A Short Life of Trouble is a good book about a good person. (Full disclosure: I knew Tucker, liked her and had dinner at her place a couple of times.) That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s perfect. Tucker’s reactions to the bad reviews that a good many of her shows received were often of the predictable “they just don’t get it” kind. No, critics like me got her tepidly received 1994 exhibition “ ‘Bad’ Girls”—we just didn’t want to keep it. And later in her career she got a tad— how to say it?—bureaucratesque. At the end of her memoir, Tucker mentions hiring a publicist “to strategize how to announce my forthcoming retirement to the public” (emphasis mine). Finally, perhaps because Tucker’s original manuscript was substantially pruned, by Liza Lou, an artist-writer and a Tucker protégé, the finished result reads a bit writer’s-workshoppy.

Am I carping or simply being truthful? A review of a memoir is as subjective as the memoir itself. What’s important— especially in this case—is the person who wrote it. Marcia Tucker left the art world a whole lot better than she found it. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be many of her kind coming on the scene. In this decade, the art world is much more expensive, much more market driven, much more calibrated to public relations, making it very difficult to be one of those unbeautiful people who, as she once put it, “act first, think later” and help make visible the unfashionable art that will eventually matter most. "Leader of the Pack" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2008 Table of Contents.