“Between You and Me is written in a clear and entertaining prose style. The author alternates between a masterful academic voice and a conspiratorial, confessional whisper in a manner that is rarely jarring. . . . While Between You and Me tells us little that is new about the relationships between the artists, curators, and critics it discusses, the book displays a startling freshness nonetheless. The book, at times, seems to echo the ‘homophile’ magazines that it examines—at the level of desire, through a shared campy sense of humor, and of course through its historical focus on queer personalities. Those magazines are a great pleasure to peruse; it’s the tremendous sense of a real conversation that gives them this quality, happening between subscribers and contributors miles apart as they forge a community together. Butt’s book also speaks across vast distances—here the less surmountable distance of time—however, and particularly through his retention of the period’s humor, he manages to carry on a conversation that this reader was glad to share.” — James Boaden, CAA Reviews
“[A] lively investigation of the epistemological implications of gossip and rumor. . . .” — Frazer Ward, GLQ
“[A]midst the kiss and tells, the rumours, innuendoes, cat fights, gossip and idle chit-chat, Gavin Butt provides a solid and unique slice of/ through history. In the open and public trials of perception innuendo, gossip and idle chit-chat are fluidly exchanged and are important currencies in the high stakes of the contemporary art world. Name-calling has always been a part of modern queer identity,
but, as Butt demonstrates, it can sometimes enhance one’s social standing and cultural significance.” — John Potvin, Art History
“[A]n important and ambitious self-proclaimed challenge to the ways we do art history in the academy. It does so in a tone that is frequently witty, playful and irreverent, which is to say ‘queer’. A book about the trivial, yet one that takes itself very seriously, presented entirely in parentheses (as if an inconsequential aside), yet claiming to be a weighty engagement with the dominant discourse of art history: in some ways this book is a brilliant and intriguing paradox.” — Satish Padiyar, Oxford Art Journal
“[An] engrossing account of how the entrenched gay art world collided with a conservative art establishment.” — Lewis Whittington, Gay & Lesbian Review
“Butt readily acknowledges that his methodology might give pause, but convinces us that without this pillow talk, the real story behind the making of modern art might never be told.” — Lewis Whittington, GLQ
“Easily accessible to art historians and non-scholars alike, Between You and Me’s performative interpretations of artistic and sexual identities through biographic remembrances and iconographic interrogations of art objects and gallery installations trouble the stability of verbal and visual evidence, critically examining the nature of what we consider to be useful evidence while expanding the term to include innuendo, rumor, and imprecise visual cues. Butt flirts with impropriety here, taking obvious
personal and scholarly pleasure in writing an account of mid-twentieth-century gossip that aggressively queers traditional art historical practice, forcing us to reconsider the ways in which we narrate history.” — Stefanie Snider, CLGH Newsletter
“Gossip, [Butt] notes, is conventionally thought to be slight because it is not serious.… Butt shows how much you can learn about recent American art by looking at the gossip associated with it.” — David Carrier, artUS
“Queers do sing, if only in each other's ears. In his new Queer Studies book Between You and Me, art historian Gavin Butt . . . delves into the rampant gay social scene that accompanied the Pop Art era, in which so many pivotal figures were as gay as periwinkle pasta.” — Roberto Friedman, Bay Area Reporter
"Anyone with a fascination for postwar modern American artists will revel in Butt's astutely original approach to relatively recent art history." — Richard Labonte, Q Syndicate
“Between You and Me is a nimble book—balancing a self-consciousness about what it means to work on the most ephemeral of subjects, what it means to deploy gossip as a critical strategy, and how gossip figures in both the content and the form of art from this period. The result is a portrait of the evolution of new kinds of artistic personas, and a map for producing new methodologies for writing about them.” — Jennifer Doyle, American Quarterly
“Between You and Me is a brilliant read that flirtatiously winks and kisses its way through the New York art world of the postwar period, turning our favorite icons inside out and back in again. It’s all in the gossip. Larry Rivers painted a ‘visual gossip column’ and was described by Frank O’Hara as a ‘demented telephone,’ but it takes a smart flirt (the best kind) like Gavin Butt to see gossip’s methodological promise. Taking gossip into his own mouthy hands, Butt slurs the studios of Rivers, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol with their own reckless talk: kisses turn into smacks, and winks into home runs. (Between you and me, that’s how I like it.)” — Carol Mavor, author of Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden
“Between You and Me is boldly original and beautifully written. Gavin Butt renders a rich (which is to say dishy) description of a queer past that might enable us to imagine a queer futurity. His book will stand as a lasting contribution to queer theory and visual cultural studies and, perhaps more importantly, serve as a political and methodological wake-up call to the discourse of art history.” — José Esteban Muñoz, coeditor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol