"Americans in Paris" Surveys Artists Who Straddled the Fractured Culture of the Postwar World | The Village Voice, May 2, 2024

NYU’s Grey Art Museum offers a salon-style take on second-generation expats in the Old World’s weary art capital. 

by Daniel Felsenthal

America lays claim to its expatriates by never letting them forget the nation they left. Whether paying Uncle Sam taxes after decades away or speaking incessantly about political strife back home, the expat wears the U.S.A. like scarlet letters on the chest — and simultaneously as a badge of honor. Americans are blustering, predominantly monolingual, and coddled by their nationality. They rarely need to assimilate to new cultures because their country of origin has sculpted so much of the wider world in its own image: A Yankee can escape the 50 states, but not the clutches of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, or, for that matter, the CIA and the web of surveillance it’s spun since the start of the so-called American Century.

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