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WORK TITLE: SoHo Sins
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE: 7/1/1948
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http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/do-tough-guys-art-an-interview-with-richard-vine/ * http://www.themillions.com/2016/08/dont-quit-day-job-richard-vines-soho-sins.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 1, 1948.
EDUCATION:University of Chicago, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Editor, writer, and curator. Worked in steel mills, psychiatric hospitals, and advertising; has curated museum exhibitions in India and China; Art in America, managing editor.
WRITINGS
Contributor to art books and exhibition catalogs, including Odd Nerdrum: The Drawings, New Orleans Museum of Art, 1994; Burhan Dogançay: Works on Paper, 1950-2000, Hudson Hills Press, 2003; Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay, Eterniday, Thames & Hudson, 2003; Escombros: 2007, Animal, 2007; William Steiger: Transport, Hudson Hills Press, 2011; Zhang Huan: The Mountain Is Still a Mountain, White Cube, 2012; Burhan Dogançay: Fifty Years of Urban Walls, Prestel Verlag, 2012; The Nerdrum School: The Master and His Students, Arvinius + Orfeus, 2013.
SIDELIGHTS
Richard Vine, a longtime fine-art critic and managing editor of Art in America, made his debut as a novelist with SoHo Sins. Set in the 1990s in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, the book revolves around the murder of an arts patron, Amanda Oliver. Her wealthy businessman husband, Philip, confesses to killing her, even though he was in Los Angeles when she was shot to death in their SoHo loft. Philip is terminally ill and is known for eccentricities; in an effort to prove him innocent, his lawyer hires private detective Ed Hogan to investigate. Hogan, a conservative former marine and police officer, has difficulty relating to the denizens of the freewheeling SoHo art scene, so he joins forces with a friend of the couple, art dealer Jackson Wyeth. There are numerous suspects, including Philip’s first wife, Angela, and Amanda’s lover, Paul. While following Wyeth and Hogan’s sleuthing, the narrative, told from Wyeth’s point of view, also deals with unscrupulous and even illegal practices in the art world and elsewhere—Philip’s technology company, for instance, distributes child pornography, while Paul creates it.
Vine told interviewers that he saw nothing incongruous in an art critic writing hard-boiled crime fiction. “A critic is already a kind of detective,” he told Travis Jeppesen in an interview for Art in America online, “analyzing baffling visual evidence in search of coherent explanation that eludes more casual observers. And, with contemporary art, the material under scrutiny is often considered suspect by the general public. So the shift to crime is not as jarring as it might seem. What’s more, the hardboiled murder-mystery is, in fact, a pretty complex genre.” He told Brooklyn Rail contributor David Ebony: “I find the detective genre a perfect metaphor for the intellectual life—or, more grandly still, for the human mind in the world. It’s really the Enlightenment project, isn’t it? Finding darkness, evil, and mystery all about—then, while sticking solely to the facts, to evidence tested and validly reasoned about—making one’s way to a simple but vastly illuminating knowledge.” He further explained to Jeppesen that his father was a former boxer who associated with criminals but could quote long passages of Shakespeare from memory. Because of that, “I never saw any discrepancy between literary artistry and old-fashioned manliness,” Vine said.
Several critics saw much to admire in the novel. Vine’s experience in the art world serves him well, related Bill Morris on the Millions Web site: “SoHo Sins succeeds because it was written by a man with a day job, a job that gives him intimate knowledge of how a subculture works—its personalities and preoccupations, its business practices, its styles, its silliness and occasional beauty and, above all, the ugly money that pumps through its rotten heart.” Morris added, “You have to be inside such a world to plausibly imagine the worst it can imagine.” David Cranmer, blogging at Criminal Element, noted that the novel is an effective detective story but also something more: “Where SoHo Sins goes beyond expectations is in the ironic intricacies of the community’s entanglements—Wyeth remains friends with Phillip’s first wife and precocious daughter and, though he was also a friend of Amanda’s, he had no qualms introducing Phillip to other women.” Cranmer observed, “The engaging morality tête-à-tête between Wyeth and Hogan intensifies as the story progresses.”
There were some who voiced reservations. In Booklist, Keir Graff saw flaws in the novel’s “length and pacing,” in addition to some anachronisms and unrealistic portrayals of the investigative process. “Vine paints a compelling picture, but he could have used fewer brushstrokes,” Graff maintained. A Publishers Weekly commentator remarked, “The plot is lumpy … yet the vague denouement is strangely satisfying.” Blogcritics contributor Bill Sherman noted that while SoHo Sins, at 382 pages, is longer than the typical detective novel, he “personally found that this worked in the book’s favor.” With its extensive moral and social commentary, it “proves a challenging read that may not suit Hard Case Crime readers looking for a crisp and fast-paced diversion, but it’s a rewarding one for those willing to venture somewhat deeper,” Sherman explained. Still others praised the novel highly. A critic at the Crime Review Web site termed it “an utterly effortless read, with wonderful pacing and incredible subtlety,” adding: “It is a dark journey, but one that you will not be able to set aside once you have picked it up.” D.R. Meredith, writing in the online New York Journal of Books, concluded a positive review by saying: “A very dark, very noir crime novel, SoHo Sins by Richard Vine is a satisfying read for fans of the genre. Although the characters, as in most noir crime novels, are not at all warm and fuzzy, they are realistic. SoHo is itself a character—and is the strongest one all. Five out of five stars for this debut novel.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Apollo, November, 2011, Jonathan Goodman, review of New China, New Art, p. 108.
Booklist, May 1, 2016, Keir Graff, review of SoHo Sins, p. 38.
Brooklyn Rail, July-August, 2016, David Ebony, author interview.
Choice, May, 2009, D.K. Haworth, review of New China, New Art, p. 1684.
Library Journal, April 15, 2009, David McClelland, review of New China, New Art, p. 91.
Publishers Weekly, May 2, 2016, review of SoHo Sins, p. 34.
Reference & Research Book News, December, 2011, review of William Steiger: Transport.
ONLINE
Artcritical, http://www.artcritical.com/ (December 1, 2008), Jonathan Goodman, review of New China, New Art.
Art in America Online, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/ (July 19, 2016), Travis Jeppesen, “Do Tough Guys Art? An Interview with Richard Vine.”
Blogcritics, http://blogcritics.org/ (January 22, 2017), Bill Sherman, review of SoHo Sins.
Crime Review, https://thecrimereview.com/ (August 8, 2016), review of SoHo Sins.
Criminal Element, http://www.criminalelement.com/ (July 14, 2016), David Cranmer, review of SoHo Sins.
Manhattan Book Review, http://manhattanbookreview.com/ (February 28, 2017), Kevin Winter, review of SoHo Sins.
Millions, http://www.themillions.com/ (August 5, 2016), Bill Morris, “Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Richard Vine’s ‘Soho Sins.’”
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (February 28, 2017), D.R. Meredith, review of SoHo Sins.
Quoted in Sidelights: A critic is already a kind of detective, analyzing baffling visual evidence in search of coherent explanation that eludes more casual observers. And, with contemporary art, the material under scrutiny is often considered suspect by the general public. So the shift to crime is not as jarring as it might seem. What’s more, the hardboiled murder-mystery is, in fact, a pretty complex genre
INTERVIEWS JUL. 19, 2016
Do Tough Guys Art?: An Interview with Richard Vine
by Travis Jeppesen
Red Grooms, Mimi Grooms and The Ruckus Construction Company: Wall Street Newsstand and Trinity Church from "Views from Ruckus Manhattan: A Sculptural Novel," 1975-76. Photo Robert E. Mates and Mary Donlon.
July 19 marks the release of SoHo Sins, an art world murder mystery by Richard Vine, managing editor of A.i.A. Here, artist and fellow novelist Travis Jeppesen interrogates the author on his motives, the origins of the tale, and the seamy relationship between art criticism and noir fiction.
TRAVIS JEPPESEN I guess the big surprise for most people will be that you've written such a book to begin with! Editors of fine art magazines aren't supposed to dabble in "lower" genres like hard-boiled mystery–it’s not allowed! How did this book come to fruition? Have you always been a closeted Raymond Chandler aficionado?
RICHARD VINE Ah, a deliberately retro “high-low” critical query about a deliberately retro novel, both coming out of the sensibility of 1990s SoHo. How appropriate. Especially from a guy whose own novels deal with slackers and suicide cults. Aren’t you the literary trickster whose Venice Biennale report for A.i.A. [September 2015] was done in the fictional persona of a cynical, heroin-shooting hipster critic, illustrated by the part-time porn novelist Bjarne Melgaard? “Lower,” indeed. . . . OK, game on.
The “high” answer, Hilton—I mean, Travis—is that visual artists no longer operate with the confining strictures of “noble” (as opposed to “mundane,” “kitsch,” or “popular”) materials, genres, and themes, so why on earth would critics or creative writers do so? Espousing a hierarchy of forms would render a contemporary novelist entirely out of sync with the times—and on the losing side of a battle that was fought in late nineteenth-century France, at the very beginning of modernism, and again in the 1950s with the advent of Pop art. Today, any source and any artistic form is legitimate. The question is: how well do you use it? How much do you make of it?
Secondly, the “low” answer to your question is that I’m too damn old to care what anyone else thinks is a high form or low. I know what speaks to me. Forms are incommensurate; they can’t be productively compared. But skill and passion of execution certainly can. So I ask you: if your heart is broken, do you turn to the piano concertos of a third-rate classical composer, because that’s a “high” form, or to the insuperable grief songs of Hank Williams?
JEPPESEN A lot of artists, writers, and intellectuals have been overt or covert fans of the detective novel. This is something that most people are unaware of. Agnes Martin, whose work is ostensibly about lofty issues like spiritual transcendence, was an Agatha Christie addict. Ludwig Wittgenstein was a great fan of Norbert Davis. But that’s different from actually writing one!
VINE Art critic John Canaday wrote half a dozen mystery novels after his retirement from the New York Times. The British art scholar Iain Pears produces them right now. And why not? A critic is already a kind of detective, analyzing baffling visual evidence in search of coherent explanation that eludes more casual observers. And, with contemporary art, the material under scrutiny is often considered suspect by the general public. So the shift to crime is not as jarring as it might seem.
What’s more, the hardboiled murder-mystery is, in fact, a pretty complex genre, one that not-so-secretly melds two quite “high” intellectual strands. First, it’s a product of the immensely difficult, centuries-long triumph of empiricism (with its logical reasoning on the basis of physical evidence, its successive hypotheses that can be tested and thus proved either valid or false) over the delusions and half-truths of tradition, augury, ideology, religion and other types of superstition or deliberate misdirection. Second, the whodunit is a form infused with the existential dread inherent in post-Nietzschean culture. How do you ground your values—aesthetic, social, moral—once the old assurances (“God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world”) are blown away? Kafka, Beckett, Sartre, Camus and other literary titans are not the only authors who wrestled with that dilemma. So did Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, John D. MacDonald, and—yes—Raymond Chandler. But they did it at a level closer to the streets, to life as we live it day to day.
JEPPESEN I’m glad you said that, because despite my playful line of questioning at the beginning, I think that the “low” genre of mystery is an oft-overlooked deployment zone for philosophical inquiry. Cormac McCarthy said in an interview that the only issues worth writing about are life and death. In a sense, that’s the distilled essence of every mystery novel. Life and death—the weightiest of philosophical issues, right?
VINE Right. Every murder mystery purports to be about the reasons for one death but is also, at a deeper level, about the unreasonableness of all deaths—the core absurdity of the human condition. That’s why my paired protagonists—the art dealer Jackson Wyeth and the private investigator Hogan—make their wry and bitter asides: “Why does anyone kill? For that matter, why does anyone die? I’m still working on that one. For now, let’s have another beer.” The two set out to save Jack’s client and friend from self-condemnation (“My name is Philip Oliver, and I believe I murdered my wife”), but they soon have to wrangle, in their own snide way, with some truly hardcore philosophical issues.
I mean, why do you suppose that murder mysteries pervade our best-seller lists and TV offerings and movies? Because, fundamentally, we all want to know why human beings are born but to die. We all ask ourselves how much real worth—if any—we can wring out of our brief days and nights on what Chandler called “these mean streets.“ Everyone wants to know, and nobody has the answer. But we keep making the investigation, time after time.
JEPPESEN It’s tricky, because you do it so well, that at times the book reads as a satire—not only of the mystery genre, but of course as a satire of the art world. In a way, SoHo Sins de-mystifies the art world for general readers, who might not have any knowledge of how it operates or the nature of the people who populate it. Meanwhile, art world people will find the novel hilarious, when not troubling, because it’s such an apt description of the loftiness and pretensions of the milieu. At the same time, the hardboiled dialogue that’s a hallmark of the genre, which you’ve mastered so well, also works ironically here–I don’t know many people in the art world who are so honest and direct!
VINE Well, I come by the laconic speech pattern pretty naturally. My father left school in the eighth grade and started his adult life as a boxer. When I was boy, he looked and sounded a bit like Humphrey Bogart. He’d tell me about nights in a joint outside Youngstown called the Jungle Inn, where armed men on catwalks watched over the gambling tables below. Two of his acquaintances pulled off the last train robbery east of the Mississippi River. Later, he mellowed and would sometimes recite large chunks of Shakespeare by heart. But he could still drop a wiseass with a right cross at the blink of an eye. After that, I never saw any discrepancy between literary artistry and old-fashioned manliness.
JEPPESEN One could make the case that the novel also serves as a work of discreet art criticism. Certainly, it offers a cynical perspective on the New York art establishment at a particular time—the 1990s, when the novel is set. Is there a particular reason why you chose this period?
VINE Yes, I chose it because I lived it and because it was an important transition period, when the woeful money sickness that dominates the current art scene began to take hold. Hence the importance of the collector Philip Oliver’s wasting illness in SoHo Sins—and its debilitating effect on his mind. The novel is, among many other things, a kind of social etiology. These days, there is an excruciating contrast in our profession between the sincere concern of many artists for aesthetic experience, communality, and social justice versus the self-serving speculative mania (who will get famous? whose prices will soar?) that drives the global art system. I’ve gone back to the era when that rift became a chasm and highlighted its devastation.
Quoted in Sidelights:I find the detective genre a perfect metaphor for the intellectual life—or, more grandly still, for the human mind in the world. It’s really the Enlightenment project, isn’t it? Finding darkness, evil, and mystery all about—then, while sticking solely to the facts, to evidence tested and validly reasoned about—making one’s way to a simple but vastly illuminating knowledge.
Also in July-August 2016 print edition
INCONVERSATION
RICHARD VINE with David Ebony
Richard Vine
SoHo Sins
(Titan Books, London, And Hard Case Crime, New York, 2016)
An art-world murder mystery, SoHo Sins is the first novel from Richard Vine, Art in America’s Managing Editor and an expert in the field of contemporary Chinese art. SoHo Sins is a noir-style crime-story set in the New York art world of the late 1980s and early ’90s. The story surrounds the murder of Amanda Oliver, the wife of Philip Oliver, an eccentric media mogul and a major collector of contemporary art. The book features vivid portraits of the prime murder suspects, and the detectives in pursuit of them. The story is told from the point of view of Jackson Wyeth, a successful, world-weary SoHo art dealer.
Vine’s efforts are in line with the longstanding phenomenon of art critics (and artists) writing crime fiction: Iain Pears in Britain, John Canaday (former New York Times critic) years ago here, and these days Christopher Finch, Carter Ratcliff, Jonathan Santlofer—even Irving Sandler, who has a manuscript in development.
The following conversation (conducted partly by email, partly by phone) between Vine and his longtime colleague David Ebony offers insight into the novelist’s way of thinking, the crime-novel genre, art-world politics, and the state of art today.
David Ebony (Rail): I don’t read much fiction lately—usually I read things that are somehow related to the art I’m writing about. So the fact that I got sucked into the story and swept up by the characters in SoHo Sins is a big compliment. There are some beautifully written passages like “There was a chord shift in the Glass composition, a major alteration in the flat aural horizon.”
Highlights of the book for me were other non-fiction passages: your descriptions of Henry Darger paintings and exhibitions, for instance, and the vivid Ron Athey and Bob Flanagan performances, which I also witnessed in person. And your representation of SoHo back then is also remarkable—and evocative.
The character renderings are strong, making the personalities all the more disturbing at times. I wonder how closely the main characters are based on real-life people you have known or met? Are Philip Oliver, Amanda, and the others, based on art-world people? How much of Jackson (or Jack) Wyeth is you?
Richard Vine: There are only two characters transcribed directly from life, and they’re not ones you named. One is Sammy the wannabe mobster, whom I knew long ago in Chicago, and the other is the Viking, based unabashedly on my Icelandic sculptor friend Gudjon Bjarnason. (Or three “real” characters, actually, if we count the Viking’s daughter singing on tape.) All the rest are the usual mishmash of observation and imagination, with elements of various people transposed from one to the other, fragmented and recombined. How could a guy of my generation resist, for example, making a villain of a handsome young video artist? One of the great pleasures of fiction, for readers and writers alike, is the chance to ask, “What is it like to look, feel, think, dress, talk, and act as someone else—as many other people?”
As for the narrator, I suppose you could say that Jack is all me, but Richard Vine is not all Jack. There’s a pretty obvious splitting of the authorial self here into the two complementary but contending halves named Jack and Hogan [an ex-Marine private detective]—both worldly and cynical, to be sure, but in far different ways, for different reasons, with different results.
Wong Kit Yi, the young artist to whom the book is dedicated, may have had the most perceptive response: “Oh, I see, you’re all the characters. And they’re all you. How funny.”
Rail: For me, the most disturbing character of all (perhaps because I’m gay?) is Philip’s daughter, Melissa. I found that her underage seductress persona thinly masks a terrorizing spoiled brat. Jail bait, indeed. Jack’s physical attraction to her was troubling, as I’m sure it was intended to be. But I guess we’ll never know her true nature for sure. Or will there be SoHo Sins II?
Vine: More ambiguity there, I’m afraid. I originally projected an ongoing series of Jack and Hogan adventures. But the Hard Case Crime publisher was hesitant to tamper with a story he felt is “already complete,” with that large time-jump at the conclusion of SoHo Sins. In any case, he has encouraged me to write instead about the infamous Kent State University killings that I witnessed in 1970. I’m now doing so with ever deepening and broadening results. After that, will Jack and Hogan return in another story? I can’t say.
You’re tougher than I am on little Melissa. I find her to be equal parts charming and frightening. Ideally, readers will sympathize with her, despite her narcissism, throughout most—perhaps all—of the strange experiences that Jack and others subject her to.
Rail: I am curious as to what attracted you to the crime novel genre for your first novel? Were you always an avid reader of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and so on?
Vine: It may sound crazy at first, but I find the detective genre a perfect metaphor for the intellectual life—or, more grandly still, for the human mind in the world. It’s really the Enlightenment project, isn’t it? Finding darkness, evil, and mystery all about—then, while sticking solely to the facts, to evidence tested and validly reasoned about—making one’s way to a simple but vastly illuminating knowledge. One may regret finding truth, in the end, but that’s the bargain. It’s better than being duped.
I toy with that convention in SoHo Sins, leaving elements of doubt and uncertainty at the conclusion, and a narrator stuck in a situation that is far from being transformed—by reason or sacrifice or anything else. The book is a noir fiction in Otto Penzler’s sense of the term: the product of a world unredeemed and probably unredeemable. After Kafka and Beckett, it’s a bit difficult to see crime detection, scientific inquiry, or anything else as an escape from the darker facts of the human condition. If anything, crime novels—especially the cynical-guy variety that I traffic in—serve as a grim confirmation. As the experimental novelist John Barth once put it: “Self knowledge is always bad news.”
I mention Barth because, long ago, I did a University of Chicago Ph.D. in contemporary American fiction, with a dissertation titled “John Barth and the Literature of Exhaustion.” It examined Barth’s own novelistic output in light of the notion, espoused in his 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” that everything that productively can be done in narrative fiction has been done already. Hence, the only way forward—apart from self-protective ignorance—is to use the old proven forms, knowingly and strategically, for new ends. I’d like to think that SoHo Sins does exactly that, taking on some rather serious issues (artistic values, infidelity, the exploitation of innocence, even religious faith), while also providing readers with an engaging and—yes—entertaining experience every step of the way.
I don’t read a large amount of crime fiction these days, only an occasional John D. MacDonald, Benjamin Black, Thomas H. Cook, or Qiu Xiaolong. But during one year of my life—1979 – 80, when I was teaching modern British novel at the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, with nothing but 400 miles of desert in every direction—I sampled the genre pretty widely: Agatha Christie, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Mickey Spillane, Patricia Cornwell, Dashiell Hammett, Dick Francis, James M. Cain, and others. Later I took a workshop course with Sara Paretsky. But, first and last, there is always Raymond Chandler, who brought poetic inflection to a form otherwise known for an astonishing concision of structure and language.
Rail: I understand the aim was for suspense, but I was filled more with upset and alarm in the sections about the process of making kiddie porn films. That Jackson would even consider leading Melissa into the scary position of appearing on the set of “Virgin Sacrifice” is very disturbing. What if something had gone wrong with the plan—the girl could have been abducted and carted off to another unknown location?
Vine: I’m glad to hear you were upset, since the whole point of the subplot was to make the presence of evil palpable. Too often the murder victim in crime fiction is just a token that sets the game in motion. But I wanted readers to feel the reality of perversion, of sin. So I asked myself, “What, in today’s world, is a menace more disturbing than murder?”
Secondly, I wanted to remind myself and everyone else just how thin the membrane is that separates each of us from illicit urges and personal transgression. “We’re all the type,” the private detective Hogan says. Sadly, I think the real world supports his view. Hence the need for ethical rules and self-vigilance, for a code like the one held by that disabused ex-Marine, imperfectly applied though it may be.
Rail: Finally, it is a bit unsettling that the depictions of the art world are relentlessly disparaging throughout the novel—art world denizens almost universally come across as greedy and shallow creeps, and the dealers, including Jack, are all shady, if not crooks. Since you have devoted such a great part of your career to the art world, I wondered if you personally find no redeeming qualities at all in art, and in the contemporary art world? Do you agree with Melissa, who says that art is “for the rich, and it doesn’t mean anything.”
Vine: Well, you know the old saying: “No one wants to read a book about a happy family.” Formally, when you adopt the mode of crime fiction—especially noir crime fiction—you adopt the premises of that fictive universe: in this case, the dire conviction that human beings are, by their animal birth, a pretty rotten bunch, worthy of pity only because they try to do their best, even though they are all condemned to death in advance. The narrator, much less the author, dare not exempt himself from those judgments.
Now, the art world you and I know may be filled with honest, good-hearted souls, earnestly making their art and curating their shows and writing their essays with the best of all possible motives. But once you begin to “investigate” that art world, a number of other factors—and other players—soon come into view. SoHo Sins, you might say, is a lament not for the art world that was, or is, but the art world that is rapidly emerging. By now, its corruption by unregulated wealth is almost complete; this book simply imaginatively extends present trends in the time-honored fashion of Orwell’s 1984. My projection goes into the immediate past rather than the immediate future, but that reversal of vectors is just an amusing bit of game-play to help highlight the present.
An argument could be made that the art world today, ultimately dependent as it is on the buying decisions of a few super-rich individuals, is fatally tainted throughout. (Artnet.com reports a new financial scam almost every week.) Do some further digging, and the facts soon reveal that no one can become that rich, or maintain that level of inherited wealth, without being a moral criminal. Such disproportionate lucre is accumulated either through activities that are literally illegal or through the utterly unconscionable exploitation of employees, stockholders, taxpayers, and customers—an economic crime and a moral one.
Richard Vine
RICHARD VINE, managing editor of Art in America magazine, is the author of some 300 articles, reviews, interviews, and books--including New China, New Art (Prestel 2008/2011), which traces the emergence of avant-garde art in post-Mao China. SoHo Sins is his first novel.
Richard Vine is an experienced writer, editor and interviewer, specialising in TV and pop culture.
After working at the Guardian from 1999-2012, he is now freelance and writing for film at The Field Office. Based in London, he also blogs for Chimpomatic and collects pictures of Dead TVs.
If you would like to get in touch please email.
RICHARD VINE (SoHo Sins)
Richard Vine is the managing editor of Art in America, one of the world’s most influential art magazines. He holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Chicago and has written hundreds of critical essays and two nonfiction books on contemporary art. He recently curated museum exhibitions in India and China, and his travels as an art critic have taken him throughout Europe, Asia, South America, and the Middle East. In earlier days, he worked in steel mills and a locked psychiatric ward, was a beach bum in Hawaii and an ad executive in Chicago, studied in the south of France, and participated in the 1970 Kent State demonstrations that ended with four students killed and nine wounded. SOHO SINS is his first novel.
Quoted in Sidelights: the plot is lumpy
yet the vague
denouement is strangely satisfying.
SoHo Sins
Publishers Weekly.
263.18 (May 2, 2016): p34.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
SoHo Sins
Richard Vine. Hard Case Crime, $22.99 (384p) ISBN 9781783299287
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The contemporary New York art scene provides the backdrop for art magazine editor Vine's colorful first novel. When
art patron Amanda Oliver is found dead in her SoHo loft, her husband, Philip, immediately and continually confesses
to her murder, even though he couldn't have been there. 24 hours earlier when she was shot. Philip's attorney hires PI
Hogan to investigate, and Hogan enlists art dealer Jackson Wyeth's help. In their search for the truth, Hogan and Wyeth
travel through the demimonde of assorted deviants, both artistic and sexual, who are the friends and lovers of the
Olivers. Revelation slides after revelation, and a child pornography ring is exposed and eliminated, without moving the
reader noticeably closer to the killer. Meanwhile, Philip rapidly deteriorates physically and mentally. The authentic
background at times entices, and some of the characters are well realized, but the plot is lumpy, the police are curiously
absent from the homicide investigation, and the detecting is mostly an offstage afterthought. And yet the vague
denouement is strangely satisfying. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"SoHo Sins." Publishers Weekly, 2 May 2016, p. 34. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452883985&it=r&asid=3d7f923a581d460618dd10036128c4bf.
Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452883985
2/5/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486329829033 2/9
Quoted in Sidelights: length and pacing
Vine paints a compelling picture, but he could have used fewer brushstrokes.
SoHo Sins
Keir Graff
Booklist.
112.17 (May 1, 2016): p38.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
SoHo Sins. By Richard Vine. July 2016. 382p. Hard Case Crime, $22.99 (9781783299287); ebook (97817832992941.
This debut from Art in America's managing editor has an arresting beginning: after an art patron is found shot dead in
her SoHo loft, her wealthy businessman husband turns himself in: "My name is Philip Oliver, and 1 believe I murdered
my wife." But narrator Jackson Wyeth, an art dealer and friend of the couple, isn't sure Oliver knows what he's talking
about. Working with a PI hired to prove Oliver's innocence, Wyeth soon finds himself navigating a labyrinth of dark
motives and deviant behavior in gogo 1990s New York. Readers wanting a tour of the art world by a knowledgeable
and gimleteyed guide may enjoy this ambitious first effort, which, with lots of plot and a big cast, explores the nature
of marriage, relationships, and even deeper existential questions. Unfortunately, the book has problems, chiefly in
length and pacing, but also with anachronisms and methods of detection and law enforcement that will test the
credulity of regular mystery readers. Vine paints a compelling picture, but he could have used fewer brushstrokes.
Keir Graff
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Graff, Keir. "SoHo Sins." Booklist, 1 May 2016, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453293674&it=r&asid=51ec20edd0a9e21a3c74e7a72ec07ec5.
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Vine, Richard. New China New Art
David McClelland
Library Journal.
134.7 (Apr. 15, 2009): p91.
COPYRIGHT 2009 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Vine, Richard. New China New Art. Prestel. 2008. c.240p. illus. bibliog. index. ISBN 9783791339429. $60. FINE
ARTS
The first chapter of this survey of contemporary fine art made by Chinese artists working both in China and worldwide
is titled "Why China, Why Now?"and the answer is woven throughout a text that examines painting, sculpture,
installation, performance, photography, and video. The rise of China as an economic and military superpower has been
paralleled by the emergence on the global art scene of a bevy of talented and provocative Chinese artists (and scores of
lesstalented and hungrier imitators). Following a short, nontechnical introduction, Vine, the managing editor of "Art in
America," covers 125 of the most influential artists with copious highquality images and short, strictly descriptive
texts. Although Vine does cover some of the popular painters (e.g., Fang Lijun) of the big, flattoned canvases that
many viewers equate with contemporary Chinese art, he reaches far beyond the usual suspects to include previous
unknowns like photographer Wang Ningde and performance artist He Yunchang. Presupposing no special knowledge
of Chinese art history and mercifully free of art jargon, this is an excellent introductory book for both academic and
public libraries.David McClelland, Philadelphia
McClelland, David
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
McClelland, David. "Vine, Richard. New China New Art." Library Journal, 15 Apr. 2009, p. 91. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA201492107&it=r&asid=fca8851eb6d1aa26ec66127db975bfad.
Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
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Vine, Richard. New China, new art
D.K. Haworth
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
46.9 (May 2009): p1684.
COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
464830
N7345
MARC
Vine, Richard. New China, new art. Prestel, 2008. 239p bibl index afp ISBN 9783791339429, $60.00
Contemporary Chinese art is hot in today's markets, as reflected by the many publications about it. For college
libraries, this is another must buy on contemporary art in China. "Another" refers to Michel Nuridsany's China: Art
Now (CH, Oct'04, 420733), which focused on 30 individual Chinese artists, most of whom are included in this new
book. However, this book by Vine (senior editor, Art in America magazine) is much broader in its reach and inclusion
of many more artists (80 total). After an introductory chapter on the background of contemporary China and its art, the
author, from whose writings some of the current book derives, presents five chapters on techniques and media, fully
and excellently illustrated, covering painting/sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and video. Two final
chapters, "The Scene Now" and "History Lessons," give excellent overviews of the role of Chinese artists at home and
abroad, including the commerce of art and a succinct but detailed study of historical events and political history in the
art of the past 20 years. The book even offers an investigation into a probable/possible future for contemporary art in
China. Includes a Chinese names index. Summing Up: Essential. **** Lowerlevel undergraduates through
professionals/practitioners; general readers.D. K. Haworth, emeritus, Carleton College
Haworth, D.K.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Haworth, D.K. "Vine, Richard. New China, new art." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, May 2009, p.
1684. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA266631089&it=r&asid=dc3f4acf9d8935b3011a1af7212b0aff.
Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
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Comprehending the new: this excellent survey of
Chinese contemporary art highlights the need for
a deeper critique of the work
Jonathan Goodman
Apollo.
174.592 (Nov. 2011): p108.
COPYRIGHT 2011 Apollo Magazine Ltd.
http://www.apollomagazine.com/
Full Text:
New China, New Art
Richard Vine
Prestel, 25 [pounds sterling]
ISBN 9783791345505
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Already established as an expert in the field of Chinese contemporary art, editor and author Richard Vine has now
brought out a second edition, revised and expanded, of New China, New Art. Printed in a smaller, snappier softcover
format than the first edition, the book presents on its cover a reproduction of a sculpture by Li Zhanyang, History
Observed: Joseph Beuys, Mao Zedong (2007). The image sizes up the Western presence in much Chinese
contemporary art: Beuys, the visionary, clad in his trademark hat, vest and boots, gestures into the distance, while
Chairman Mao, the statesman and cultural revolutionary, regal and austere in his slateblue uniform, calmly surveys the
scene. Although the two never actually met, there is a thematic rightness to this tableau, for one of the distinguishing
characteristics of Chinese contemporary artists is their extensive knowledge of Western avantgarde art practices.
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[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Vine doesn't address the issue at length, but he makes it very clear in his highly knowledgeable and wellwritten
presentation that Chinese contemporary art doesn't exist in a vacuum. Fang Lijun's early 1990s series of bald thugs are
entirely Chinese, but they are painted in oil on canvasthat is, using Western materials (Fig. 2). Similarly, Zhang
Huan's body mortifications, which include hanging from the ceiling and dripping his blood, via an intravenous tube,
onto a hot burner, can be explained in light of the actions of the American performance artist Chris Burden. As Vine
points out, because the Chinese never really developed a separate period of Modernism, they have had to come into the
present based on recent art practice, much of it from the period of experimentation during the 1960s and '70s in the US.
At the same time, however, the author is at pains to establish the highly pluralistic nature of contemporary Chinese art.
Seeking to impose some sense of order on what is close to a field of anarchy, he divides the book into sections on
painting, sculpture and installation, performance, photography, video and, finally, the scene today. These sections
indeed allow him to progress in a reasonable, measured fashion, but are not intended to give the impression of a tidier
arrangement of talent than is in fact the case.
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
With so many artists sharing the spotlight, the trick is to keep track of the lesser players, and this Vine does admirably
well. The major figures, most of them active since the mid1980s, are well known, among them Xu Bing (Fig. 3),
Zhang Huan (Fig. 1) and Cai GuoQiang. Now mature as artists, they have become the official representatives of postmodern
Chinese culture. But nowadays much of the work that captures our interest has to do with lesserknown figures,
most of whom get (and deserve) a descriptive paragraph in Vine's book. In this sense, the evenhanded reference
volume format, wherein each artist is allotted a similar amount of space, proves advantageous. On the other hand,
however, it also suggests (misleadingly) that each artist is equally accomplished, and produces a listlike accumulation
of names. Moreover, it underscores an implied perception of most mainlandChinese art as improvisatory, made in a
doityourself milieu, at a time when such a generalisation is becoming less accurate. The universities remain
traditionally academic, but more than a few major artists, including Zhang Peili and Qiu Zhijie, are teaching radically
new courses in art schools to those eager for the avantgarde.
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Generally speaking, Vine's judgment is laudable. He does an excellent job of evoking the content of the work, if not
always of commenting on its failure or success. The avantgarde in China has been both lionised and marginalised,
sometimes for the same reason: a willingness to take risks and an unpredictability that can pose political concerns. The
author is a very good historian in this case, patiently recounting Xiao Lu's notorious February 1989 shooting of her
installation, Dialogue (1989), at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, during the country's first governmentsponsored
exhibition of avantgarde art, or describing the troubling use of fetuses and stillborn infants in performance
activities before the Chinese government stopped the practice. His citations radiate a casual authority; likewise, the
pictures are well produced and refer accurately to the major works of the artists who are being addressed. As a result,
New China, New Art presents a lot of information in a highly objective manner; with the result that students, collectors
and even scholars active in the field will be able to make better sense of a complicated history with many, many
players.
So, if we understand the book as an extended map of its subject, then its author is to be commended as a superb
cartographer. But his very success points out the need for other approaches. Contemporary art in China now has a small
history, dating back to the mid1980s, which needs to be considered in depth and requires greater contextualisation than
this book provides. Unlike contemporary Western artists, Chinese artists do not rely on theory as the cutting edge of
their orientation and expressiveness. Perhaps what is needed is a theoretical overview that sees the avantgarde
phenomenon as an expression at once of rebellion against and of pride in a China that daily grows richer and more
internationally important. In the book's last chapter the new players are very effectively named, but little thought is
given to what their implications might be. A thorough critique of the next wave would help us understand the ongoing
transformations of an art world which has jumped from one spot to the next without actively considering what each
new spot means. We are at a point in the discipline where a deeper history needs to be drawndrawn, one hopes, by
someone as assiduous as Richard Vine.
Jonathan Goodman is a freelance writer specialising in contemporary Chinese art.
Goodman, Jonathan
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
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Goodman, Jonathan. "Comprehending the new: this excellent survey of Chinese contemporary art highlights the need
for a deeper critique of the work." Apollo, Nov. 2011, p. 108+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA273786358&it=r&asid=139c1b810ec15b4fd60cc6af1d3665d8.
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William Steiger; transport
Reference & Research Book News.
26.6 (Dec. 2011):
COPYRIGHT 2011 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9781555953584
William Steiger; transport.
Vine, Richard and Christopher Gaillard.
Hudson Hills Press
2011
192 pages
$60.00
Hardcover
ND237
Steiger's solo exhibition career began 20 years ago. Those familiar with his paintings as well as those new to his work
will be grateful for this book. The focus is on Steiger's paintings of subjects connected with transport, presented in
roughly 150 plates. His sources of inspiration and the qualities of his interpretations are explored in introductory essays
by the authors, Richard Vine (editor for Asia at Art in America) and Christopher Gaillard (a principal at the art
advisory and appraisal firm of Gurr Johns International), as well as in contributed writings from architects and critics.
A chronology, exhibition list, and bibliography round out the volume (which measures 11.25x11.25").
([c]2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"William Steiger; transport." Reference & Research Book News, Dec. 2011. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA274120933&it=r&asid=d54032fe101909aeda5e68afc3edc691.
Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
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Quoted in Sidelights: SoHo Sins succeeds because it was written by a man with a day job, a job that gives him intimate knowledge of how a subculture works – its personalities and preoccupations, its business practices, its styles, its silliness and occasional beauty and, above all, the ugly money that pumps through its rotten heart. You have to be inside such a world to plausibly imagine the worst it can imagine
Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Richard Vine’s ‘Soho Sins’
By BILL MORRIS posted at 12:00 pm on August 5, 2016
1
cover
Richard Vine has a day job, a very good one. He’s managing editor of Art in America magazine, where he has written hundreds of articles about Chinese ink art, the Chicago Imagists, photographers from Mali, Korean sculptures installed in the gardens at Versailles, and the way art subsidies work in Singapore. Now Vine has a new entry on his globe-spanning resume: noir novelist.
Vine’s debut novel, SoHo Sins, has just been published by the Hard Case Crime series, and it’s a terrific addition to the pulp tradition, which Charles Ardai, a co-founder of Hard Case, summed up this way: “There’s a body on page one. The cover art is classical realism with a heightened sense of sexuality and menace. The stories are heart-stopping, a wonderful blend of high and low culture.”
SoHo Sins checks all the boxes. The moody cover art is by Robert Maguire, a prolific illustrator who produced more than 600 pulp covers beginning in the mid-20th century. It shows a man in a fedora and trench coat in a darkened alley, looming over a seated blonde in a red dress, a fallen woman in obvious distress. There’s a dead body in the opening sentence: “I slept rather badly the first few nights after Amanda’s murder.” And the story that unspools from there, as narrated by the suavely decadent SoHo art dealer and real estate speculator Jackson Wyeth, is a wonderful blend of high art and low-down deeds, a whodunit with room for de Kooning paintings and child pornography, art biennials and back-room deals, millionaires and mistresses and murder. The novel spins around a question: did the mentally unstable art collector and tech millionaire Philip Oliver murder his socialite wife in their SoHo loft, as he claims, even though he was apparently in Los Angeles when the killer pulled the trigger?
The novel is set during the late 1980s or early1990s, when big money like Philip Oliver’s had begun to infect and distort the New York art scene. The money has gotten even more obscene in the ensuing quarter-century, partly because dealers like Jackson Wyeth have never been inclined to ask indelicate questions. “You can’t deal successfully in art if you dwell on where the money comes from and how it gets made,” the glib Wyeth says at one point. “I concern myself with my clients’ tastes and credit ratings, not their ethics.” The novel’s money-drunk art scene is described on the cover, in suitably breathless prose, as “a world of adultery and madness, of beautiful girls growing up too fast and men making fortunes and losing their minds. But even the worst the art world can imagine will seem tame when the final shattering secret is revealed…”
The worst the art world can imagine — those words are the key. Simply put, SoHo Sins succeeds because it was written by a man with a day job, a job that gives him intimate knowledge of how a subculture works – its personalities and preoccupations, its business practices, its styles, its silliness and occasional beauty and, above all, the ugly money that pumps through its rotten heart. You have to be inside such a world to plausibly imagine the worst it can imagine.
In America today it’s maddeningly difficult to make a living writing books, and it’s just about impossible to make a living writing fiction. That’s largely because the pool of writers is constantly growing while the pool of serious readers, especially readers of fiction, is constantly shrinking — never a good business model. As a result, all but a few writers of fiction have some sort of day job, which most of them view as a time-sucking, soul-crushing impediment to the making of their art.
covercovercover
But as Richard Vine has shown, a day job can be a counter-intuitive blessing to the writer of fiction. Since most people spend nearly half of their waking hours at work, the workplace would seem like natural and fertile ground for setting a novel. We already have more than enough novels, written in flawless, bloodless MFA prose, about a bunch of Oberlin grads struggling to find themselves in brownstone Brooklyn. As Jason Arthur pointed out on this site recently, we need more novels that draw on worlds where people do actual work — like the art dealers and pornographers and tycoons and cops in SoHo Sins, or the metal scrappers in Matt Bell’s Scrapper, the eco-saboteurs in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, the wheat-threshers in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the drug dealers in Richard Price’s Clockers, the admen in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, John le Carré’s spies, Elmore Leonard’s hard-working petty criminals, and the lonely department store clerks in Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. These can be worlds the author knows first-hand, or they can be vividly imagined worlds of the past, such as the 17th-century Dutch commodity speculators in Davis Liss’s The Coffee Trader, or the Irish immigrant sandhogs who dug the New York City subway tunnels in Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness.
The point is that a day job — as a commodities trader, say, or a construction worker or an art dealer — can be a way for a writer to admit readers to plausible, fully realized worlds that would otherwise be off-limits. Richard Vine grasps this. In a recent interview in Brooklyn Rail, Vine discussed how his day job informed his novel:
SoHo Sins, you might say, is a lament not for the art world that was, or is, but the art world that is rapidly emerging. By now, its corruption by unregulated wealth is almost complete; this book simply imaginatively extends present trends…My projection goes into the immediate past rather than the immediate future, but that reversal of vectors is just an amusing bit of game-play to help highlight the present.
An argument could be made that the art world today, ultimately dependent as it is on the buying decisions of a few super-rich individuals, is fatally tainted throughout. (Artnet.com reports a new financial scam almost every week.) Do some further digging, and the facts soon reveal that no one can become that rich, or maintain that level of inherited wealth, without being a moral criminal. Such disproportionate lucre is accumulated either through activities that are literally illegal or through the utterly unconscionable exploitation of employees, stockholders, taxpayers, and customers — an economic crime and a moral one.
A world that’s “fatally tainted throughout” — and populated with operators like Philip Oliver, who uses his tech company to both finance his art acquisitions and distribute child pornography around the world. Could there be a richer backdrop for a noir novel? And could there be a better person to write it than someone who has a day job on the inside, deep in the tainted shadows, where the dirty money does its work?
SoHo Sins
Image of SoHo Sins
Author(s):
Richard Vine
Release Date:
July 18, 2016
Publisher/Imprint:
Hard Case Crime
Pages:
352
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
D. R. Meredith
“Five out of five stars for this debut novel.”
SoHo in the nineties was a world of art galleries, performance artists, painters, both the gifted and the amateurish, bars and clubs, millionaires and panhandlers, where sex was a commodity bought and sold, but not always paid for in cash.
Amanda and Phillip, Phillip and Amanda, Phil and Mandy, or sometimes just P and M, the Olivers were the epitome of patrons of the art world, a seemingly happy couple right up to the time someone put two bullets through the back of Amanda’s head, and a drunken, distraught Phillip staggered into the police station and confessed that he killed his wife. “My name is Phillip Oliver, and I believe I murdered my wife.”
Jackson Wyeth, owner of one of SoHo’s most prestigious art galleries, as well as several buildings in the area, is a friend to the Olivers, and is shocked by Amanda’s murder, but even more shocked by Phillip’s confession. “All their repeated separations and reconciliations, all their legal maneuverings, were a kind of sport. In reality, Amanda was life itself to him.”
Phillip had been lured away from his first wife, Angela, shortly after she gave birth to his own child, Melissa, by Amanda, who “taught him how to have fun.” Amanda also shrugged off Phillip’s numerous affairs “with a sharp, falsely light ‘men are animals.’”
What Amanda might not have been able to forgive was Phillip’s taking up Claudia, more than 20 years her junior, so soon after the remission of Amanda’s breast cancer. Jackson sums up Phillip’s affair with Claudia as “not one of his prettier episodes.”
Hogan, a private investigator for Phillip’s lawyer and a boyhood friend of Jackson’s, calls him asking for information about Phillip and Amanda. “Thing is, his story rambles all over the place, and half the details don’t match what the cops found at the crime scene.”
There is another reason to believe Phillip did not murder his wife: He was in California at the time, and he is dying of a brain disorder, and nothing he says can be trusted. So says Phillips’s lawyer, and he hires Hogan to prove his client is innocent.
Hogan, ex-Marine and ex-cop, is an alien in the SoHo art scene. A staunch Catholic, he finds SoHo’s culture of drugs, drink, and sex a sinkhole of debauchery, even while he is not above having an affair with Phillip’s ex-wife, Angela. Hogan needs Jackson to serve as a guide to SoHo.
Jackson, a complex man who forgave his own wife’s serial affairs up until her death from AIDS contracted during one of her many infidelities, is no saint himself. He admits to selling second-rate art at first-rate prices to Phillip. But he does know SoHo, and he knows Angela and Phillip’s young daughter, Melissa.
Much as Jackson hates to admit it, he knows Angela has a motive to murder Amanda. It was Amanda who enticed Phillip to divorce Angela, who was left with only a house, an infant daughter, and none of the millions from Phillip’s tech company, to which she should have been entitled. But would she have waited 12 years to take revenge?
When Melissa admits to having Amanda’s missing laptop computer, Jackson fears that the girl found it in her mother’s bedroom; however, Melissa insists that a disreputable videographer named Paul Morse gave it to her to hide. Morse was sleeping with Amanda and stole her computer to prevent the police finding any information about his relationship to the dead woman.
Jackson is shocked to learn first that Amanda had a lover, and second that it was the sleazy hanger-on to the art world and host of an equally sleazy late night TV show where he broadcast his videos. “. . . this particular boy toy had the measly income of a poet and the conversation of a video-store clerk. One of those pretty, brutish male-model types who look like they’ve just been smacked between the eyes with a brick.”
When Melissa tells Jackson that she and Paul email each other, and that he takes pictures of her when her mother is not present, Jackson is convinced that Paul Morse is more than just videographer. He is a sexual predator, and a damn good suspect for Amanda’s murder.
Jackson and Hogan set up a sting operation to catch Paul in the act of filming his pornographic videos of underage girls and adult males. He asks Melissa to help him, a request that enrages Angela after she discovers it.
A search of Paul’s apartment turns up the murder weapon used in Amanda’s death. Despite Paul’s claims that he didn’t kill Amanda, he is arrested and charged. If the prosecutor can’t prove Paul guilty on the murder charge, there are still the charges of child pornography.
The case is solved; Phillip, quickly succumbing to his brain disorder, can die in peace, or what passes for peace; and Melissa will inherit her father’s millions, since he failed to change his will in favor of his mistress. Best of all, Amanda’s killer is not a true resident of SoHo. He hangs out on the fringes, hides in the shadows, and is a person of no account in SoHo.
In a powerful plot twist, Amanda’s murder case is reopened, and another person is charged with the crime. Although the twist is unexpected, the explanation is logical and Jackson accepts it. Until he doesn’t.
A very dark, very noir crime novel, SoHo Sins by Richard Vine is a satisfying read for fans of the genre. Although the characters, as in most noir crime novels, are not at all warm and fuzzy, they are realistic. SoHo is itself a character—and is the strongest one all. Five out of five stars for this debut novel.
Where SoHo Sins goes beyond expectations is in the ironic intricacies of the community’s entanglements—Wyeth remains friends with Phillip’s first wife and precocious daughter and, though he was also a friend of Amanda’s, he had no qualms introducing Phillip to other women. The engaging morality tête-à-tête between Wyeth and Hogan intensifies as the story progresses.
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FRESH MEAT
An Artistic Debut: Reviewing SoHo Sins by Richard Vine
DAVID CRANMER
SoHo Sins by Richard Vine is an intriguing debut novel about the underworld of the New York art scene (Available July 19, 2016).
“You can’t deal successfully in art if you dwell on where the money comes from and how it gets made. I concern myself with my clients’ tastes and credit ratings, not their ethics.” —Jackson Wyeth
Nothing like an admixture of art plus murder for a mystery-fused suspense tale. A classic example is Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey, where a vain man's portrait ages as he stays youthful and in a final fit of indignation, he stabs at his degenerate likeness with horrific repercussions. The film The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947) catches Humphrey Bogart, as Geoffrey Carroll, painting images of his wives before planning their deaths. (There's just something, dare I say, creepy when the camera zooms in on the canvas of these human creations and that otherworld of color, seeming to hold court against mankind's devious nature, enacting lustful revenge.)
Richard Vine, in SoHo Sins, mines another vein of the murderous side in the art world, where dealers and wealthy collectors acquire Rembrandt’s and Picasso’s like the rest of us buy bubblegum. Similar to Grey and Carroll, the SoHo characters have cultivated an extravagant, enclosed nook all their own, surrounded by Pollack’s and Kandinsky’s, while lounging in Wassily chairs in front of modernist cube-shaped tables.
In this cold backdrop, affluent socialite Amanda Oliver is slain in her loft and her husband Phillip immediately confesses. He's a bit of a heel for having walked out on his first wife, Angela, and their daughter, Melissa, then carrying on a steady affair, while married to Amanda, with a twenty-eight-year-old Italian model named Claudia…plus multiple other liaisons.
Still, Phillip’s friend Jackson Wyeth (rather too perfect a name for an art dealer) doesn't believe this immoral nature is necessarily a path to murder, and he encourages Phillip's personal lawyer to hire a gumshoe friend named Hogan to begin corroborating Phillip's alibi to get to the bottom of the slaying. Hogan isn't as familiar with the SoHo art scene and asks Wyeth to accompany him to navigate. As the unlikely twosome nose about the immaculate “crypt” where Amanda was shot in the head, Wyeth muses:
It was more than just a matter of imagining, too vividly, what had happened at that juncture of corridor and open space. Something was off in the apartment itself. There were no signs of ransacking or theft, not so much as a broken wineglass. Yet the very normalcy of the environment felt bogus, as though the rooms were sworn to unwilling secrecy, the designer objects longing to reveal some rude, unspeakable truth.
Wyeth guides us through SoHo Sins in a relaxed, knowledgeable manner. (Had a most peculiar impression that the protagonist's voice was that of Meyer from John D. Macdonald's Travis McGee series—yes, a quirky notion.) With Hogan in tow, Wyeth begins the tried-and-true detective examination of all parties associated with Amanda and Phillip Oliver. Standard genre track.
Where SoHo Sins goes beyond expectations is in the ironic intricacies of the community’s entanglements—Wyeth remains friends with Phillip’s first wife and precocious daughter and, though he was also a friend of Amanda’s, he had no qualms introducing Phillip to other women. The engaging morality tête-à-tête between Wyeth and Hogan intensifies as the story progresses. Here’s some lucid introspection from Wyeth as he ponders one’s fall from the moral high ground:
A moral change is like aging. The alterations are subtle and deep, the damages cumulative. There is no way to perceive them, except by looking away and looking again, as one must to see the passage of time on the face of a clock.
Mr. Vine supplies plenty of juicy suspects, from Phillip's executive goons to Amanda's boy-toy on the side, seemingly all having a damn good reason why Mrs. Phillip Oliver #2 was better off underground. Even Wyeth, from my armchair detecting, came under scrutiny with his too cool—above the fray—reporting of an incident he'd outwardly rather not be bothered with. The denouement is clever, having built masterfully on a hill of red herrings.
“Write what you know,” dictates the Mark Twain quote, and according to the SoHo back blurb, Richard Vine, as editor of a leading art publication, has an insider’s scoop to this New York microcosm. The streets, buildings, and people become three dimensional, straight off Mr. Vine’s canvas, creating a world that flourishes right alongside other masterpieces from the art world. Even minor characters like Laura, Wyeth’s assistant, are given room to breathe and develop over sixty-five chapters.
Mr. Vine juggles a plethora of different voices quite well. The only character I found to be a minor misstep, or rather a slight glitch, was that of Phillip Oliver. Phillip's disintegration into crazy guy who still runs a major conglomerate wasn’t convincing to me. Mention is made that he could be pulling a mob boss Vincent Louis Gigante (The Chin) “crazy” to spare Claudia or he genuinely has a medical condition that is impairing him. Either way, the words coming out of his mouth didn’t ring organic.
Along a similar line, the opening epigraph from German philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno, "Every work of art is an uncommitted crime,” at first inspection seemed to be just a phrase with some fitting catchwords to begin the story, but upon reading further, in an abstract way, it set the mood for this powerhouse debut.
For a novel about art and murder, it would be a crime not to take a moment to fawn over the cover painting by Robert Maguire (1921-2005), a renowned twentieth century illustrator. A book that brings all the elements together like SoHo Sins to make a pulp reminiscent of the “old days” requires a packaging worthy of the material. The cover art by Mr. Maguire depicting a shady man in a trench coat standing over a brightly dressed woman in a grimy alleyway is certainly appropriate eye candy for this top pulp fiction piece by first time author Richard Vine from the publishing giant, Hard Case Crime.
SoHo Sins
We rated this book:
$22.99
Something is rotting beneath the surface of the SoHo neighborhood of New York City. Behind all the glamour and high style the art world is not a safe place. Then one day Amanda Oliver is brutally murdered in her apartment, as one of the leading icons of the New York art world it is a major loss. With her husband suffering from a disease of the brain that is robbing his memories, it is up to Jackson Wyeth to start digging for the truth and into the seedy, and dangerous, underbelly of a city living on the edge and a world full of excesses. With suspects galore, can Jackson find the killer before they strike again to hide the evidence?
When you read crime noir stories, whether old classics or new tales, you expect a certain style. You expect the story to be compact, and to move at a quick pace. Sadly this book lacks both of those elements. It is too long, this would have worked a lot better if it was about 100 pages shorter; instead things get dragged out that do not need be.
Reviewed By: Kevin Winter
Author: Richard Vine
Star Count: 2/5
Format: Hard
Page Count: 352 pages
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Publish Date: 2016-07-19
ISBN: 9781783299287
Amazon: Buy this Book
Issue: August 2016
Category: Mystery, Crime & Thriller
Quoted in Sidelights: an utterly effortless read, with wonderful pacing and incredible subtlety. It is a dark journey, but one that you will not be able to set aside once you have picked it up. Its subtle sense of mystery will completely bewitch you.
REVIEW: SOHO SINS BY RICHARD VINE
AUGUST 8, 2016 THECRIMEREVIEWADMIN LEAVE A COMMENT
Series: N/A
Book Number: N/A
Read this book for: moral ambiguity, twisted and gritty crimes, sexual content, noir, minimalist writing, philosophical moments
Quick Review: A subtle, minimalist portrait of a life lived in a moral grey area – not so much a whodunnit as an exploration of right and wrong – but utterly compelling. So hard to put down!
***
Philip and Amanda Oliver are pillars of New York’s SoHo art scene, until Amanda is found murdered in their loft, and Philip – suffering from a degenerative brain disease – confesses to the killing. But he doesn’t remember being in Los Angeles at the time, thousands of miles away. Art dealer Jackson Wyeth is asked to help his friend, PI Ed Hogan, investigate the killing on behalf of Philip’s lawyer. Trying to save his friend Philip from jail time for a crime he likely didn’t commit, Wyeth begins to peel back the layers surrounding the family, and finds depravity there that shocks even him, despite his SoHo lifestyle…
SOHO SINS is a debut novel from Richard Vine, who has spent his life in the art world and is a global expert on fine art. He turns that knowledge into a deftly executed and chilling mystery that shows the darker side of beautiful things. Particularly as a debut novel, this novel is an exceptional read: sensitive subjects and dark thoughts handled with thoughtfulness and subtlety to make for a gripping experience.
There’s a bit of a ‘whodunnit’ mystery in this novel, with a decent puzzle: a man who has confessed to a murder that he doesn’t remember, likely because he didn’t commit it. However, I found that that aspect of the novel was not really at the forefront of the narrative. Instead, it served almost as a background thread to string together a series of other discoveries and to offer main character Jackson Wyeth an opportunity to cast a judgmental look at the world he inhabits. Instead of this detracting from the novel, it actually increases the interest, as the investigations into other crimes spiral out from this beginning.
Jackson’s investigations lead him into some dark territory, involving sexual crimes and various cover-ups, as well as force him to confront his own moral failings. This investigation into moral character is actually fascinating. Jackson is a reluctantly introspective character, and does not want to examine his own life too closely, but is forced to. It makes for an utterly mesmerizing reading experience as he tries to draw behavioral lines while trying to maintain the fiction of a carefree, morally ambiguous life. This is really the heart of the story, and it is incredibly poignant.
The other beautiful thing about this novel is its minimalist noir styling. It’s an utterly effortless read, with wonderful pacing and incredible subtlety. Suspense is built more from a question of morals than from the threat of imminent danger. The writing is clean and simple, but also intelligent and captures the somewhat grim, world-weary tone of the best noir.
If you are a noir fan, you should absolutely read SOHO SINS. It is a dark journey, but one that you will not be able to set aside once you have picked it up. Its subtle sense of mystery will completely bewitch you.
Quoted in Sidelights: I personally found that this worked in the book’s favor.
proves a challenging read that may not suit Hard Case Crime readers looking for a crisp and fast-paced diversion, but it’s a rewarding one for those willing to venture somewhat deeper.
Book Review: “SoHo Sins,” A Hard Case Crime Novel by Richard Vine
Posted by: Bill Sherman 14 days ago in Book Reviews, Books, Editor Pick: Books, Editor Picks, Mystery and Thriller 0 Comments
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Typically, when you think of the kind of gritty crime fiction repped by Hard Case Crime, the first thing that comes to mind is a private dick operating out of a low-rent office. But in Richard Vine’s debut crime novel SoHo Sins, our narrator hero is far from a struggling, hard-pressed p.i. Instead, the aptly named Jackson Wyeth is a moneyed NYC art dealer, plying his still-lucrative trade at the end of the twentieth century.
Wyeth is coaxed into doing amateur detective work after his wealthy friend and client Philip Oliver walks into a police station stating, “I believe I murdered my wife.” Suffering from dementia caused by a progressive brain disorder, Oliver makes a good prime suspect: a serial philanderer with an artist mistress. The killing, two close shots to the back of the head with soft-nosed slugs, looks to be the act of someone close to the victim, which looks even worse for Wyeth’s friend. Brought into the case by an even older friend, an ex-cop turned p.i. named Hogan, Wyeth agrees to help. “Keep yourself occupied, or you might end up examining your own acts and desires – a decidedly unappealing prospect,” he notes at the start of a case that will test the man in more ways than one.
The investigation takes Wyeth and Hogan into the SoHo scene, which is establishing itself as the “new-art capital of the world.” In this neo-decadent setting we meet the barely functioning Oliver, his mistress Claudia, a shady “artistic” photographer named Paul Morse, Oliver’s first wife Angela and her precocious nymphette daughter Melissa. The deeper Wyeth delves, the seedier the scene becomes until we’re brought into the underworld biz of underage porn, a setting that provides more than one calculatedly discomforting moment for our hero.
At 382 pages, SoHo Sins is a weightier tome than your typical fast-read pulp ‘tec tale, though I personally found that this worked in the book’s favor. Vine’s characters live in a realm built on moral ambiguity (“You don’t deal successfully in art if you dwell on where the money comes from and how it gets made,” Wyeth says of his own profession at one point), which is clearly delineated by the book’s melancholy finale. As a narrator, Wyeth is sometimes given more to social commentary than to storytelling but that’s perhaps to be expected from an author who has also worked as editor of an arts magazine. In the end, Sins proves a challenging read that may not suit Hard Case Crime readers looking for a crisp and fast-paced diversion, but it’s a rewarding one for those willing to venture somewhat deeper.
Book Review: The Curious World of Wine (DIFFERENT RICHARD VINE)
Christopher NullMarch 20, 2014
curious_world_of_wineWine is indeed a curious world. Just drinking everyday bottles of the stuff is enough to vault you into a world of confusing terminology, exotic places, and strange people for the rest of your life.
Purdue University’s Richard Vine does the wine fanatic no favors with his book, The Curious World of Wine, which only serves to add to the mystery. A collection of loosely sorted and generally quite short “fun facts,” Vine devotes 210 pages, 10 chapters, and over 100 segments of only a few paragraphs each to one oddball tidbit or another about the world of wine.
Historical vignettes and etymology make up the lion’s share of the book. Some of this you’ll likely have heard before (toasting was born to exchange liquids between two glasses to ensure no one was being poisoned), some you likely haven’t (Robert Mondavi and Philippe de Rothschild conceived of Opus One while the Baron was lounging in bed). Most of the tidbits are at least interesting, even if they’re short on being actively educational.
Vine’s writing is typical of academics — straightforward and largely humorless aside from the overuse of wordplay — but breezy enough to make it easy to get into. If trivia’s your name and wine’s your game, give this book a look.
The Curious World of Wine, From George Washington To Emeril Lagasse (DIFFERENT RICHARD VINE)
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2012 AT 8 A.M. BY JENN GARBEE
The Curious World Of Wine
The Curious World Of Wine
Perigee Books
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In The Curious World of Wine today, uncorking a bottle is often more an invitation for criticism than enjoyment. Was that $15 bottle worth a repeat buy? Did the pricey Pinot Noir you served for Thanksgiving do your heritage turkey justice?
In his new book, Richard Vine, an industry consultant and Professor of Enology Emeritus at Purdue University, promises to provide a more "fascinating miscellany about the colorful characters, celebrated places, and quirky events surrounding winemaking," according to the book jacket flap. Sure, Vine (a handy last name) includes a handful of softball sidebars, perhaps better suited to his former college-age students, on topics such as why drinking wine with a good meal is better than sex ("Condoms aren't required to eat or drink and there's never a risk of pregnancy").
But primarily, the book is filled with curiosity-driven insights for the wine enthusiast. If you're underwhelmed by the glut of criticism in the wine market today, this pocket guide might just bring you back to those moments of wineglass-toasting fun. Get more after the jump.
The Curious World Of Wine Tastings
The Curious World Of Wine Tastings
flickr user needlesspaces
Among the book's excerpts: the story of how Thomas Jefferson nearly went bankrupt trying to cure his vines from a devastating disease, and an enterprising Midwesterner's attempt to make an Ohio bubbly prior to the Civil War.
Chapters titles give you an idea of what other wine stories are here: "Wining with the Ancients," "Legends and Lore" and "Fascinating Legacies." The latter includes moments such as when "six bulk wine producers in southwest France were convicted of selling E & J. Gallo of California more than three million barrels of fake Pinot Noir during a three-year period before 2008." We have a feeling only the critics noticed.
The book also includes plenty of fun quotes, such as one from George Washington from a letter he wrote to George W. Fairfax (June 1786): "My manner of living is plain and I do not mean to be put out of it. A glass of wine and a bit of mutton are always ready." Over 200 years later, we might not have the mutton always at the ready, but we're still pretty set on wine side of things.
Scribble Washington's quote on a card and add a bottle of your favorite wine, and you've got a pretty great gift. Or actually, a wine tasting kit might be more in line with The Curious World of Wine. We have a feeling Washington would have gotten a kick out of the new holiday sampler from Emeril Lagasse (he chose six California wines that come in 50 ml tasting samples). Our favorite tasting note from the "kicked-up" chef who isn't exactly known for his healthy cooking: According to Lagasse, the 2010 Patz & Hall Sonoma Coast Chardonnay "has a great lean texture and doesn't weigh you down with butter."
The Curious World of Wine – Literary Monday (DIFFERENT RICHARD VINE)
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This week’s Literary Monday pick is a book filled with fun facts about wine. Most interestingly, the book is authored by Dr. Vine. Sorry, I just couldn’t resist – a book on wine authored by Vine. Dr. Vine has been in the world of wine since 1958 and has many fun stories to share with us. In The Curious World of Wine, we discover the origins of the word “plonk”, along with the origins of the honeymoon and about a wine named after Sir Winston Churchill. Dr. Vine helps us discover the French that made the wine and Champagne industry and the founding of the California wine industry. Dr. Vine helps us examine wineries named for animals, naughty labels and wine scandals.
As one can see, the Curious World of Wine is a fun book. It is not to be missed by any serious oneophile. In one small tome, you have fun tidbits, interesting stories and juicy gossip. It has taken Dr. Vine almost fifty years to accumulate this vast array of knowledge that you get to digest in a couple of hours. Salute!
Monday, December 1st, 2008 print
New China New Art by Richard Vine
by Jonathan Goodman
This article was designated A Topical Pick from the Archives, January 2012 to mark the event at which Vine alongside artist Zhang Hongtu present the revised/expanded edition of his now widely acknowledged survey at New York Public Library, Wednesday, February 1, 6 – 8 p.m.
For details of this event, please visit nypl.org
Zhang Huan 12 Square Meters 1994 C-print, Edition of 15, 169 x 117 cm
Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters 1994 C-print, Edition of 15, 169 x 117 cm
Richard Vine New China New Art Prestel: New York, 2008, 240 pages, ISBN 978 3 7913 3942 9
[Revised/Expanded edition, 2011, 256 pages, ISBN 978 3 7913 4550-5]
Richard Vine, editor of Asian art for Art in America, has taken a ten-year-long interest in Chinese art and parleyed it into an encyclopedic volume of considerable information and intelligence. Vine has been publishing reviews and articles on China since 1998, when he first became interested in the field. Not so long ago, all but a few people in the international artworld were lackluster in their appreciation for contemporary Chinese art; today, the market bubble, showering money on even the lesser wannabes in Mainland China’s art system, has made the artworld there the focal place for art in Asia. Vine has wisely restricted his attention to the better-known artists in the relatively short history, perhaps three decades, of new Chinese art. He is an excellent writer, finding the exact term in any description and staying away from the unhappy grandiosity and triumphalism that often accompany writing about China’s avant-garde.
New China New Art seems pitched at the relative newcomer to the Chinese art world, with an emphasis on the introduction of names and particular achievements. It does a good job of describing that rather disconnected gathering of artists, gallerists, curators, and critics that constitutes the Chinese art intelligentsia, the latter unfortunately undermined by the practice in China of galleries directly paying writers for articles on their artists. As Vine rightly points out, the artworld in Beijing and Shanghai and other cities is clearly hindered by a lack of infrastructure: well-developed spaces, sharp writing and publications, and an overall professionalism that seems to have gone by the wayside in the face of all the money raining down on the artistic districts of China’s urban centers.
Qui Zhijie, Tatoo 2, "No!", ca.1994, reproduced in the book under review, p. 94
Qui Zhijie, Tatoo 2, "No!", ca.1994, reproduced in the book under review, p. 94
Rather than explain this rather labyrinthine state of affairs, Vine concentrates on the art itself, offering a wonderfully accessible approach to individual achievements, grouping artists according to seven categories: Painting, Sculpture, Installation, Performance, Photography, Video, and The Scene Now. He forgets no one, accurately summarizing an artist’s contribution within the space of a paragraph or two. Established installation artists such as Xu Bing and Cai Guo Qiang are given their due, but Vine also covers talented photographers such as O Zhang and Chi Peng, whose work is just beginning to make its way into Western awareness. He sticks close to the facts rather than working up a general theory for the pluralism of Chinese art. In truth, it may well be impossible to elaborate an overview when so many different kinds of art compete with each other, and Vine’s broad scope leaves very little behind.
One of the best things about Vine’s book is the very succinct way in which he characterizes artists and their work. He is able to capture, for example, Zhang Huan’s nearly twenty-year career in a few paragraphs, deftly analyzing his “breakthough” 12 Square Meters (1994): “Zhang smeared his body with fish oil and honey, then sat motionless for an hour in a sweltering, stench-ridden communal outhouse of that size (129 square feet), before stalking mutely away, step by step, to immerse his entire body in the brackish water of a nearby pond.” But even when the author packs so much information into so few words, the effect of the writing is never heavy or turgid. Conceptual sculptor Ai Weiwei is treated with similar objectivity and brevity. Even when Ai went so far as to deliberately drop a Han dynasty urn, Vine holds back from any judgemental attitude. This book stand out in its independence and clarity.