Interview

Rachel Feinstein is a renaissance woman.Literally. She looks like a musely princess from a 15th-century painting. (A good one.) And she’s a renaissance woman in that she’s a most accomplished artist in both two and three dimensions. She’s also the muse of her famous husband, John Currin, who is also interviewed in this issue. I’ve had such great conversations with Feinstein and Currin together that I originally thought of trying to interview them in their bed—me in the middle with the tape recorder. But with Rachel nine months pregnant, it seemed more prudent to have separate lunches. And this way they got twice as much space in the magazine—which they richly deserve—and I got two nice lunches at Il Buco. I talked to Rachel first because it seemed that she could go into labor at any moment.

GLENN O’BRIEN: I’m hungry.

RACHEL FEINSTEIN: Me too. Actually, being this pregnant, I have a small-stomach thing, so I have to take my time eating.

O’BRIEN: So you eat all day—you graze?

FEINSTEIN: Yes, I graze on little portions.

O’BRIEN: We always seem to wind up talking about beauty.

FEINSTEIN: We were talking about that in Miami. Beauty is something I like a lot in art. We were talking about ideas of the end of the world and how in crises—if there’s a crisis or world war—the things that people save and really care about are the beautiful things.

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

FEINSTEIN: That’s the whole question with the Duchamp urinal. I’m curious to see what people think about that. If the world is in flames, what do you rescue? Do you take the Duchamp urinal or the Jeff Koons glistening-gold Michael Jackson, or some painting?

O’BRIEN: Well, if the provenance of the urinal is lost, if the paperwork is lost, forget about it.

FEINSTEIN: Exactly—and it will be, of course. I have these weird, apocalyptic ideas of what people are going to carry away under their arms, and paintings are the number one thing because they’re easy. You take them off the stretcher, you roll them up, and you take them anywhere. So I think that’s why ultimately painting ends up being the most valuable thing in art, because it’s cash-and-carry.

O’BRIEN: It just gets an inch shorter all around  every time somebody cuts it out of the frame.

FEINSTEIN: It’s so sad. We went to the National Gallery last weekend and saw the Ginevra de’ Benci painting—you know, that amazing da Vinci painting of the woman with the juniper bush behind her head. And it’s so beautiful. And supposedly it was a bigger painting with more of her body and now it’s only this big head. It’s so hard to imagine what it once was—maybe it would have been not as beautiful.

O’BRIEN: Yeah. Maybe Venus de Milo had ugly arms.

FEINSTEIN: It’s like our ideas of Greek sculptures. They used to be all painted, but now they’re all so beautiful because they’re white. They were garish before.

O’BRIEN: Our odd idea of the classical world, the white Washington, D.C., is based on buildings that were originally brightly painted.

FEINSTEIN: I know.

O’BRIEN: That was one of the interesting things about the HBO series Rome. They showed Rome in color—not like in the old Hollywood movies where the buildings looked like un-ruined ruins.

FEINSTEIN: I missed that series.