Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

The New York of the thirties was very different from Paris: “not so much beauty and tradition as native fantasia emerging from accelerated greed.” Abbott’s book is aptly titled, for she is not so much memorializing the past as simply documenting ten years of the chronic self-destruct quality of American experience, in which even the recent past is