by BARBARA POLLACK
After two decades of answering questions for the Royal Family and the White House, the ORACLE has decided to lend her talents to her her true destiny--art. Sitting at the BLAST BAR every Saturday night, the ORACLE sits at a small table with six stacks of cards laid out infront of her, each card holding the answers to different questions about the future of each artists. The ORACLE can read the minds of curators, by merely holding a copy of ART IN AMERICA; she can predict themes of up-coming shows simply by concentrating on the Jacks in her deck. She holds a dangerous amount of knowledge about this town, the next Biennial, art at the crossroads, who went to Singapore and why. Strange shapes come to her at night, unclear and fuzzy, only emerge on the cover of the TIMES a few months later.
The ORACLE knows more about others than she knows about herself, she is our Cassandra--she can speak the truth about the future, but she never believes it. Now uncanny visions have begun to haunt her: scenes from an empty bedroom, flat animals, tiny objects in a dark place, phone calls from the dead, a space that has no name, anwering machines that never take messages, and the voices of town at the crossroads about to explode in a spasm of desire and blood.