A savvy assessment of how artists can, and should, function in the marketplace.
In defense of artists of all varieties, most of whom face daunting challenges in making a living.
Cultural critic Deresiewicz astutely examines the state of the arts in contemporary culture, arguing convincingly that to be an artist is not to be a practitioner of a “secular religion” but instead a producer within a market economy. His book, he writes, “attempts to make visible…the two things that the arts have long concealed about themselves: work and money.” Drawing on articles, books, and essays by artists, scholars, and critics as well as 140 lengthy phone interviews with artists who work in music, writing, visual art, film, and TV—he profiles 25 in detail—the author paints a vivid picture of the challenges involved in making art, finding an audience, and being self-supporting as an artist. Noting that the term “fine arts” dates to 1767, he traces the cultural identity of artists from Renaissance artisans supported by patrons to Enlightenment creators of art “as an autonomous realm of expression” to bohemians who defiantly rejected the marketplace, as if the very idea of money tainted the purity of their endeavors. Today, artists working in every genre must be constantly aware, self-marketing to audiences or finding intermediaries, such as agents, to market them. Most artists, Deresiewicz shows, earn subsistence incomes, with their biggest financial pressure coming from rent, both for living, working, and performing. The author examines a wide range of topics relevant to artists’ lives, including MFA programs; the rise of Amazon and possibility for self-publishing; opportunities in TV, which is “rolling in cash”; the dearth of philanthropic support of the arts in favor of projects with social impact; and the internet, which has made art accessible, offering “unmediated access to the audience” but also putting artists in competition with many others.
A savvy assessment of how artists can, and should, function in the marketplace.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12551-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
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