Who Is America? art gallery consultant said "a ton of stuff" was edited out, including her critical remarks

Slate

Fine-art consultant Christy Cones has only one regret about the interview: "I would have never worn that freakin’ Cavalli dress. I would’ve worn my Wolford dress if I’d known it was" for American TV, she says. (Cones was told the interview was for British public television.) Cones says she considers what Sacha Baron Cohen does as being "art." "Let’s face it," she says, "the guy is in the tradition of, oh, let’s go all the way back, Aristophanes and Horace and Petronius and Jonathan Swift and Voltaire and Colbert. We need our comedians and our satirists, even when it’s dark, to hold the mirror up to us as a culture." As for the editing, Cones says, "there were a couple of times...where I would make a critical remark that they didn’t show in the final version. When that happened, I would see a kind of flare of anger in his eyes and I worried that he might be a violent, impulsive person. I guess it was all feigned, but certainly I was like, He might freak out, better not say that. For the sake of art, not for the sake of my own ego—although it would probably appease that too—I wish I had the full footage of that interview, because we went on for like an hour and a half." ALSO: Cones doesn't think she was manipulated into cutting off her pubic hair.