Gilbert and George

THE CULTURE OF DESPAIR
by Charlie Finch

In 1995, jolly critic Robert Rosenblum (now giggling with God) had to admit, a few months after the fact, that he reviewed Gilbert and George's "Naked Shit Pictures" in Artforum without actually going to the show, so as I watched the first frame of James Kalm's video of the duo's new "London Pictures" exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, in which Rosenblum's artist widow Jane Kaplowitz stands before a frieze of horror assembled from London tabloid headlines, I decided to do the same.

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