The initial premise of Gavin Butt’s Between You and Me is that new ways of looking at the New York art world of the 1950s and ’60s can be found by examining the gossip of queer men within that circle. To many the idea that queer men run the art world, while insatiably gossiping with one another, seems to support homophobic constructions of queer identity. I am relieved to say that Butt presents his material in such a way that the artificiality of such stereotypes is fully acknowledged, occasionally celebrated, but mostly subverted. None of the themes of this book are entirely new; Reva Wolf used gossip to investigate the life and work of Andy Warhol over a decade ago, and the way in which sexuality affected the making and reception of the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg has inspired a cavalcade of articles and seminar papers since the entry of queer studies into the academy in the 1990s. Butt’s book, however, looks askance at this earlier material and builds a mature model of queer studies that draws on the pioneering work of the 1990s but adds much more nuanced models of thinking about queer performativity that have...