art essays book

Six Books That Will Change How You Look at Art

These titles expand our understanding of creative work—and affirm that it is fundamental to how we process the world.

In 1923, Pablo Picasso told his peer, the Mexican gallery owner Marius de Zayas, that “art is a lie”—but one that “makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” Artists intuitively engage—in paint, clay, prints, film—with the strangeness of life. Their creations can differ wildly from our expectations and outlook; they frequently inspire emotion by surprising us or, as Picasso believed, by manipulating our perception.

Those inexplicable feelings make many people curious. Viewers are driven to understand who makes art and why, seeking out behind-the-scenes details about well-loved artworks. Memoirs, manifestos, and aesthetic histories offer insights into what can otherwise be unspoken and untranslatable, including the mystery involved in the making of a piece.

The six titles presented below explore different facets of visual art: the materials, the concepts, the people. Together, they affirm that, as Picasso said a century ago, creative work reveals to us what is hidden; it is fundamental to how we process the world.

Color , by Victoria Finl ay

Many accounts of art history begin with how humans first acquired the materials that create colors. In her book, Finlay unearths the background of familiar hues. The results reveal how political a painter’s palette can be. Ochre, the by-product of clay and ferric oxide, brings Finlay to Australia and its Aboriginal people, who have used it for thousands of years in ceremonial practices. Red has a bloody background: Millions of cochineal beetles have been killed to produce the lucrative pigment carmine, and Spain violently invaded Mexico, where it was traditionally extracted. Most macabre of all is the troubling past of brown. Finlay focuses on “mummy brown,” the shade extracted from crushed Egyptian mummies and allegedly used in Romantic artworks such as Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People . Finlay’s investigation adds depth to our interpretation of the history of art: Colors don’t simply flow out of a tube. Beyond their function and appeal, they carry memories—sometimes violent ones.

Read: To understand art, think biology

The Unknown Masterpiece , by Honoré de Balzac (translated by Richard Howard)

Balzac’s novella, which influenced modernists such as Paul Cézanne and Picasso, is about the sacrifices that artists are willing to make for their art, and whether or not universal beauty exists. In 17th-century Paris, the lives of three painters briefly collide: A young Nicolas Poussin visits the studio of a man he admires, François Porbus. Frenhofer, an old and respected acquaintance of Porbus, is also there. Together, they consider what their profession means and contemplate techniques. Frenhofer shares his struggle to create the perfect painting. His goal is to make the art itself disappear—to feel as if “the air is so real you can no longer distinguish it from the air around yourselves.” But when Frenhofer eventually displays his masterpiece, Balzac exposes the gap between a creator’s hopes and an audience’s reception. Most strikingly, the scene challenges the assumptions that all art should be made for public consumption and that a work is ever finished. An artist may work their entire life just to accept that perfection is an illusion.

The Hearing Trumpet , by Leonora Carrington

Carrington, a significant figure of the 1930s surrealist-art movement in Mexico, explored dreamlike landscapes, uncanny creatures, and bizarre encounters in her paintings, pushing against the “reign of logic” that the French writer André Breton criticized in his influential 1924 Surrealist Manifesto . In her novel, events are similarly illogical—a murder, the legacy of a medieval abbess, and various occult quests add up to a self-affirming exploration of madness and fragile sanity. Carrington’s protagonist, Marian Leatherby, a 92-year-old foreigner living in Mexico, is unexpectedly gifted an ear trumpet by her good friend Carmella. While using the accessory, she overhears that her family wants to send her away to a private institution for seniors; she’s moved to this unfamiliar, cultish space and must adapt to all-new daily rituals. Meanwhile, the hearing trumpet becomes an extension of Leatherby’s intuition, leading her into a fantastical world of myths and magic. The novel is especially notable for offering its audience a way to reappraise Carrington’s other works. As in her canvases, nothing makes sense at first, until a closer inspection shows how irrationality—in all kinds of creative work—is an expression of boundless possibility.

Read: A new way to see art

Ninth Street Women , by Mary Gabriel

Through riveting and braided profiles of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Gabriel illustrates in this groundbreaking group biography how New York City supplanted Paris as the modern art capital of the world in the 1940s and ’50s. In doing so, Gabriel canonizes the women of abstract expressionism, one of the most significant visual movements of mid-century America. Its (mostly male) practitioners came from a generation that was marked by the Great Depression and war, and the style they chose was a form of resistance and rebirth. For “AbEx” women, painting was additionally about living life differently while rejecting misogynistic ideals and pressures. Readers will empathize with their struggle to exist as talented artists, especially when their abusive relationships restrained their full creative potential. Gabriel’s portrait of a few blocks around Washington Square Park, a “critically important stretch of pavement,” recontextualizes these women’s formidable vision and reaffirms that their legacy remains central to contemporary art.

Art Is Life , by Jerry Saltz

Art literally changed Saltz’s life: Once a self-described “failed artist” turned truck driver, he made his passion into a career as an influential critic at The Village Voice and New York Magazine . The author shares that ardor with his readers through a selection of wide-ranging writing from the past 20 years. He looks at the various crises and New York City’s art scene—the aftermath of 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the coronavirus pandemic—and depicts an ebullient yet fragile world undergoing perpetual reinvention. He writes formidable portraits of people such as Beauford Delaney and describes the jaw-dropping splendor of Paleolithic cave paintings in Niaux, France. He worships artwork while denouncing the excesses of its business, taking pleasure in ridiculing the frequently obscene industry’s theatrical auctions and overinflated cycle of openings, biennials, and fairs. But animating this lucrative, commercial global machine, Saltz underscores, is the pricelessness of the artist’s vision—without which life would be quite dull.

Read: Does ‘American art’ exist anymore?

1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows , by Ai Wei wei (translated by Allan H. Barr)

Ai’s long-awaited memoir is a love letter to his poet father, Ai Qing, and his son, Ai Lao, as well as a guide to what motivates protest art. Ai revisits, in words and personal illustrations, his alienating childhood, his coming-of-age as a citizen-artist, and his eventual decision to flee China. He recounts how his father, once courted by Communist cadres (and by Mao personally), was disgraced, and how his repudiation by the authorities extended to his entire family: Ai spent significant time in harsh labor camps and reeducation facilities during the Cultural Revolution. From there, the book largely follows the course of China’s contemporary history, which underscores the indivisibility of Ai’s politics and his art. The narrative is briefly interrupted by his stay in the United States in the 1980s, where he lived in precarious conditions doing odd jobs, including sketching people’s portraits in the streets of New York City, before returning to China shortly after the Tiananmen massacre. Then Ai’s dissidence against state-sanctioned abuse ignited more harassment and detention; he now lives in exile with his family. Ai’s pioneering use of blogging and viral reach demonstrate new ways for art to exist in the digital age. His book illustrates the power of shocking, satirical, and insolent work as an instrument to resist oppression and authoritarianism.

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Nine Books That Came to Fame Slowly

University of Iowa Press

Art Essays is a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by contemporary novelists. This vibrant and diverse selection includes essays by award-winning writers such as Zadie Smith, Chris Kraus, Teju Cole, Orhan Pamuk, and Jhumpa Lahiri. From the art of Sonia Delaunay to contemporary photography, from the docks of Malaysia to Leonora Carrington’s home in Mexico City, and from reflections on modern Black British paintings to meditations on the female gaze, these essays bring together blazing insights to the visual world, with personal, intimate reflections. With an introduction by literary critic and editor Alexandra Kingston-Reese, Art Essays is an enthralling vision of a new wave of literary essays shaping contemporary culture.

“As joyous as it is intelligent,  Art Essays  proves once and for all that the best essays enchant us with the same splendor and humor and passion as the best novels or the most striking paintings.”—Merve Emre, University of Oxford

“This brilliantly stimulating book canonizes the art essay as the form of the moment and shows what it makes possible. Boldly claiming that the novel is now a satellite orbiting the essay, it gathers essays by exciting contemporary novelists on art and watches the critical, creative, and formal sparks fly.”—Kathryn Murphy, University of Oxford 

Chloe Aridjis Tash Aw Claire-Louise Bennett Teju Cole Geoff Dyer Sheila Heti Katie Kitamura Chris Kraus Jhumpa Lahiri Ben Lerner Orhan Pamuk Ali Smith Zadie Smith Heidi Sopinka Hanya Yanagihara

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Nonfiction Books » Art » Photography

Rachel cohen on writing about art.

Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade by Rachel Cohen

Good writing about visual experience allows us to see things we otherwise wouldn't, says Rachel Cohen . The author picks some of her own favourite books about art.

Interview by Sophie Roell , Editor

The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer

Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets by J. D. McClatchy

Still Life With A Bridle by Zbigniew Herbert

Tiepolo Pink by Roberto Calasso

Dreaming by the Book by Elaine Scarry

1 The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer

2 poets on painters: essays on the art of painting by twentieth-century poets by j. d. mcclatchy, 3 still life with a bridle by zbigniew herbert, 4 tiepolo pink by roberto calasso, 5 dreaming by the book by elaine scarry.

W hat role does writing about art play, in an age when it’s relatively easy to see an image directly – whether it’s via the Internet or going to a museum?

Let’s talk about the books you’ve chosen, starting with Geoff Dyer’s book about photography , The Ongoing Moment .

Yes, Geoff Dyer is a devotee of John Berger , who is another person who I could definitely have included. I chose mostly to bring together books that I’m currently engaged with, in trying to write about visual experience myself for the notebook I keep online. One of the things that’s really striking about Geoff’s book — and all of these books — is that “ways of seeing,” in Berger’s phrase, are so idiosyncratic. Different individuals see so particularly and part of the joy of reading a book like this is getting to encounter his way of seeing. He sees things in these photographs that I would never have noticed, and his way of assembling them allows you to have a new vision of these images.

Part of what I love in the book is that it’s beautifully structured, it’s built around certain ideas or content that recurs through different photographs. So there’s a long loop on the hat, there’s another one on benches, there’s ones on bodies. As you read through them, you have this sense of the way photographers themselves feel images in their mind. They see an earlier photographer’s picture of a hat, and then that becomes part of their own understanding, so that when they photograph hats they’re always alluding to the earlier images. This is maybe a property peculiar to photography — the incredible liquidity with which this referentiality happens —  and Geoff, who also loves jazz, has a very fine eye and ear for this kind of cross-referencing that the artists themselves are doing. I think that really helps you to see photography in a different way and to experience these pictures as the photographers experienced them. You feel as if you’re entering into the way that photographers themselves are working and thinking.

Is it Geoff’s interpretation of the way they’re working and thinking or are the photographers consciously thinking that way?

You can’t know that. But the images are very striking in their resemblances, you feel their connectedness. It doesn’t have to be a conscious reference, or an acknowledged one, in order for it to be valuable for a viewer. That’s a thing about visual work in general, that’s like writing. In writing, you’re always learning from other writers, you’re always redoing things that other writers have done. So are painters and photographers. Even if it’s far back in the mind of the practitioner, it can still be very interesting for a viewer to see. We assume in painting that painters are conscious of the whole history of art and that they will have seen many of the great works of art and will have thought about them. The same is true in photography. I know that photographers are avid consumers of photographs, but I just hadn’t thought about it in quite the way that Geoff does.

So would you say that he is writing about photography in a very unusual way?

Yes, it’s a very brilliant and unusual way of entering this material. People tend to isolate photographers and write monographs about one at a time. If they’re writing about groups of photographers, they tend to write about them like a group that all existed together at the same chronological moment, and not to trace these kinds of lineages that descend over time and loop around.

I have a soft spot for Geoff Dyer because when his first novel, The Colour of Memory, came out he used one of my brother’s paintings on the front cover. This is before he was famous, so now when I see how well he’s doing, I feel pleased.

Your next choice is a collection of essays by famous poets, including Ted Hughes and W.B. Yeats, called Poets on Painters . Tell me a bit more what it’s about.

This is a wonderful anthology edited by J.D. McClatchy. It brings together roughly a century of Anglo-American poets writing about painting. It starts with Yeats and goes all the way up through Richard Howard and John Ashbery. It has a very quirky sensibility. McClatchy says that he wanted to bring together an Anglo-American tradition of poets writing about painting. It’s sort of hard to say what the tradition might be, and he lets the different pieces speak for themselves. He says they all have an interest in style and that’s definitely true. You can really feel the individual voices of the poets in the things they’ve chosen to talk about and in the way they’ve chosen to talk about them.

“What there is to see in most images changes a lot over time”

I love the book for its surprises, it’s like a little treasure chest. Every time I go back to it, I find some essay that I didn’t pay attention to before that’s somehow revelatory, or just gets my interest going, my attention sharply drawn in one direction or another. This is actually a book that a student of mine gave me, a lovely writer calling Corinne Manning and that’s also nice. I teach writing about the arts , but this wasn’t a book I knew, until this student gave it to me. One of my favourite pieces in it is a piece by Frank O’Hara about Jackson Pollock. That’s an essay I’ve quoted in my own work and returned to repeatedly. It really manages — through both its poet’s sensibility and the proximity of O’Hara to Pollock, he really knew Pollock, and really understood what Pollock’s project was — to bring out a lot of the different dimensions in Pollock’s work that are somewhat subsumed in his current, gigantic status. It’s easy just to be told he’s great painter and not really think about what his project was. For its specificity I really appreciate that essay and many of the essays in that collection.

And the idea is that a poet has a different approach than an art historian?

Your next book is Still Life with a Bridle , the title of a 17th century Dutch painting, and indeed the book, by Zbigniew Herbert, is all about 17th century Dutch painters…

Zbigniew Herbert is a great Polish poet and essayist of the 20th century. I love a lot of his work, and this essay collection is an old favourite. It’s one I’ve read many times and taught many times. He has a few qualities that are unusual in trying to bring a reader into contact with visual material. He doesn’t often describe, in detail, the paintings, although sometimes he does. The pictures are not reproduced in the book, so you don’t see them. But he comes at it through a combination of a wonderful documentation of what material life was like in the 17th century — what people sat on, what they ate, what their rooms were like, what the goods were that were traded and valued — and a propensity to make a strange myth out of what’s known of the biographical details of the lives of the individual painters. So you feel as if you’ve been told fairy tales, at the same time that you feel immersed in the economic history of the moment. That combination is wonderfully evocative for what the paintings themselves are like, although he’s relying on you to carry some images that you may have seen yourself and bring those to bear on the inquiry.

I think it’s really a very unusual and beautiful book. When I’ve taught it to students they’ve been very excited about the way that you think you’re learning about one thing and gradually a picture is emerging in the back of your mind about something else. His control of the different levels of your engagement with the material is really amazing.

So what do you think he’s trying to do in the book?

Let’s go on to your next choice, about the Venetian Rococco painter, Giambattista Tiepolo. It’s called Tiepolo Pink and it’s by Roberto Calasso.

Roberto Calasso is one of the few writers working today where I just read everything he writes. If he writes something, I read it. I think he’s extraordinary.

He is an Italian and his books are translated into English, is that right?

Yes, I read them in English. I think they’re quite well translated. Calasso is somebody with a passion for large mythological structures, like the whole of Greek mythology , the whole of the Vedas . He’s enormously classically educated and has a wonderful book on Kafka also, that treats Kafka’s stories as a kind of inter-connected set of myths. So I was really curious to see what he would do with a painter. It didn’t seem obvious to me that he would be able to bring the same kind of structures to bear on the work of a painter, and I hadn’t paid much attention to Tiepolo until I read this book. But when I did read it I was astonished to see how much of Tiepolo I had missed and also to see how well Calasso’s particular way of approaching material worked with this painter. The book is a structured in a kind of musical scherzo structure —  an A-B-A form — so there’s a middle section that’s got a different melody from the outer sections. That allows you to move from light to dark to light, which is a wonderful metaphor for Tiepolo’s work which is all about light. He looks at groups of pictures, and the way Tiepolo keeps using the same figures in the same kinds of poses and the same props as if he were portraying a kind of travelling company of players. That is really effective, it really allows you to see what Tiepolo was after. So it’s a case of where the particular way of seeing of the writer really is revelatory of what the painter is doing. I went to the Met not long ago to look at Tiepolo under the influence of Calasso and was kind of uplifted by how much better I felt I was seeing. That’s maybe the best measure of whether a book about visual experience is working, whether it returns you to the world with clearer eyes for the particular subject.

Yes, he’s not one of the most well-known of the Italian painters…

Your last choice is a little bit different from the other books you selected. Tell me about Dreaming by the Book , by Elaine Scarry.

This is a book I just read and was very struck by. I wanted to include it because it seemed like an interesting companion to the other books. Elaine Scarry is not writing about painting or photography, she’s writing about novels or poetry in which there is a strong visual experience for the reader. When you’re reading Homer or Wordsworth or Thomas Hardy you have a sharp visual image in your mind. She’s writing, in a way very technically, about what techniques she thinks writers are using to have this evocative effect.  She begins with an interesting paradox. If you’re told, “Imagine the face of a friend,” it’s very hard to call up an image. Your mind doesn’t really do that very readily. But if you’re reading a description of someone’s face, you can get it in your mind quite clearly. The question is, what’s happening in the visual imagination that allows for that ease, that facility of calling up images? She thinks that it actually helps to be instructed, that if you’re told how to look, then your mind enters into a different space and you can call up these images. So she’s looking at the kinds of instruction the great writers use.

“The best measure of whether a book about visual experience is working is whether it returns you to the world with clearer eyes.”

I think she’s quite right, about these kinds of techniques: for example, the way that butterflies and birds and other things allow you to imagine flight or movement through the air. So I was very interested in that. For me, it was also useful because when you’re writing about a painting or photograph there’s always a question, are you trying to get the reader to see the thing? Or are you doing something different? I think both things are valuable. For a writer who is interested in evoking visual material, this is a wonderful book to look at, because it’s so technically clear.

I always read Amazon.com reader reviews because it gives me a good sense of what a range of people think about a book. One such reviewer said about this book, “This book has changed how I read books. Her revelations about technique cannot be undone once learned.” It’s a pretty important book, then?

Yes, it does seem to me it’s very persuasive and unusual. It’s not like anything I’ve ever read before. As a writer, I sometimes did have the feeling that I imagine a dancer might have reading an anatomy book, that you don’t necessarily want the bones laid bare in that way, to know what’s happening in this thing you’re using in this interpretive way. But, at the same time, I thought it was essential reading for someone trying to understand how writers create visual experience.

Yes and that’s useful for all writers  — in the end we all want to create vivid images in readers’ minds…

That’s right, and that’s also why it’s interesting to read books about visual work, even if that’s not your main interest, or even if you think “Well I don’t write about photographs or paintings.” It’s a very concentrated study of how you move around in the world with your eyes, which is surely what a lot of writers are trying to do. It sharpens and it sensitizes things. Going back to your first observation, we live in an ever more visual culture, we see so many more images every minute then people did 20 or 50 years ago. Somehow, interpretation of visual experience has become one of the primary jobs of the writer. Maybe it has always been, but it certainly is now.

April 9, 2014

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Rachel Cohen

Rachel Cohen has written essays for the New Yorker,  the Guardian , the London Review of Books  and the New York Times , amongst others. Her essays have been anthologized in Best American Essays and in the Pushcart Prize Anthology .  Her first book,  A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists,  won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and was named a notable book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and by Maureen Corrigan on National Public Radio.  She is a member of the regular faculty of the creative nonfiction program at Sarah Lawrence College. Her new book is  Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade.  She keeps a notebook on looking at art online here .

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By Jillian Billard

May 11, 2018

I don't know about you, but when it gets warm out, the first thing I want to do is sit outside and read. With spring finally in full swing, we're getting ready for those lazy-in-the-park days with a list of books to keep us inspired while we bask in the sun. Here are ten books written by artists about art that are sure to get your creative juices flowing.

HOW TO SEE: LOOKING, TALKING, AND THINKING ABOUT ART BY DAVID SALLE

David Salle's book How To See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art is a look at art theory and criticism from the artist's perspective. Rather than projecting meaning and philosophy onto a work, as contemporary critics are often wont to do, Salle offers an alternative way of looking at a work that focuses primarily on aesthetic choices. Writes acclaimed author Salman Rushdie, "If John Berger's Ways of Seeing is a classic of art criticism, looking at the 'what' of art, then David Salle's How to See is the artist's reply, a brilliant series of reflections on how artists think when they make their work. The 'how' of art has perhaps never been better explored." Salle is interested in the way that art works, down to its fundamental core. Speaking about the works of his contemporaries and friends, Salle offers an intimate, humorous, and readable approach to art criticism, teaching us how to open our minds and see with the artist's eye.

PAUL CHAN SELECTED WRITINGS 2000-2014

Hong Kong-born, Nebraska-raised visual artist Paul Chan is known for wrestling with dualities and deriving influence from a diverse array of voices, many of which are aesthetically and dialectically at odds. Though he is widely regarded as a video artist, Chan's relationship to language has always been an integral part of his practice. In 2010, Chan founded Badlands Unlimited , a publishing company that has put out a number of titles ranging from art criticism to poetry to artist's books to erotic fiction. In this selection of critical essays, the artist muses on both the joys and frustrations of the inherent paradoxes of modern and contemporary art, philosophical thought, and language. Drawing reference to a varied scope of artists and thinkers, from Chris Marker and Henry Darger to Marquis de Sade and Theodor Adorno, Chan reflects on the literary motivations and inspirations for his own work. It, like the variety of influences he draws from, is at once a serious and delightfully humorous read.

INTO WORDS: THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF CARROLL DUNHAM

Speaking of titles published by Badlands Unlimited, The Selected Writings of Carroll Dunham is a must-read for anyone interested in a look at contemporary art history and culture from an artist's perspective. You've probably seen Dunham 's cartoonish paintings of nudes in colorful landscapes that blend abstraction with figuration, but did you know he's also a really great writer? Featuring intimate interviews with artists such as Peter Saul and in-depth musings on artists ranging from Kara Walker, Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns, Dunham offers an alternative art history of the past 100 years with equal parts wit and a keen, discerning eye. The book features an introduction from the Chief Curator of the Whitney Museum, Scott Rothkopf, and a publisher's foreward from Paul Chan.

IMAGING DESIRE BY MARY KELLY

Imaging Desire is a selection of critical writings from conceptual artist Mary Kelly from 1976 to 1995. In these essays, Kelly poses vital questions about the practice of making and talking about art, and argues for an art criticism that stems from psychoanalysis, feminism, and semiotics. For over twenty years, Mary Kelly attempted to push political and sexual boundaries with her transgressive writings and large-scale narrative installations. This collection of texts illuminates the intersection between her thoughts and visual renderings. As the title suggests, Kelly is interested in discovering the relationship between image and desire, and attempts to reframe the way we think about and look at art. Beyond the scope of feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Kelly's writings are vital in discussing theoretical elements of art today.

THE COMPLETE STORIES OF LEONO RA CARRINGTON

If you're a fan of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), then you are going to love. this. book. Famed for her wildly imaginative paintings that are at once as dark as a Hieronymous Bosch and lighthearted as a children's book illustration, Leonora Carrington has illustrated the deep recesses of her mind with a deft hand. Now, for the first time ever , all of the witty and macabre fictional written fantasies of this phenomenal thinker are compiled in one place. (Did you even know she wrote fiction? I sure didn't!) Satirical, hilarious, achingly beautiful and surreal, these stories offer a new perspective into the fantastical psyche of this artist. Of the book, Sarah Resnick of Bomb Magazine writes “the British-born Carrington, who in her youth moved to Paris and befriended the Surrealists, is perhaps better known as a painter of dreamlike tableaus in which wild-maned, wispy androgynes consort with half-human beasts and spindly plant life...yet prose makes available to Carrington a wry deadpan that painting does not—these stories are funny.” At once tender and grotesque, these stories are just an absolute delight.

In her book Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl asks "what is the function of art in the era of digital globalization?" In a world so fraught with environmental destruction, growing inequality, overarching digital technology and surveillance, and inherently capitalist-driven art market where many major museums are funded by corporations such as arms manufacturers, how do we continue to make and appreciate art? Don't worry though, as depressing as that all sounded, Steyerl's exposure of the paradoxes of the art world in the midst of globalization is ultimately enlightening. (I mean, she still makes art). For anyone making art in this day and age, Steyerl's work is an essential read.

Ok, so Yvonne lays out a pretty clear and succinct descriptor that will likely discern whether or not this book is for you, so I'm just going to let her do the talking. "If you're interested in Plato," writes the artist, "you're reading the wrong book. If you're interested in difficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics, cultural history, and the reasons that a club sandwich and other meals––including breakfast––have remained in the memory of the present writer, keep reading." In this memoir, the dancer, choreographer and filmmaker offers an intimate look at her personal journey with art. Filled with excerpts from her diary, letters, program notes, and snapshots, Rainer deftly illustrates the path of a woman artist in postwar America; tracing her early life as an orphan to her flourishing in San Francisco and Berkeley and her eventual settling in New York City, where she lived and worked alongside artists Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham , Robert Rauschenberg and Yoko Ono and co-founded the iconic Judson Dance Theater in 1962. This book is not concerned with art theory and philosophy, but rather in understanding the trials, travails, and ecstatic moments of living as an artist.

WHERE ART BELONGS BY CHRIS KRAUS

In her book Where Art Belongs , writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus talks about the use of time as material for art making. Kraus is most known for her musings on the life of the artist, namely what it means to be a creator and thinker and a social being in the world simultaneously.  She argues that “the art world is interesting only insofar as it reflects the larger world outside it.” She speaks about the often doomed but nonetheless valiant efforts of small DIY art communities and makes the case that these collectives are what have kept art and creativity alive since the infiltration of a disembodied digital lexicon. Writes scholar McKenzie Wark, "in this book we get post-post-punk angelinos, sex worker art works, (and) a tribute to an artist who sailed away off the edge of the world..so if any of those things are of interest, buy this book." It's certainly an inspiring read that offers hope for the contemporary art world, despite its many faults.

FUCK SETH PRICE BY SETH PRICE

Funny title aside, contemporary artist Seth Price's Fuck Seth Price is a provocative short read about what it means to be an artist in today's social, political, and digital climate. In the book, which teeters between fiction, essay and memoir, Price chronicles an unnamed fictional protagonist as he moves throughout the confusing contemporary world and muses on a variety of modalities of visual art, from sculpture to architecture to literature to film. Merging high and low-brow references, Price reckons with the overstimulation of our contemporary mindset and delves into a rabbit hole of cultural-theory speculation in a book that is at once comical, revelatory, and completely confounding.

THE ARTIST PROJECT: WHAT ARTISTS SEE WHEN THEY LOOK AT ART

Phaidon's The Artist Project is an exciting compilation of commentaries from 120 of today's most influential artists on the works that inspire them. In this selection of interviews, featuring artists from Vito Acconci to Shahzia Sikander , artists discuss works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that spark their imagination and lend to their creative process, offering readers a unique look at art history through the artist's perspective.

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• Art Essays: A Collection

In this Book

• Alexandra Kingston-Reese
• Published by: University of Iowa Press
• Series: New American Canon
• View Citation

Contributors: Chloe Aridjis, Tash Aw, Claire-Louise Bennett, Teju Cole, Geoff Dyer, Sheila Heti, Katie Kitamura, Chris Kraus, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ben Lerner, Orhan Pamuk, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Heidi Sopinka, Hanya Yanagihara

Table of Contents

• Title, Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Art Essay
• Thematic Guide to Approaching the Essays
• A Leonora Carrington A to Z
• Chloe Aridjis
• You Need to Look Away: Visions of Contemporary Malaysia
• How Paint and Perception Collide in the Work of Late Surrealist Dorothea Tanning
• Claire-Louise Bennett
• There's Less to Portraits Than Meets the Eye, and More
• Now We Can See
• Should Artists Shop or Stop Shopping?
• Sheila Heti
• A Walk around the Neighborhood
• Chris Kraus
• The Space between the Pictures
• Jhumpa Lahiri
• pp. 104-115
• Damage Control
• pp. 116-129
• When Orhan Pamuk Met Anselm Kiefer
• Orhan Pamuk
• pp. 130-135
• We Must Not Be Isolated
• pp. 136-146
• Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's Imaginary Portraits
• Zadie Smith
• pp. 147-160
• Hey, Necromancer!
• Heidi Sopinka
• pp. 161-167
• The Burning House
• Hanya Yanagihara
• pp. 168-178
• Permissions
• pp. 179-182

Additional Information

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Beyond the Mainstream: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Art

Abstract:  This selection of essays by a prominent art historian, critic and curator of modern art examines the art and artists of the twentieth century who have operated outside the established art world. In a lucid and accessible style, Peter Selz explores modern art as it is reflected, and has had an impact on, the tremendous transformations of politics and culture, both in the United States and in Europe. An authoritative overview of a neglected phenomenon, his essays explore the complex relationship between art at the periphery and art at the putative center, and how marginal art has affected that of the mainstream. Author:  Peter Selz Publication date:  January 28, 1998 Publication type:  Book

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Our Writers Pick 20 Books About Art and the Art World to Keep You Reading Well Into the New Year

Our favorite biographies, memoirs, essay collections, and more.

One of the best parts of a holiday vacation is finally getting to curl up with a good book (perhaps that one that’s been waiting patiently on your nightstand for months!).

Below, we’ve selected 20 novels, memoirs, biographies and other books all themed around art or the art world. Happy reading!

1. Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and his Art by Daniel Oppenheimer (2021)

From From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer. Courtesy University of Texas Press.

The late art critic and iconoclast Dave Hickey rose to fame with his cult classic book from 1993  The Invisible Dragon . “Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege,” he famously wrote. His writings are a contentious takedown of the art establishment and they encourage us to rethink out relationship to beauty. David Oppenheimer’s new book traces the history of this unique mind and his impact on art and writing.

Find it at: University of Texas Press .

—Kate Brown

2. The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America by Catherine Prendergast (2021)

The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America by Catherine Prendergast. Courtesy of Penguin Random House.

In this Gilded Age tale of a bohemian fairy tale gone wrong, Catherine Predergast delves into the history of the Carmel-by-the-Sea artist colony on California’s Monterey Peninsula—and how a tumultuous love triangle turned deadly. It stars a talented female poet, Nora May French, who has been unfairly forgotten in U.S. literary history. 

Find it at: Penguin Random House

—Sarah Cascone

3. My New Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh (2021)

Ottessa Moshfegh, My New Novel  and Issy Wood, The down payment (New York: Picture Books | Gagosian, 2021)  

Although it never directly targets the art world, Moshfegh’s standalone story nevertheless implicates some of its most exhausting characters by mercilessly satirizing the creative process (or what passes for it, at least) of a man with more resources than talent, vision, or commitment. But the best contemporary-art connection lives outside the pages; as the inaugural entry in Gagosian’s new “Picture Books” series, which pairs celebrated authors with celebrated artists, every copy of My New Novel comes with a limited-edition poster of a painting made by Issy Wood that was made in response to Moshfegh’s story. 

Find it at: The  Gagos ian Shop.

— Tim Schneider

4. The Ultimate Art Museum by Ferren Gipson (2021) 

The Ultimate Art Museum by Ferren Gipson (2021). Photo courtesy of Phaidon.

Ferren Gipson’s fascinating book offers a curated collection of global art in the form of an imaginary museum for children ages eight to 14. Gipson is a museum tour guide, walking the reader through 40,000 years of art, ranging from prehistoric caves to contemporary paintings across three wings, 18 galleries, and 129 rooms. There are also interactive elements such as “detective” boxes and fold out-maps. 

“I think it’s good for people of any age to share their thoughts and opinions on art, and to feel encouraged that there are no wrong or bad opinions,” Gipson told Artnet News. “There are so many ways to approach an artwork, from how it makes you feel, to the symbolism within the piece, and beyond. I think one of the most important things to do is to make sure people know their opinions are welcome and valid.” 

Find it at:  Phaidon

—Eileen Kinsella

5. Walking Through Water in a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller (1990)

Cookie Mueller, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, new edition: Collected Stories (1990). (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents).

Cookie Mueller, a member of John Waters’s legion of weirdos known as the “Dreamlanders,”  writes prolifically about her life as an outsider, scoundrel, druggie, and glamour hound throughout 40 years of hard-lived life. Mueller’s prose might trick you into thinking you’re reading simple drinking stories, but really she’s presenting ideas about mortality, loss, joie de vivre, and the how the hippie generation permanently changed American culture. The book is one of the most popular books published by Semiotext(e), the art book publisher founded by Sylvère Lotringer, who died earlier this year. Best enjoyed with a hard drink in a dimly lit dive bar. 

Find it at:  Semiotext(e) , Mast Books

—Annie Armstrong

6. The Lost Notebook of Édouard Manet: A Novel by Maureen Gibbon (2021)

The Lost Notebook of Édouard Manet: A Novel by Maureen Gibbon. Courtesy of Norton.

This work of historical fiction transports the viewer to 19th-century Paris, where Édouard Manet, ravaged by syphilis, manages to paint his final masterpiece, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere . Author Maureen Gibbon explores the artist’s inspirations in his final years, including Manet’s mysterious muse, Suzon.

Find it at: W.W. Norton

7.  1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir   by Ai Weiwei (2021)

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei. Photo Courtesy Penguin Random House

This highly anticipated memoir by one of the world’s most famous Chinese artists is more than just a personal tale, but a story that mirrors the evolution of China from over the past century. It’s told through the experiences of three generations of Ai’s family: the artist’s father, Ai Qing, a famous poet, Ai Weiwei himself, and his son Lao. This English version of the book offers Western audiences a glimpse into the life and trauma that was endured by generations in the country. 

Find it at: Bookshop.org ,  Penguin Random House  

—Vivienne Chow

8. Dark Things I Adore by Katie Lattari (2021)

Dark Things I Adore by Katie Lattari. Courtesy of Source Books.

This suspenseful novel starts out at an art school in 2018, with a talented young student setting up a studio visit in Maine with her mentor, a professor who didn’t quite make good on his early artistic promise but still commands a certain amount of respect. The narrative is soon complicated by flashbacks to the events of 30 years earlier at a Maine artist colony and a slowly unraveling mystery takes a dark turn thanks to one of the character’s long-simmering desire for revenge. 

Find it at:   Sourcebooks

—Sarah Cascone 

9. Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern by Charles Dellheim (2021)

Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern by Charles Dellheim. Courtesy of Brandeis University Press.

As restitution cases related to artworks looted or sold under duress to Nazis in the 1930s and ‘40s continue to make their way through the courts, Charles Dellheim investigates the unanswered question of how so many Jews came to own such important works of art in the first place, despite being an outsider group. 

Find it at:   Brandeis University Press

10. The Art Fair Story: A Rollercoaster Ride by Melanie Gerlis (2021)

Melanie Gerlis, The  Art Fair Story (2021).

Seasoned art market reporter and  Financial Times  columnist Melanie Gerlis has done a deep dive into the art fair, the trade shows that have been going on for half a century and are now part of the fabric of the art industry. In a scintillating read, Gerlis charts the rise of these platforms from their postwar origins to the globalized mega-events they have become today—and raises important questions about their uncertain future in a transformed world. 

Find it at: Lund Humphries

— Naomi Rea

11. Dark Mirrors by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (2021)

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s Dark Mirrors (2021). Courtesy of MACK.

Wolukau-Wanambwa covers a great deal of ground in the 16 contemplative essays of Dark Mirrors , touching on the practices of image-makers like Deana Lawson, Arthur Jafa, Rosalind Fox Solomon, and Paul Pfeiffer along the way. If there’s anything that unites them all it’s an interest in the shifting ways images shape contemporary dialectics—especially around race—and how artists observe, probe, and unpack that process. 

Find it at: MACK Books

— Taylor Dafoe

12. Creatives on Creativity by Steve Brouwers (2021)

Creatives on Creativity by Steve Brouwers. Courtesy of ACC Art Books.

Steve Brouwers, a Belgian creative director, presents a series of interviews with 44 successful makers of all stripes—including Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert, artist Ryan Gander, and illustrator Maira Kalman—sharing their thoughts on the creative process and their inspirations, fears, and failures. 

Find it at: ACC Art Books 

13. Still Life by Sarah Winman, (2021)

Image courtesy Putnam Publishers.

This art-centric piece of historical fiction spans four decades, kicking off in Tuscany in 1944 as Allied troops are advancing. Ulysses Temper is a young English solider who accidentally meets Evelyn Skinner, an older art historian who is in the country to try to salvage an important painting. Their initial spark of connection touches off a course of events that shapes Ulysses’s life for the next 40 years, including an unexpected inheritance that prompts his return to the hills of Tuscany. Winman has garnered much-deserved praise for her sweeping poetic prose in a rich narrative that weaves together love, war, art, the ghost of E.M. Forster, and an epic flood. 

Find it at:  Penguin Random House

— Eileen Kinsella

14. Luisa Roldán by Catherine Hall-van den Elsen (2021)

Catherine Hall-van den Elsen, Luisa Roldán . Courtesy of Getty Books.

The first book in the new series “Illuminating Women Artists” is dedicated to the Spanish Baroque artist Luisa Roldán (1652–1706), known as La Roldana. (A second, about Artsemisia Gentileschi, is due out in February.) In addition to highlighting her considerable skill in sculpting polychrome wood and terracotta sculptures, Catherine Hall-van den Elsen delves into 17th-century Spanish society, painting a picture of what life would have been like for a woman of the era, and the challenges faced by women artists in particular.   

Find it at: The Getty Shop

15. Writings on Art 2006–2021 by Robert Storr (2021)

Writings on Art 2006-2021 by Robert Storr. Courtesy HENI Publishing.

This new compilation of writing, published last month, pulls together 51 of Storr’s most captivating articles, essays, and other texts from the past 15 years. The esteemed critic writes passionately and intelligently about 45 international artists, including El  Anatsui, Francesco Clemente, and David Hammons—sometimes in texts published in English for the first time. The book is the follow-up to Storr’s  essential volume one, titled  Writings on Art 1980-2005 , which was also edited by Francesca Pietropaolo. 

Find it at: HENI Publishing . 

— Kate Brown

16. Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts by Jed Perl (2022) 

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts  by Jed Perl (2022), Courtesy of Penguin Random House.

This forthcoming book is written by former  New Republic  art critic  Jed Perl , who is the author of eight books, including a two-volume biography of Alexander Calder. Perl’s new tome tackles, in the words of Guillaume Apollinaire, a “long quarrel between tradition and invention.” Analyzing the work and lives of creative geniuses in a variety of disciples — from Mozart and Michelangelo to Picasso and Aretha Franklin — Perl argues that authority and freedom are the “lifeblood of the arts.”

— Katya Kazakina

17. Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev (2021)

Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev. Courtesy of Penguin Random House.

Believe it or not, this is the first major biography of the renowned Surrealist René Magritte. Author Alex Danchev argues that the Belgian artist is one of the most important image makers of the 20th century, having influenced such disparate figures as Jasper Johns and Beyoncé. Beyond illuminating lesser-known details of the artist’s life and career, the book includes 50 color illustrations as well as more than 160 black and white images, including legendary works as The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe)  and Man in a Bowler Hat . 

18. How to See: Looking, Talking and Thinking About Art by David Salle  (2016) 

David Salle’s How to See (2016). Courtesy of W.W. Norton.

David Salle’s criticism reads like a conversation with an artist, because, well, it basically is. Each essay in the painter’s first book of critical essays (we hear another one is in the works) offers cerebral ruminations on art that can challenge your sensibilities, make you laugh out loud, and, of course, teach you how to see art as an artist does. 

19. The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz: A Powerful True Story of Hope and Survival by Thomas Geve (2021)

The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz: A Powerful True Story of Hope and Survival by Thomas Geve. Courtesy of Harper Collins.

For 22 months, 13-year-old Thomas Geve survived the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the Allies freed the prisoners, he was initially too weak to leave. He spent his two months of recovery making over 80 drawings, 56 of which are published here with a revised version of Geve’s first-hand account of life in the camp. “These stories,” he wrote, “give voice to my comrades who did not get to see the day of liberation. My world was their world as well. My words would give their personalities and dreams, which had perished so unfairly and too soon, eternal life.” 

Find it at: Harper Collins

—Sarah Cascone  

20. Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz (2021)

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz. Courtesy of Norton.

Archaeology fans will be fascinated to learn more about the rise and fall of four ancient cities: Rome’s Pompeii in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius; Cambodia’s stone temples at Angkor Watt; the massive mounds of Cahokia near modern-day St. Louis, and the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey. Annalee Newitz visited all four sites and was able to identify the environmental changes and political turmoil that helped lead to the demise of these once-thriving settlements—and she considers what lessons about urban life contemporary society can draw from ancient history. 

Find it at:   W.W. Norton

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Writings by artists convey a specific type of knowledge or way of thinking about artistic practice that the writings of academic and professional observers do not. It is not just a matter of artists’ texts filling discursive gaps between critical writing and artistic production; it is also a question of texts by artists creating intellectual, political, and cultural possibilities that would not otherwise exist. The books in this series remind us that art’s manifestations and meanings are rendered more complex when artists’ voices are heard, and when artists engage in direct debate and dialogue with each other, the public, and scholars. This series carries the spirit of several earlier book series that shaped aesthetic theory and art writing practice in the twentieth century into the twenty-first century: the Documents of Modern Art series edited by Robert Motherwell (1944-61), the Jargon Society Press founded by Jonathan Williams at Black Mountain College in 1951, Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press (1964-75), and the Nova Scotia Series edited first by Kaspar Koenig and later by Benjamin Buchloh in Halifax in the 1970s. The Writing Art series of MIT Press was initiated by Roger Conover in 1991.

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by Michael Asher

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The Must-Read Art Books to Pick Up This Fall

These titles, like all the best art books, transcend the visual..

Most of us don’t read books the way we used to—attention spans are short, BookTok recommendations populate our shelves and audiobooks are the new books. But there’s one type of book that will never go out of style, and that is the classic art book . By which we mean those sometimes hefty coffee table books filled with beautiful pictures.

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When it comes to the best art books, however, the appeal transcends the visual. These aren’t auction catalogs, after all. Great art books are creatively curated and offer readers a deep dive into the movements, niche cultures and personal stories behind the works showcased on each page. There are fascinating career retrospectives and anthologies of major biennials, museum and gallery surveys and re-editions of obscure photo books—in other words, something for everyone,

Our autumn art book recommendations, all slated for release in the coming months, promise to be equal parts rich in detail, lovely to look at and insightful.

The German model-turned-photographer Ellen von Unwerth , well-versed in the fashion world, has a new photo book with TASCHEN called Heimat , which is the word for the feeling of belonging in German. This art book features high gloss, glamorous and sexualized photos of women romping around the south of Germany—riddled with Bavarian clichés from beer to dirndls. Considering that the south of Germany leans traditional, and not particularly adventurous, it offers a refreshing take on her home region.

Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939

For a throwback to pre-war Paris, check out Brilliant Exiles , which looks at the influential American women who lived, worked and participated in the culture of Paris in the early 20th Century. They each had their own way of expressing the freedom Paris afforded women, from singer Josephine Baker to muse Zelda Fitzgerald to writer Gertrude Stein or gallerist Peggy Guggenheim. All were trailblazers who ultimately changed culture, locally and abroad. The book coincides with the touring exhibition of the same name that’s on view at the National Portrait Gallery until February 23, 2025.

Balenciaga – Kublin: A Fashion Record

Balenciaga has seen better days. Their recent controversy with teddy bears in bondage has left many fashion aficionados dreaming of the days when the brand represented truth and authenticity. Balenciaga – Kublin: A Fashion Record by Ana Balda and Maria Kublin , set to release on October 22, is the first book to document the work of fashion photographer and filmmaker Tom Kublin and his collaboration with brand founder Cristóbal Balenciaga. This art book features over 140 photos from Balenciaga’s postwar heyday in Paris showing how Kublin captured Balenciaga couture in the 1950s and 1960s—there are behind-the-scenes shots of Balenciaga at work, as well as fashion editorials and street style shots.

The World According to David Hockney

Out this September, this anthology of art images and quotations compiled by Martin Gayford offers insight into the philosophy and life of British artist David Hockney . The book is part of publisher Thames & Hudson’s “The World According To” series and looks into Hockney’s artistic process. With quotable quotes like, “The eye is always moving; if it isn’t moving you are dead” and artistic insights such as “Painted color always will be better than printed color because it is the pigment itself,” Hockney shares his thoughts and discusses how he was inspired by icons like Paul Cezanne, Walt Disney and his fellow artists.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment , co-produced by Cartier-Bresson and Clément Chéroux, is a new edition of an already groundbreaking photo book. The Decisive Moment ( Images à la Sauvette in French) features over 200 photos from the first twenty years of Cartier-Bresson’s career as a photojournalist. It was first published in 1952, with depictions of postwar Paris, and is referred to as a “bible for photographers.” It comes out on September 10.

Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums

Fans of magic, look no further. Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums by Peabody Essex Museum curator at large George H. Schwartz , neuroscience researcher Tedi Asher and others explore the art and objects related to magicians and their practice. From posters to “spirit photography,” this book looks back on an era when magic was beyond convincing. There are photos and paraphernalia belonging to Harry Houdini, Margery the Medium, Howard Thurston and the Fox Sisters, among others, in chapters that peel back the illusions and the artistry of their stages that made them prime performers of their day. It will be released by Rizzoli on September 17.

101 Surrealists

101 Surrealists by Desmond Morris looks at the lives and the works of some of the most compelling artists from the now century old Surrealist movement. It all starts with Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto from 1924 and follows the works of Salvador Dali , Frida Kahlo , Max Ernst , Joan Miro and Francis Pacabia , as well as the overlooked artists who were part of the movement, like Kay Sage . Morris is one of the last surviving Surrealist artists and knew many of the artists whose work is featured in this art book. It’s out with Thames & Hudson on October 29.

Biennale Arte 2024: Foreigners Everywhere

While the title of this year’s Venice Biennale was nothing short of controversial (just look at what Anish Kapoor had to say about it ), this world-renowned festival of the arts is always a must-see affair. For those who couldn’t make it to Venice in person, there is the multi-book survey of the Biennale coming out on October 15. The set features over 1,000 artworks and illustrations in what curator Adriano Pedrosa explains is “a celebration of the foreign, the distant, the outsider, the queer as well as the Indigenous.”

• SEE ALSO : Celebrity Photographer Vijat Mohindra On Shooting Plastic Girls in Plastic Worlds

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It is difficult to assess Margarita Tupitsyn’s new book,  Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922–1992 , because of its strong spirit of partisanship. It covers wide historical ground and brings in a lot of new material gathered from primary sources, but it is also unabashedly selective, its choices circumscribed by the author’s personal history. A well-known art historian and curator of Russian and Soviet avant-garde art, Tupitsyn belongs to the generation of intellectuals who came of age during the period of stagnation and decline of the Soviet Union. The history she narrates belongs to this period fully and inextricably. Her important contribution to the field is to be one of the first and most consistent specialists to write about the formerly marginal subject of Russian and Soviet art, which has come to the attention of mainstream art history in the West only in the past fifty years. The author’s personal participation in this history forms an important part of the book and contributes to its strengths and weaknesses. Beginning in the 1970s, she was first a participant and later an organizer of the key events and exhibitions described in her book. Thus, her narration comes not only from her vast knowledge of history and theoretical literature, but also from her own experience. This personal element is reflected in the fact that Tupitsyn writes only about artists from Moscow, Russia’s capital and its largest and most developed city, where she was born and raised and socialized with many of the artists she describes in her book. This focus is a positive aspect of the book, as the author narrows down the topic to what she knows best. Tupitsyn’s decision to embrace “vanguard” art under a wide chronological umbrella is more problematic because she traces a direct parallel between the avant-garde of the early 1920s and experiments conducted by Moscow artists after Stalin’s death during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Tupitsyn talks about art in terms of its accepting or, the contrary, confronting the dominant political structure. This argument makes sense within an oppositional framework of a “left” versus “right” political struggle, but it dismisses a “gray” area in-between, which may be most interesting of all in the realm of aesthetics as it questions and often negates the polar divisions. In this sense, Tupitsyn’s reading of “vanguard” art is limited by its insertion into this oppositional structure.

As an actual participant of the many events she chronicles, Tupitsyn certainly has a story to tell. The book captures this story vividly, documenting it with numerous illustrations and photographs, some featuring the author herself. In the introduction to the book, she explains some of her choices by referencing her interest in the particularity of a “milieu” surrounding the artist, “with its perpetual mechanism of conversing” (1). Tupitsyn’s story is connected with the tradition of experimental and political art or “art in context,” which, she explains, demonstrably veers away from the concept of aesthetic purity propagated by Clement Greenberg in particular. Bearing in mind the specificity of Tupitsyn’s point of view, the book uncovers layers of history from published and unpublished sources. As a counterbalance to her personal involvement in the history she writes, Tupitsyn aptly quotes liberal philosophers, cultural critics, and art historians from Ernst Bloch to Michel Foucault and her teacher Rosalind Krauss to make or amplify her argument about the experimental nature of avant-garde thinking and production and its continuity through generations of Moscow artists.

The book has seven chapters, roughly a chapter per decade of the narrated history. The first two cover the decades before World War II, before the author’s lifetime. Tupitsyn begins with a story of an ideological and personal rivalry between Kazimir Malevich, the leading painter of nonobjective art, and a certain Evgeny Katsman, his brother-in-law, who turned out to be among the leading propagandists of conservative visual culture, later endorsed by Stalin and the officially supported Academy of Arts. Tupitsyn weaves an intricate narrative based on Katsman’s diaries, which reads almost like a detective novel. It reveals Katsman as a man ruthless in his attempts to destroy his rival both in art and in life, going as far as meeting with Stalin personally to plead the cause against the avant-garde. Tupitsyn makes Katsman’s diary a foil against which she develops her story of the foundation and functioning of such conservative artistic collectives as AKhRR (Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia) and Malevich, the protagonist of the avant-garde’s fight against the reactionary tendencies exemplified by the ideology propagated by Katsman. In this chapter, she touches on the key issues of this standoff: the debate about the teaching tendencies in VKhUTEMAS (Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops); the progressive role of Anatoly Lunacharsky, who promoted avant-gardists in the early 1920s; and the government support behind Die Erste Russische Ausstellung in Berlin in 1922, to which apparently only “left” artists were invited. It was interesting to learn, for example, that AKhRR was founded as a reaction to this exclusion as well as a means to associate with the Wanderers, an established group of nineteenth-century realist painters whose agenda, Tupitsyn insists, was much more progressive in its day than that of AKhRR. Tupitsyn’s listings of AKhRR’s exhibitions and her detailed chronicling of its confrontations with theoreticians affiliated with LEF (Left Front of the Arts) is helpful in reminding the reader of the fundamental difference between the approaches of the “right” and the “left” artistic factions: the rear guard aspired to study the conditions of people’s everyday lives and “depict [them] naturalistically,” while the avant-garde “imagined the proletariat not as subject of art, but as its participatory force” (11). This formulation of the pivotal ideological difference between the conservative and the progressive factions in Soviet art touches on the question of the conservatives’ idealization, the progressives’ utopia, and the loss of the reality principle in both camps. Tupitsyn weaves in the stories about other artists, such as Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and El Lissitzky, but in her choosing the Malevich-Katsman rivalry as the guiding thread of her argument, she creates a structure resembling that of a phallic, pre-oedipal standoff. In this dualistic confrontation, the raging competitors need each other in order to release their aggression against one another, but in fact the enemy they fight is invincible, because without it, their existence would be devoid of sense. This penchant toward analyzing art from the political perspective of the fight of the “left” against the “right” without giving the issues of aesthetics any consideration makes Tupitsyn argue against a growing interest of Western scholars in a comprehensive study of Socialist Realism, which she raises in the second chapter of her book.

In line with other histories of Soviet nonconformist art, Tupitsyn locates the possibility for a continuation of the spirit of the avant-garde with the death of Stalin, the concomitant end of terror, and the onset of Khrushchev’s thaw. The period from the 1940s to the 1950s is associated for the author with the resurgent interest of the Moscow artists in abstraction. In chapter 3, the author traces the development of this line of artistic thought in the work of Vladimir Nemukhin, Lydia Masterkova, Vladimir Yankilevsky, among others, including such relatively unknown names in the West as Vladimir Slepian and Mikhail Chernyshov. Artists doing three-dimensional work in open air, such as Francisco Infante, Lev Nussberg, and his Movement Group are also included, as well as early works by Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov. Kabakov and Bulatov are well-known artists who resurface in subsequent chapters dedicated chiefly to performance and immigrant art from the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s and 1990s. While developing a convincing chronology of key exhibitions and events that spurred the development of the underground art scene, Tupitsyn excludes several notable names. In the section on abstractionists, important artists, such as Mikhail Shvartsman, are absent, for example. In the section on immigrant art in New York, a recently deceased Leonid Lamm is missing. This is especially surprising because Tupistyn worked with Lamm, having included him in her Sots Art exhibition at the New Museum in 1986, and authored essays and even a book about him. The reader is left guessing about the criteria of the author’s selection. The book has an index, but at times the page numbers do not correspond to the exact mention of a name, as is the case with the group Medical Hermeneutics.

Tupistyn’s book continues an impressive series of her publications, produced in the course of more than thirty-five years. She has always been a strong voice of support for the kind of art she writes about—politically involved and outspoken—which in many ways reflects her own personality. Perhaps partisanship in writing histories is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, nowadays it may be impossible to write a good history without taking sides and making clear which ideology you support. In this particular book, however, the author pushes this principle to its limit, making the reader wonder what is missing as a result of the personal choices she made.

Natasha Kurchanova Independent Art Historian

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Eight Essential Books About AI

By Sonja Drimmer

Sonja Drimmer

Computer vision has been around since 1958, when Frank Rosenblatt, then a researcher at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, unveiled the Perceptron, which programed a camera to detect the location of a shape on a flash card. Yet, after an initial period of excitement, this landmark event in the history of artificial intelligence was followed by what’s known as the “AI Winter,” a period when most computer scientists’ hopes of developing machine learning past the rudiments went into hibernation.

It was not until 50 years later that computer vision began to advance to the next level when Fei-Fei Li, a professor at Princeton, hired thousands of low-paid, anonymous laborers through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to tag three million images, thus creating a dataset large enough to train image recognition models.

The extended caesura in this seemingly long history, then, goes some way to explaining why book-length studies of artificial intelligence as it relates to the production and analysis of art remain thin on the ground. However, there is a rich body of literature by sociologists, data journalists, and scholars in STS (science and technology studies) that, in touching on such topics as surveillance and data visualization, is useful to thinking about the relationship between AI and visual culture writ large.  The following is a list of studies drawn from a broad range of disciplines that may be helpful to anyone hoping to get a handle on this subject. Seven key terms provide the bullet points for this condensed curriculum: bias , extraction , augmentation , operation , the so-called , categorization , and power .

This article is part of our latest digital issue,  AI and the Art World . Follow along for more stories throughout this week and next.

BIAS: More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech , by Meredith Broussard

Meredith Broussard is one among a number of important scholars and public intellectuals—including Cathy O’Neil, Safiya Umoja Noble, Ruha Benjamin, and Virginia Eubanks, any of whose books could have made this list—whose research has drawn wide attention to the biased foundations and contemporary applications of modern computing technology and machine learning in particular. In her most recent book, a follow-up to her excellent Artificial Unintelligence , Broussard tackles technochauvinism, the belief that computational solutions are superior to all other forms of problem solving.

While this is clearly not a study devoted to art, running throughout the book is the important, polar theme of visibility and invisibility that will be of interest to anyone who studies visual culture. Through an array of case studies Broussard shows how algorithmic systems both reduce to invisibility and raise to hypervisibility those people who fall outside the tech industry’s norm of a white, able-bodied male, offering an unflinching look at such problems as algorithmic analysis of medical imaging, AI-based surveillance, and above all the cocksure insistence that machines are always the answer.

EXTRACTION: Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

If I could recommend only one book to someone interested in learning about the impact of incorporating artificial intelligence into the infrastructure of modern life (as is happening at breakneck speed), this would be it. The narrative of the book follows the life cycle of the hardware and software necessary to machine learning, from mining the minerals required to build the computers on which AI runs to creating, processing, and then making decisions with the data humans supply it (both with and without our permission).

The book’s thesis is crystal clear: It’s extraction all the way down. But what Kate Crawford reveals is about far more than environmental devastation and human exploitation. Having partnered with artist Trevor Paglen to create the landmark installation ImageNet Roulette (2019), and steeped in scholarship on visual culture, Crawford is well attuned to art’s entanglements with emerging algorithmic regimes and in particular how, when AI models are trained on images that must be translated into code to be machine-readable, these training sets become “classification engines” that establish new, deceptive “truths.”

AUGMENTATION: Machine Vision: How Algorithms Are Changing the Way We See the World by Jill Walker Rettberg

Offering a historical perspective, Jill Walker Rettberg situates machine vision within 8,000 years of technology devised to augment or alter the way humans see, beginning with the earliest mirrors made of polished obsidian. Assemblage , a key term in Rettberg’s analysis with roots in the work of Deleuze and Guattari and subsequent scholars of post-humanism, describes “relationships and shared agency” distributed across people, objects, institutions, and systems.

One could quibble with Rettberg’s decision to incorporate machine vision into a genealogy of technologies that augment sight, uniting into one story line optical encounters in the world with data production and synthesis. Nevertheless, her book is a necessary corrective to overhyped accounts of machine vision’s unprecedented nature. And it’s an adroit demonstration of how humans work with tools to produce ways of seeing, both empowering and disempowering who gets seen, and how, based on the affordances of those tools and what we do with them.

OPERATION: Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual by Jussi Parikka

On page 65 of this study, Parikka thanks readers for their patience. It was a gratifying moment that alleviated some of my aggravation with the unnecessary density of theory, repetition, and arcane language of the book’s opening sections. This comment might undermine my recommendation, but it is just to inoculate would-be readers against the forbidding nature of the book’s early pages.

Inspired by the filmmaker Harun Farocki’s concept of the “operational image,” Parikka’s study considers “how images are operated upon and become operationalized through aggregation, algorithmic analysis, and the ensuing questions of data-driven mobilization of the mass image.” His work occupies much the same territory as Rettberg’s study, citing many of the same influences, but with a key difference.

Using scholars Adrian MacKenzie’s and Anna Munster’s term the invisual , Parikka understands images mediated by computer technologies not as images but instead as configurations of data and “statistical distributions of patterns” with a graphical interface. This is an essential point that more people need to understand. In starting with it, Parikka offers a valuable account of what happens when images are homogenized as data and put to work to reshape the world.

THE SO-CALLED: AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams by Joanna Zylinska

If we were to take a capacious approach to computer-generated art, we might venture back to the 19th century, when Jacquard programmed its looms with punch cards. Such an approach would, however, necessitate an entirely new syllabus, overflowing with the work of artists, curators, critics, media scholars, and art historians who have trained their focus on art and computational technology. While she acknowledges this lineage, Joanna Zylinska’s AI Art is refreshing in targeting the subject of its title, all the better to give the reader a pretty zippy account of what it is and does. Underpinning the book is what I came to think of generically as “the so-called,” that is, its concern with how “AI-driven” art requires us to think critically about so-called intelligence and so-called creativity.

As a number of other authors on this syllabus point out, it’s crucial not to take for granted terms whose origins and main function are commercial—like the “learning” in “machine learning” itself (coined for marketing purposes by Arthur Samuel in 1959 while at IBM). Zylinska does not retreat from what she admits is the tedious question of whether AI-driven art can be “creative”; nor does she simply turn the question on its head to ask how AI-driven art causes us to ask how humans can be creative.

Adopting a post-humanist stance, Zylinska queries the meaning of creativity for “the human-with-the-machine, or even, more radically, the human-as-a-machine.” Revelatory as it is when AI-driven art critiques AI itself and the inhumane labor practices and invasive protocols that make it possible, such critique is ultimately incapable of effecting change. Moving beyond critique, Zylinska concludes, “Intelligent work on artificial intelligence could therefore perhaps attempt to sever that link between the work of art and human vision, going beyond the mere aesthesis of human experience to open up the problem of the universe itself as sentient.”

CATEGORIZATION: Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning by Amanda Wasielewski

Amanda Wasielewski’s book, which I reviewed for Art in America last year, is rare in directly examining the impact of artificial intelligence on the practice of art history and collecting. In my review, I took issue with Wasielewski’s framing. Nonetheless, its two body chapters bring together, as I put it, “the most skillfully limned assessments of [machine learning’s] functionalities and limitations when applied to works of art to date.” Art historians, collectors, and curators who are interested in the potentials of incorporating machine learning into their practice will find in these chapters an insightful guide to its promises and, mostly, its perils.

POWER: Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century by Jonathan Crary

A book written during the AI winter, Techniques of the Observer may seem like an odd choice for this list. But if this classic cannot stand on its own merits for its relevance to our 21st-century reality, then Jonathan Crary’s more recent manifestos, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2014) and Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (Verso, 2022), show that his first monograph was just an opening salvo in a career-long program to call attention to how modern institutions colonize vision, constructing the observer as both the subject and object of control.

With opening questions like “How is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses?” and “In what ways is subjectivity becoming a precarious condition of interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information?” it more than deserves the designation of prescient. Reading it more than three decades after its original publication is a bracing—and vital—experience.

EXTRA CREDIT: The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book by Andriy Burkov

Want to learn how machine learning works? Read Andriy Burkov’s The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book . Even the most innumerate of us (among whom I count myself) will come away with a basic understanding of its principles.

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The New York Times Book Review I've I want THE 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY read to it read it 1 My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante 26 26 Atonement, by lan McEwan 2 The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson 27 Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 3 Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel 28 Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell 4 The Known World, by Edward P. Jones 29 The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt 5 The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen 30 Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward 6 2666, by Roberto Bolaño 31 White Teeth, by Zadie Smith 7 The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead 32 The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst 8 Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald 33 Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward 9 Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro 34 Citizen, by Claudia Rankine 10 Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson 35 Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel 11 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz 36 Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates 12 The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion 37 The Years, by Annie Ernaux 13 The Road, by Cormac McCarthy 38 The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño 14 Outline, by Rachel Cusk 39 A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan 15 Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee 40 H Is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald 16 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon 41 Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan 17 The Sellout, by Paul Beatty 42 A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James 18 Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders 43 Postwar, by Tony Judt 19 Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe 44 The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin 20 Erasure, by Percival Everrett 45 The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson 21 Evicted, by Matthew Desmond 46 The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt 22 22 Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo 47 A Mercy, by Toni Morrison 23 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Alice Munro 48 Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi 24 The Overstory, by Richard Powers 49 The Vegetarian, by Han Kang 25 25 Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc 50 Trust, by Hernan Diaz I've I want read to it read it

The New York Times Book Review I've I want THE 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY read to it read it 51 Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson 52 52 Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson 53 Runaway, by Alice Munro 76 77 An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones 78 Septology, by Jon Fosse Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin 54 Tenth of December, by George Saunders 55 The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright 56 The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner 57 Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich ཤྲཱ རྒྱ སྐྱ A Manual for Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin The Story of the Lost Child, by Elena Ferrante Pulphead, by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor 58 Stay True, by Hua Hsu 83 When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut 59 Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides 84 The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee 60 Heavy, by Kiese Laymon 85 Pastoralia, by George Saunders 61 Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver 86 Frederick Douglass, by David W. Blight 62 10:04, by Ben Lerner 87 Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters 63 Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill 88 The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis 64 The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai 89 The Return, by Hisham Matar 65 The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth 90 The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen 66 We the Animals, by Justin Torres 91 The Human Stain, by Philip Roth 67 Far From the Tree, by Andrew Solomon 92 The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante 68 The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez 93 Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel 69 59 The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander 94 On Beauty, by Zadie Smith 10 70 All Aunt Hagar's Children, by Edward P. Jones 95 Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel 71 The Copenhagen Trilogy, by Tove Ditlevsen 96 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, by Saidiya Hartman 72 22 Secondhand Time, by Svetlana Alexievich 97 Men We Reaped, by Jesmyn Ward 73 The Passage of Power, by Robert A. Caro 98 Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett 74 Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout 99 How to Be Both, by Ali Smith 75 15 Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid 100 Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson I've I want read to it read it

Lebanon has made survival an art form, after decades of war and unrest

Research Scholar, Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Australian National University

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Ian Parmeter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Australian National University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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I first visited Lebanon in 1978, three years into the civil war and six years before Theodore Ell was born. I mention this because, despite the fact our experiences of this fascinating country were at different times, his impressions and judgements in his excellent new book Lebanon Days – which spans the tumultuous period from 2018 to 2021 – accord very much with my own.

At the time of my first visit, I was studying Arabic in Cairo at the behest of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. DFA (no “T” on the acronym in those days) was seeking to increase its Middle East expertise in the wake of the massive rise in oil prices engineered by Gulf oil producers following the 1973 Arab–Israeli war .

My department had approved the trip to enable me to broaden my knowledge of the Middle East and to practise Arabic in different environments where that devilishly difficult language is spoken. This was travel on the cheap through Lebanon, Syria and Jordan over three weeks – using “service” taxis (taxis with several passengers) and staying in hotels that would struggle to earn a half-star rating.

The point was to have full immersion in environments where little or no English was spoken, and I would have to make myself understood in Arabic for all the practicalities of daily life.

Book Review: Lebanon Days by Theodore Ell (Atlantic)

Beirut: a city divided

Before flying to Beirut, I consulted books on the region in the Cairo embassy’s library. Those on Lebanon predated the civil war: I was struck by the beauty of Beirut’s centre, particularly Martyrs’ Square (which features several times in Ell’s book), with large palm trees on its eastern and western sides.

At Beirut airport, just south of the city, I hailed a taxi and asked the driver in “ fus’ha ” (formal) Arabic to take me to Martyrs’ Square. He looked at me in surprise – I assumed because my Arabic was not the “ aarmi ” (colloquial) dialect he was used to. But there was another reason. When we arrived at the square, all the palm trees had been shorn off about a metre from the ground, by high-velocity bullets.

I had stumbled onto the “green line” dividing Beirut’s east and west, the main fighting arena of the war. The taxi driver was clearly nervous about being near the square and, as a Muslim, would not take me into the Christian east.

In subsequent years, I visited Beirut several times during the war. I worked there for three years in the late 1990s, when the country seemed for a few years to be getting back on its feet.

While posted in Damascus, capital of Syria, in the mid-1980s, I periodically went to Beirut with another staff member to carry out various official tasks during breaks in the fighting. If we stayed in West Beirut, we usually slept in the then-closed embassy building. As a precaution we used to drag mattresses from bedrooms into the internal hallway, to minimise the risk of being peppered with shattered glass if an explosion happened near the building.

Another vivid memory of that time is being invited by a Lebanese businessman to lunch in one of Beirut’s finest restaurants. The food was French and the interior décor was what one might expect in an upscale European restaurant. The only detraction from a delightful dining experience was that the restaurant windows were covered with sandbags.

The 2019 revolution

The Taif Accord of October 1989 is generally seen as the formal end of the war. But even then, René Moawad , Lebanon’s first postwar president, served for only 18 days before unknown assailants assassinated him on 22 November that year.

Rafiq Hariri , prime minister for six years during the 1990s, invested much of his own personal fortune in the postwar reconstruction of Beirut. During that time, he invited other businessmen to pay a voluntary tax of 10% of their income to the state to assist with financing the reconstruction.

I recall a business acquaintance telling me he regarded this request as a joke – no one would pay such a tax. I asked how he expected the state to finance schools, hospitals and roads without taxes. He responded that in Australia I could reasonably assume my tax payments would go to these purposes. In Lebanon, such payments would end up in Swiss banks.

In Lebanon Days, Ell recounts many such stories, based on his experiences accompanying his wife, Caitlin, an Australian diplomat on a posting at our embassy in Beirut.

His time there included the economic devastation caused by the collapse in the value of the Lebanese pound. The Lebanese Central Bank had kept the value of the pound artificially high at 1,507.5 to the US dollar from 1999 to 2019. This distorted the economy by making imports artificially cheap and exports expensive, hampering development of export industries and causing unsustainable deficits to accumulate.

The policy depended on the Central Bank being able to obtain dollars more cheaply than it sold them, in order to maintain the pound’s value. It was a confidence trick doomed to eventual failure, which happened in October 2019. The result was social meltdown – thowra or revolution, involving riots over months. People from all of Lebanon’s 18 religious sects were affected equally, and protesters of all faiths gathered in Martyrs’ Square to shout slogans and sing protest songs. According to Ell, one such slogan described Lebanon as “a nation of sheep, run by wolves, owned by pigs”.

Then, in early 2020, Covid struck the country: Ell and Caitlin included. But that did not stop the revolution, which finally culminated in another disaster waiting to happen – the horrific explosion in Beirut’s port in August 2020, from negligent storing of a vast quantity of ammonium nitrate.

Ell won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize for his essay published in Australian Book Review, in which he described the explosion and its impact on residents of the city in vivid detail. He expands on that detail in his book. I was particularly impressed with his comment that the ammonium nitrate had not been moved to safer storage because no one had worked out how to make money from it.

Ell’s book exudes reality to anyone who has lived in Lebanon. He describes vividly the Lebanese sense of fun, the nightclubs in East Beirut where patrons could drink and dance till dawn – and had done even in the depths of the civil war.

The flip side was the determination of Lebanese people to maintain appearances as the economy collapsed around them. Those who had frequented chic shopping malls but no longer had money for anything more than basic essentials would continue to walk the aisles of the malls – buying nothing, but carrying a luxury brand shopping bag to suggest that they had.

The war that did not end

Early in Lebanon Days, Ell makes the valid point that the civil war did not end: it simply became invisible. As he describes it, “Lebanon’s religious differences refined alienation into a way of life”.

Particularly telling is his account of Genevieve, a Maronite Christian woman, who “told us, in all candour, as though it were obvious things could be no other way, that she had never met a Muslim”. Genevieve “spoke as though the number of Muslims in her country – in her entire region of the world – was not a reality of history, an intrinsic part of life, but something offensive and noxious to be resisted”.

To make the Taif Agreement work, a national unity government was formed in the early 1990s, comprising the various sectarian leaders who had prosecuted the war. The main hold-out from this arrangement was Samir Geagea, the leader of the Lebanese Forces , a Christian militia. Geagea objected to continuing Syrian influence in the country’s governance. In 1994, he was arrested and jailed for crimes allegedly committed during the war. No such charges were laid against other ministers, who could have been accused of similar crimes.

I recall the US Ambassador in 1997 invited a group of Lebanese politicians and some Western ambassadors to his residence to brief a US congressional delegation on these postwar arrangements.

A congressman asked if the Lebanese had held a “truth and reconciliation commission” after the war, in the way South Africa had after the abolition of apartheid. One of the guests was the mercurial Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt , at the time a minister. He immediately responded, “No, we were more sophisticated in Lebanon. We put all the war criminals in the Cabinet, and any war criminal who refused to become a minister was put in jail.” Amid the laughter, the US ambassador explained to the bemused delegation that was pretty much what had happened.

Conspiracy theories

Ell constructs his narrative chronologically, but with a preface that explains how Lebanon became the country it is.

He describes the remarkable stelae (standing stone slabs used in the ancient world as markers) on the rock face near the Dog River, just north of Beirut. Each stela records an invader – from Ramses II of Egypt through to the Romans, the Ottomans, the French under Napoleon III and a contingent of the Australian Imperial Force, whose plaque records their campaign against Vichy French forces in Lebanon in 1941.

He describes the conspiracy theories espoused by Lebanese as a result of the constant threat of Israeli military action. That has usually followed attacks on Israel by Hezbollah, the Shia militia better armed than the Lebanese Army, over which the government has no authority. Sonic booms from Israeli aircraft breaking the sound barrier over Beirut cause instinctive searches for places to shelter.

Ell concludes the book with a sad account of his and Caitlin’s departure. They had made many Lebanese friends, but many of them were leaving as well. The only ones reasonably happy to remain had dual citizenship, which gave them a foreign bolthole in the event of another disaster.

The book is well presented. It includes a map showing places mentioned in the narrative, a useful historical timeline, a glossary of Arabic terms and a guide to further reading.

Lebanon Days is a meditation on a country that never leaves its visitors unaffected. Ell is a gifted writer: his prose is unaffected, precise and elegant. He has taken the drama of his three years in Lebanon to illuminate this fascinating country’s past – and to point to a future that for now looks bleak, particularly with the ever-present threat of war between Israel and Hezbollah. But what emerges as well is the resilience of the people. This paradoxical country has made survival an art form.

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The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present Paperback – January 15, 1995

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; First Edition (January 15, 1995)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 777 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 038542339X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385423397
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 1 year and up
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1180L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.35 pounds
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• #1 in Comparative Literature
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These 8 senators each made more than $100,000 last year from writing books

• Writing books continues to be lucrative for senators with national profiles.
• In 2023, eight senators made more than $100,000 in royalties, according to financial disclosures.
• That includes Democrats like Raphael Warnock and Republicans like Ted Cruz.

If you're an ambitious member of Congress with a national profile, there's a tried and true way to make some extra money: write a book.

According to recently filed financial disclosures, 8 sitting US senators made more than $100,000 in extra income — on top of the $174,000 annual salary they each receive — from book royalties in 2023.

It's an ongoing trend. Last year, six senators made more than their annual salary in book royalties.

That includes both Democrats and Republicans, each of whom have cashed in on a mixture of personal biographies, policy blueprints, and political manifestos that they've published in recent years.

Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia

Raphael Warnock, the first-term Democratic senator from Georgia, made more than $460,000 in book royalties last year.

That's on top of more than $655,000 in 2022 and nearly $244,000 in 2021. Altogether, Warnock has made more than $1.3 million from selling books since he was elected to the Senate.

According to a disclosure that Warnock filed last year, covering the year 2022, the senator even went on a book tour for his 2022 memoir, "A Way Out of No Way," in June and July of that year amid his competitive reelection fight against Republican Herschel Walker.

In his most recent disclosure, Warnock indicated that he had signed a new agreement with Penguin Random House in June 2023 to write two more books, entitled "We're All In This Together 1" and "We're All In This Together 2."

There's little public information about those forthcoming books, including when they're set to be released, and a Warnock spokesperson did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas

Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and 2016 GOP presidential candidate known for hosting a thrice-weekly podcast , earned $390,000 last year from book royalties.

But that's just one portion of a much larger windfall that Cruz is set to receive for his book writing.

In January 2022, Cruz signed an agreement with the the right-leaning Regnery Publishing to write two books for a grand total of $1.1 million, to be paid out in four installments. In total, Cruz has disclosed receiving $890,000 of that sum so far.

Those books include "Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System," published in 2022, as well as his 2023 book "Unwoke: How to Defeat Culture Marxism in America."

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas

In 2022, Cotton published his second book, " Only the Strong: Reversing the Left's Plot to Sabotage American Power." Since then, he's received a total of $600,000 in book royalties — $300,000 in both 2022 and 2023.

But while most senators appear to receive their book royalties directly, Cotton does it differently. He has established a limited liability company called TBC Books (Cotton's full name is " Thomas Bryant Cotton") that holds his royalty earnings. Then, he draws money from that entity as he sees fit.

In 2023, he withdrew $100,000. In 2022, he withdrew $73,537.

It's not clear why Cotton uses an LLC rather than receiving the royalties directly, and a spokesperson did not return Business Insider's request for comment.

Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama

Britt, the freshman Alabama senator best known for her 2024 State of the Union response , earned $233,750 in book royalties last year for her 2023 memoir, " God Calls Us to Do Hard Things: Lessons from the Alabama Wiregrass."

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky

Paul, the staunchly libertarian Kentucky senator and 2016 GOP presidential candidate, earned $185,000 last year in book royalties for his 2023 book, " Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up."

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont

Sanders, the independent socialist Vermont senator and two-time Democratic presidential candidate, earned $148,750 in royalties last year from Penguin Random House.

The Vermont senator has published several books, the most recent of which is "It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism." In 2022, he earned enough in book royalties to essentially double his Senate salary .

"I wrote a best-selling book," Sanders memorably told the New York Times in 2019 . "If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too."

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri

Hawley earned $127,500 in book royalties in 2023, according to his most recent financial disclosure.

That's likely a windfall from his 2023 book "Manhood," which argues in part that the political left is waging an assault on traditional masculinity.

But Hawley has another book on the way, as Business Insider first reported in May .

In October 2023, the Missouri senator signed an agreement with Regnery Publishing to write a book entitled " The Awakenings: The Religious Revivals that Made America — and Why We Need Another One."

It is unclear when that book will be published, but a manuscript is due in January 2025, according to Regnery.

In 2021, Hawley made $467,000 in book royalties.

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia

Kaine, the Virginia senator and 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee, earned $114,000 in book royalties last year for his memoir, " Walk, Ride, Paddle: A Life Outside."

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