per piece. And he basically didn't make any money at all, if you throw in advertising, travel, labor costs, et al."

As we've told you before, Deitch was motivated to solidify his relationship with the Mori family, as advisor to the Mori Museum, now under construction in Tokyo. Jeffrey, our source adds, now doesn't feel that losing Mariko will jeopardize this arrangement.

We also hear that Deitch lost so much money on Jeff Koons' "Celebration" debacle that Sotheby's can pretty much tell him what to do. This includes selling his project space at 18 Wooster Street.

Deitch's Yoko Ono show, a critical success funded by Ms. Ono, was a sales disaster -- one drawing sold. But Yoko did pick up a Keith Haring for herself from the Emmerich backroom.

Director Peter Weir's trademark lush dissolves (see Richard Chamberlain in The Last Wave) work brilliantly to contrast the cynical manipulations of the actors around him with Carrey's fructifying real paranoia.

We see the situation through his eyes, while observing him as well, just like the billion viewers in the movie. The hand-in-glove match of Truman's quest with our own existential dilemma is a perfect fit, as if Candide wandered into 1984.

One caveat. Don't wait to see this on video -- the wide-screen and the packed audience add to the experience.

Slate editor Michael Kinsley famously remarked that a political gaffe is "When a politician inadvertently tells the truth."

We're glad the former veep unconsciously confirmed our scoop last month that the White House is actively planning a difficult year 2000 third term strategy for President Bill Clinton.

Let's hope so!

I am only a joker who had understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries.

According to Dorment, NATO allegedly encouraged Italian journalist Giovanni Papini, in 1951, to publish a fake interview with Picasso, to dramatically undercut his pro-Communist image. In 1962, the artist asked his biographer Pierre Daix, to expose the fake interview, which he did in Les Lettres Francaises.

The book was supposed to be published by Prentice-Hall, but allegedly after a visit to Langley, Haden-Guest agreed to withdraw the book from publication, because of agency fears that sources would be fatally compromised.

We've read the first chapter, a cliffhanger drug deal at Beirut airport, right out of Easy Rider, only true.

A noted oenophile, and three-time winner of the Spy Magazine "Night-life Ironman Decathalon Cup," Haden-Guest is all business in the Levant, where he notably described his friendships with Hezbollah mullahs in Vanity Fair.

We're guessing that the agency now approves of Anthony's swashbuckling portrayal of their folks in the field, and that enough time has passed to remove any threat from Haden-Guest's prose.

John proudly displays it in his back office, but we couldn't help but notice a marked resemblance!

Fortunately for ArtNet, only 100 people read it!

By the way, it took the glossy Gugg mag 11 issues to find a sponsor. Larry Gagosian!!!

CHARLIE FINCH is the New York editor of Coagula Art Journal and has coauthored the forthcoming Most Art Sucks from Smart Art Press.