About the Book

“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. 

Praise for 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 was, depending on how you look at it, either the first or the last real man: sensitive, cultured, astute, funny as fuck, gentle, with style to die for. Whether you think he inspired the best or is the end of a certain lineage, you still know he was rare. I was lucky to know him and feel luckier still to have his writing to remind me what a blessing his voice was.”

—Lena Dunham

“Glenn O’Brien delivered irony and grace with every gesture, thought, and sentence. He was acid-edged knowledge with a flounce of camp, a deeply intelligent person, and the voice you want on Warhol’s factory and the absurdities, generally, of life in the later twentieth century. If you’re a critic, read this book and weep that you’ll never be him, nor write like him.” 

—Rachel Kushner

“Glenn O’Brien was an artist, a filmmaker, a musician, editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, a columnist for Interview, Paper, ArtForum and other publications, and a very successful advertising copywriter and creative director of advertising for Barneys Department Store. For much of his adult life he stood at the cusp of contemporary culture, at the vanishing point of cool… And although O’Brien contributed to and wrote several books during his lifetime, it seemed as if his insight and wit – and the sort of deadpan humor that made you wonder if Warhol got his bon mots from O’Brien, would disappear from the culture with him. That will not be the case, thanks to the posthumous publication of Intelligence for Dummies, a collection of O’Brien’s writing and aphorisms covering art, music, fashion, politics, and several autobiographical essays concerning Andy Warhol, Interview, and Jean-Michel Basquiat... It is a gorgeous volume, one that most writers can only dream about.”

—Tom Teicholz, Forbes 

“The best book I've read in the past year is Intelligence for Dummies, a collection of essays and writing by the late American journalist and editor Glenn O'Brien. He was a friend. He wrote the text for one of my exhibition catalogues, and reading this is like hearing his voice again.”

—Stefan Brüggemann, Financial Times

“The smartly designed book features critical reviews, profiles, and essays alongside poems, freeform meditations, diatribes, tweets, and works of fiction. Intelligence for Dummies is not just a mélange of O’Brien’s greatest (and quirkiest) hits, however; the rounded selection pointedly reflects his virtuosity with form and the imaginative fluency he had within the medium of words.”

—Eugenie Dalland, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The real keepers in this volume are precisely detailed and often moving evocations of his friends: Warhol, Basquiat, Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, James Nares. He conveys them in ways that are strangely difficult to quote, since they are contingent on chatter, circumstance, anecdote, and location, and evoke by accretion.” 

—Lucy Sante, New York Review of Books

“All of the great writing in this beautiful book … summed up so much of what the world lost when O’Brien went to the great after-hours party in the sky. That blend of wit and irreverence, a middle finger and a sly smile, always cool and smart. O’Brien was an individual you didn’t always have to agree with, but you paid attention to what he had to say… The stuff in Intelligence for Dummies is lovingly curated and shows the writer from all different sides (one especially moving moment is a series of recollections from his friendship with Basquiat), but what it shows is something we’ve lost and that we could really use more of: individualism.”

—Jason Diamond, InsideHook

“O’Brien has certainly given us a means to feel the vibes where he once held court and to contemplate the era’s mysterious machinations, subtle codes of conduct, and modes of style. For years he was the most revered impresario of cool and certainly many will read this book with acute nostalgia… He may have been ‘the most important cultural critic of celebrity culture,’ who attained status neither with official arbiters of literary taste nor with academicians… O’Brien’s writing is admirably alive.”

—Jeremy Sigler, BOMB Magazine 

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