Intelligence for Dummies

“Enclosed in this beautiful package, please find: an agile mind, a perfect style, a canny and undeceivable heart, and a welcome, enduring presence in the reader’s life.” —Michael Chabon

“Glenn O’Brien may be the most important cultural critic of celebrity culture who never accredited his importance... Could he also have been the most important magazine editor of the 1970’s and 1980’s? These two claims complicate one another. The celebrity culture he dissected mercilessly was the same one he was complicit in creating, at Interview, which O’Brien credits with inspiring People... This puts him in a neighborhood with figures like Marshall McLuhan and Andre Breton, who seem to stand both enmeshed in and to one side of their cultural moment.” —from the introduction, by Jonathan Lethem.

Intelligence for Dummies is a portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last fifty years of cultural life, captured through a vivid selection of Glenn O’Brien’s writings on music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, the political temperature of America. O’Brien’s essays, aphorisms and tweets create a portrait of the artist as cultural bellwether, complimented by artwork and photographs from his collaborators. A full-color, hardcover edition, Intelligence for Dummies is a deeply personal look into Patti Smith and Jean Michel Basquiat’s New York, and the culture of money and celebrity politics that ensued.