PAYING ATTENTION

A clear eye on contemporary arts.

Selected and introduced by Schambelan, this collection gathers nearly 70 essays by award-winning novelist and cultural critic Tillman, embracing her wide-ranging interests in the arts from 1973 to 2025. Visual art, film, literature, and pop culture all come within her purview; her subjects include artists Etel Adnan, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Anderson, Hilary Harkness, and Andy Warhol; writers Jane Bowles, Dennis Cooper, Craig Owens, and Gertrude Stein; and filmmakers Clint Eastwood and Chantal Akerman. Tillman’s “Homage to Homage” reflects some recurring themes: “modernism, abstraction, appropriation, and freedom,” and how “nationality, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender influence and shape behavior, rights, and possibilities—the futures for bodies.” While keeping her focus on art and artists, she reveals autobiographical details: her childhood obsession with Marilyn Monroe, growing up the youngest of three sisters with a “not quite a good-enough mother,” her father’s death, and a teaching stint in England. Her voice throughout is cool and limpid; Schambelan describes that detachment as a “stylistic signature of critical distance,” consistent whether she’s writing about natural disasters, drone strikes, or mass shootings. Although the volume is appended with a bibliography of essays, providing the years and outlets where the pieces were published, it would have been helpful if the provenance had been indicated throughout. Schambelan notes that Tillman called her essays “occasional pieces”—that is, “works of criticism undertaken in and for an occasion, a moment. They’re compositions in time—this time, now. But they bespeak awareness that now becomes then at every instant, and that history is ephemeral and fungible.”

Thoughtful, incisive perspectives.