New Books In Art

Did you catch that look? The theory of fabulousness is on the move. In his new book, Fabulous: the Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (Yale UP, 2018), madison moore explores some of the sites where fabulousness is highly valued, such as the street, the catwalk, the club (including the line to get in), and the body itself. Our hour-long conversation references many personal experiences that capture the ephemeral quality of fabulousness, which can appear in any place, at any time, through any body. madison also speaks of his participation in and organization of the worlds that his scholarship extends. A running theme of our conversation is that fabulousness is never without risk. As he writes, “You can’t understand fabulousness unless you get that it emerges from trauma, duress, exclusion, exhaustion, and depression, and that in some ways being fabulous is the only thing that can get us out of bed in the morning.” There are, of course, groups of people who actively police fabulousness. But its self-making potentia