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

The definitive collection of Glenn O’Brien—first editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview, host of the public-access landmark TV Party, and GQ’s beloved Style Guy—gathering fifty years of writing on art, music, fashion and the political temperature of America in a full-color hardcover introduced by Jonathan Lethem.

Glenn O’Brien’s public-access show TV Party had Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie as its house band and Jean-Michel Basquiat working alongside them. He had already been the first editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview, the magazine he credited with inspiring People. He would go on to write the serial Chanel commercials that starred Scarlett Johansson, Brad Pitt and Matthew McConaughey, to run creative for Barneys, and to answer readers’ questions about shirt cuffs and manners as GQ’s Style Guy, syndicated in GQ editions around the world. It is an unlikely single career, and Intelligence for Dummies is the first book to show it whole.

Assembled after O’Brien’s death in 2017, it is a portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last fifty years of cultural life. The selection runs from music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, to the political temperature of America: criticism, profiles and essays alongside aphorisms, poems, freeform meditations, diatribes, fiction and tweets. He wrote some of the first important features on Basquiat, Christopher Wool and Richard Prince; the most moving pages here are his evocations of friends—Warhol, Basquiat, Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, James Nares—built by accretion out of chatter, circumstance and location.

A full-color hardcover, the book sets O’Brien’s writing alongside artwork and photographs from the collaborators he wrote about, and opens with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, who places 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.”

Intelligence for Dummies is ZE Series 001, the volume that set the pattern for the series: a writer in conversation with visual culture, given the full-color treatment usually reserved for the artists. It is a deeply personal look into Patti Smith and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s New York, and into the culture of money and celebrity politics that followed.