Who Knew?

I was having a conversation the other day with someone about Jewish pornography (I won't reveal who it was in order to protect her identity), and I had completely forgotten about it until I got an e-mail today from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture letting me know that they will be presenting a talk between Glenn Ligon and Wayne Koestenbaum on Friday, May 19^th at 6:00pm at P.S.1 MoMA at 22-25 Jackson Ave. at the intersection of 46th Ave. in Long Island City. Admission is free, no reservation is required, but space is limited.

Glenn Ligon is an artist who has exhibited worldwide and is represented in major collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, The Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Best known as a painter who uses language as a device for both image and communication, Ligon addresses issues of identity and politics through quotations from culturally charged material.

Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films (2006). He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of critical prose, including Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (1989); The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (1993); and Andy Warhol (2001). He has also written for many contemporary art exhibition catalogues and was the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award. He taught at Yale University from 1988 to 1996 and is currently a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a visiting professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.

Unfortunately, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films is not a directory of movies like I had hoped, but rather a book of poetry. This slightly disappointed me, but I am just glad to know that someone other than myself is interested in this subject.