Sugary excerpt of the weekend from Elizabeth Lowry's review of Wendy Steiner's The Real Real Thing: The model in the mirror of art:
Today’s aesthetic controversies seem to turn specifically on the issues of truth-telling and the ethical treatment of the real in art. Oprah Winfrey’s indignation over authorial fraud can and often does make headlines – consider the furore when James Frey’s account of his drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces (2003), and Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence (2008), were revealed to have been less than scrupulously factual. “Readers demand their money back for memoirs that lie; publishers rush to withdraw unsold copies from bookstores; editors, denying collusion with their fraudulent authors, are nevertheless fired for their credulity.” The real thing is no longer enough – our touchstone now is the real real thing.
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