A free-wheeling and eclectic discussion of creativity.
Moore interviews 24 artists in 24 hours in this conceptual art book.
For this book, art historian and curator Moore staged two dozen interviews with various artists over the course of as many hours, all conducted from Miami’s Betsy Hotel. (If that seems like a marathon-level feat, know that Moore is, in his off-hours, a marathon runner.) “Like a puppeteer of dialogues, I had meticulously orchestrated the schedule, balancing time zones, language barriers, and artistic sensibilities,” writes the author in his introduction. It’s an international affair, with artists and curators calling in from London, Beijing, Kyoto, Dubai, Tbilisi, Rio de Janeiro, Milan, Capetown, Bogotà, Berlin, and elsewhere to answer Moore’s questions about inspiration, practice, art-world trends, geopolitics, migration, and what it’s like to care about art in the 2020s. Ceramicist En Iwamura describes what he learned about installations from working with a gardener. Sculptor Miler Lagos discusses the experience of constructing clothes out of paper made from natural plant fibers. Nadya Tolokonnikova, a multidisciplinary artist and member of the performance art group Pussy Riot, muses on the limited, stark color palette she’s used in her work since leaving Russia: “I live in exile. I’m a geographically anonymous person, practically living on the moon, with no home. I think it translates into art and into colors.” The tone of the interviews gets slightly silly toward the end of the 24-hour period—the sleep-deprived Moore spends part of his interview with the Berlin-based artist Ana Prvački practicing his German—but the questions always lead to intriguing responses by the interview subjects. The time constraint, which necessitates keeping the interviews brief, makes a fun game of the project. Readers will feel as though they are gallery-hopping with Moore across a cosmopolitan city as the conversations build upon one another to create a panoramic portrait of contemporary art.
A free-wheeling and eclectic discussion of creativity.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9788867496730
Page Count: 320
Publisher: SmallPub
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
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