Art, Literature & Reportage

An interview conducted for Reality Sandwich in November 2009 with the director Tao Ruspoli, whose first feature, FIX, drew on his brother’s addiction and the ten-day ultimatum a judge gave him. Ruspoli discusses the LAFCO collective and what filmmaking becomes when the media economy is coming apart.

Written for Reality Sandwich in January 2009, on the occasion of two Chelsea exhibitions of his father’s work. Pinchbeck’s memoir of the abstract painter Peter Pinchbeck, who left hundreds of canvases in a rent-controlled Greene Street loft and who, asked whether he would trade his style for recognition, said he would change nothing.

Written for Artforum in 2003. The essay traces Burning Man from Larry Harvey’s 1986 effigy on San Francisco’s Baker Beach to a thirty-thousand-person city in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and argues that its gift economy and deliberately destroyed artworks, such as David Best’s Temple of Tears, place it outside official art-world judgment.

Artforum, 2002. Pinchbeck writes about his father, the abstract painter Peter Pinchbeck, who died in 2000 leaving hundreds of unsold works in a Greene Street loft. The memoir covers the London Blitz, his father’s arrival in New York in 1960, his inclusion in the Jewish Museum’s 1966 Primary Structures exhibition, and SoHo’s gentrification.

An on-the-ground look at Berlin’s post-wall art scene, published in Harper’s Bazaar in 2001. It reports from Art Forum Berlin, the galleries Klosterfelde and Neugerriemschneider, and the Kunst-Werke space in Mitte, profiling artists Kirsten Pieroth, Monica Bonvicini, and Elmgreen and Dragset, whose cheap rents and club life Pinchbeck likens to 1960s New York.

Rolling Stone sent Pinchbeck to Burning Man in 2000. The dispatch describes the dust storms that nearly broke the festival, the Microsoft-staffed Church of Mez camp, John Perry Barlow at Spiral Oasis, and Larry Harvey’s grant-giving organization, showing how Silicon Valley money reshaped an event that began as a beach effigy burning.

An essay for The New York Times in 1998. Pinchbeck recounts editing the literary journal Open City with Thomas Beller, from hawking copies on a SoHo street corner to publishing Denis Johnson, Mary Gaitskill, and David Berman, and argues that high rents and media hype have dissolved the conditions that once sustained little magazines.

Esquire, 1997. A first-person account of five weeks of training at the Chelsea Piers Sports Center, where fitness director Erik Stevens and trainers Paul Virtue and Tom Beaumont used stretching, plyometrics, and posture correction to add six inches to Pinchbeck’s vertical leap, enough to touch the rim in Tompkins Square but not to dunk.