by Jon Lackman | 24 November 2010 | Books
In the November Artforum, David Rimanelli handily dismantles Berkeley Art Museum director Lawrence Rinder’s roman à clef Revenge of the Decorated Pigs :
… [Rinder’s] astonishing success would seem to be lost, however, on Rinder, who is apparently still mired, almost a decade later, in a sedulously manured soil of anger, hurt feelings, spite, and sour grapes over the reception of his [Whitney] biennial endeavor … [H]is digs and thinly veiled revelations fall falt, or on deaf ears. (Would anyone care if a married museum trustee really had fellated the author nine years ago?) Rinder’s Revenge is perhaps a dish that was not best served cold … What’s breathtaking about his trippy-naughty-kooky-tedious febrile night writing isn’t that it is a tell-all about his quondam days as a persecuted museum curator. No, it’s that he though the sitting director of a significant metropolitan museum could get away with publishing such a book. And he did. The Bay Area is just so free, God love it.
