An eye-opening look at how contemporary political issues find their ways into the hushed halls of museums and galleries.
A broad-ranging account of arts activism.
Should Paul Gauguin be canceled? After all, New York Times arts and culture writer Nayeri notes, he “behaved as if the women and young girls he came across in Tahiti were exotic fruits, there for the picking.” It’s a question that cleaves a sharp division among camps: those who, particularly in Paris, resent the New York Times criticizing French curatorial mores and those who are quick to apply presentist standards of behavior to the past. There’s social justice, and there’s censorship, and sometimes the line between is difficult to discern, though Nayeri contrasts the top-down censorship of state and church with the bottom-up censorship of those who protest injustices based on ethnicity, class, gender, and culture. The author argues that the largest artistic institutions have been playing catch-up. Whereas not long ago one would have to search to find a woman or person of color headlining a show, lately curators have been engaging in provocative installations in which, for example, a work of Picasso is paired with a work by Black American artist Faith Ringgold that features echoes of Guernica, but now visually commenting on the race riots of the late 1960s. “As MoMA explained, this particular display was a way to depart from a purely historical, step-by-step presentation, and start a transgenerational dialogue,” writes Nayeri. Some of the come-lately efforts seem a touch feeble, some a touch desperate, as when, in the wake of the George Floyd murder, curators all over the U.S. and Britain scrambled to remake their exhibits to be more inclusive. Make no mistake, writes the author, inclusion is still lacking. Upon revisiting Ernst Gombrich’s canonical The Story of Art, she writes, “I couldn’t find a single woman artist, even though his book starts in prehistoric times and leads all the way up to American art of the 1950s.”
An eye-opening look at how contemporary political issues find their ways into the hushed halls of museums and galleries.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66260-055-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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