About the Book

A portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last 50 years of cultural life, captured through a vivid selection of O'Brien's own writings on music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, the political temperature of America.

Book Synopsis

"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

A portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last 50 years of cultural life, captured through a vivid selection of O'Brien's own writings on music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, the political temperature of America.

Glenn O'Brien collaborated with visual artists, writers, fashion houses, and musicians throughout his almost 50-year career. Intelligence for Dummies gathers Glenn O'Brien's essays, aphorisms and tweets, to 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 aperçu into Patti Smith and Jean Michel Basquiat's New York, and the culture of money that ensued. It also reveals O'Brien's incisive and prescient understanding of America's political culture, and of our current president.

Review Quotes

"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." --Luc Sante, New York Review of Books

"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

About the Author

Glenn O'Brien (1947-2017) was one of the most widely read and influential magazine writer-editors of the last fifty years and was a hall-of-fame copy - writer and creative director whose ads are ingrained in popular culture. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, O'Brien studied at Georgetown University and Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts. After college, he joined Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine, which he helped shape over his 20-year association. He wrote regular columns in publications including Artforum, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Paper, Purple, and Spin, and was widely read on the subjects of art, fashion, and music. Beloved as GQ's "Style Guy", his witty advice column was syndicated in GQ editions around the world. O'Brien's wrote dozens of books, including 2011's best-selling How to Be A Man, published in six countries.