LOVE AND DEGRADATION

Simmons presents a series of critical essays analyzing love and all its forms through a carefully curated selection of art, literature, and pop culture.

In a series of 11 essays that cover different forms of creativity, the author examines the art and pop culture moments that affected him personally. He opens the book with a consideration of Toyin Ojih Odutola’s The Treatment, a series of ink drawings that Simmons uses as a basis to discuss the “racist heteropatriarchy” that allows certain (white) people to live without fear (which is “the greatest privilege of all”). The author tackles each chapter from a different critical perspective, focusing on race (via the movie Widows), feminism (via Barbara Kruger’s photo collages), and mental health (via the movie Spencer). But love (in all its forms) largely takes center stage, such as in Simmons’s analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) as a “paranoid novel”—complete with an ambiguous ending—that challenges the romantic expectations of the day. The TV show Fleabag is analyzed through a queer lens as the author discusses the protagonist’s tendency to pass “through and between visibility and invisibility.” Simmons also includes some personal anecdotes that highlight his connections to the material. With the author bouncing from one time period and art form to another, some readers may wish for a more streamlined reading experience. Any visual artwork discussed is included alongside its companion essay, making prior knowledge of the pieces unnecessary. Simmons’ refreshing honesty (at one point, he muses about his own suicide attempt: “I think that much of my work in art criticism and history has been spent attempting to be postdiscourse, because suicide is the end of discourse”) and choice to include largely modern works make the book read like a hipper, more socially conscious college textbook. He ultimately demonstrates that contemporary entertainment is worthy of intellectual appraisal by revealing its rich potential for rigorous discourse.

A thought-provoking analysis that uses art to challenge readers to dig deeper.