The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing - Hardcover

Moss, Adam

 
9780593297582: The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 059329758X ISBN 13: 9780593297582
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“The book is a visual feast, full of drafts, sketches, and scribbled notebook pages. Every page shows how an idea becomes a finished design.” —Ari Shapiro, All Things Considered

From former editor of New York magazine Adam Moss, a collection of illuminating conversations examining the very personal, rigorous, complex, and elusive work of making art

What is the work of art? In this guided tour inside the artist’s head, Adam Moss traces the evolution of transcendent novels, paintings, jokes, movies, songs, and more. Weaving conversations with some of the most accomplished artists of our time together with the journal entries, napkin doodles, and sketches that were their tools, Moss breaks down the work—the tortuous paths and artistic decisions—that led to great art. From first glimmers to second thoughts, roads not taken, crises, breakthroughs, on to one triumphant finish after another.

Featuring: Kara Walker, Tony Kushner, Roz Chast, Michael Cunningham, Moses Sumney, Sofia Coppola, Stephen Sondheim, Susan Meiselas, Louise Glück, Maria de Los Angeles, Nico Muhly, Thomas Bartlett, Twyla Tharp, John Derian, Barbara Kruger, David Mandel, Gregory Crewdson, Marie Howe, Gay Talese, Cheryl Pope, Samin Nosrat, Joanna Quinn & Les Mills, Wesley Morris, Amy Sillman, Andrew Jarecki, Rostam, Ira Glass, Simphiwe Ndzube, Dean Baquet & Tom Bodkin, Max Porter, Elizabeth Diller, Ian Adelman / Calvin Seibert, Tyler Hobbs, Marc Jacobs, Grady West (Dina Martina), Will Shortz, Sheila Heti, Gerald Lovell, Jody Williams & Rita Sodi, Taylor Mac & Machine Dazzle, David Simon, George Saunders, Suzan-Lori Parks

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adam Moss was the editor of New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and 7 Days. As editor of New York, he also oversaw the creation of five digital magazines: Vulture, The Cut, Daily Intelligencer, Grub Street, and The Strategist. During his tenure, New York won forty-one National Magazine Awards, including Magazine of the Year. He was an assistant managing editor of The New York Times with oversight of the Magazine, the Book Review, and the Culture, and Style sections, as well as managing editor of Esquire. He was elected to the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2019.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

I WAS STANDING in the gift shop of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, flipping through the book Gehry Draws, when I came across the scribble you just passed a couple of pages back. It was more or less the first intimation the building’s architect, Frank Gehry, had of the museum, which became an architectural icon the moment it was built; it’s been compared with a boat, a fish, an artichoke, and Marilyn Monroe. I happen to love a doodle, and the scribble was a compelling little doodle in its own right, but what was so striking to me was how much it resembled the cockamamie (and extraordinary) structure I had come to Bilbao to see.

As I looked at the scribble and at the walls, and then back again at the drawing, an image out of a Pixar short popped into my head: the doodle shimmied to life to become the building it imagined, which now surrounded me. Gehry talks about these scribbles (his word for them—and there are many, just like this one) as his way of “thinking aloud.” And for a brief moment, I was right there with him when he had that first electric thought envisioning the place. It was one of those fleeting associations you hardly register. I moved on.

And yet I’d had a similar experience while I was still upstairs in the museum, at an exhibit of Alice Neel paintings that had been traveling around the world. Among them was a picture of a man named James Hunter, called Black Draftee (James Hunter).

As the story goes, Hunter came for a sitting, then went to Vietnam; he never returned to her studio. Neel looked at what she had applied to the canvas in that one meeting and declared the painting finished. I’m nuts about a lot of her work, but on that day as I was tooling around the galleries, I kept circling back to this painting. I was stuck on it. The interrupted portrait of Hunter was haunting, but what really got to me was the implied portrait—of Neel the artist, painting the picture. So there I was with her, too, experiencing the sit- ting as she experienced it.

And then it happened again. A day or so later I was in Madrid at the museum, and I saw this painting by Velázquez, one of the many court portraits of Philip IV. It’s hardly the most interesting of his works, but see where you can make out a trace of where it looks like the artist initially posed the king’s leg before fixing it? Standing by the painting, staring down the flaw, I felt as if I’d discovered a secret. It came as a gift to view Velázquez as mortal, making a decision and then thinking better of it.

I’ve long been attracted to this sort of artifact—of artists caught in the act of making art. If you look around, you can find them in corners of the internet: academic websites, auction house offerings, fanzines. They show up in the occasional exhibit, or as a sideshow in museum retrospectives. There are many types: tossed-off sketches and more-considered studies, unfinished work, meandering notes to self, scribbled lyric fragments, marked-up text, mad out- lines. I find them almost inexplicably beautiful in all their genres.

Some of my interest is aesthetic. I appreciate a crude hand; I can see the artist in it. I respect the honesty of the specimens, knowing they were not meant for me to see. They’re forensically interesting, often revealing stages of thinking. But I suppose what I find most satisfying about them is the way they seem to embody anticipation. They’re full of portent, more verb than noun. Also, poring over them gives me the same charge I get from reading the letters and journals of famous people. There’s a nosy pleasure in that, and I’ve often thought, in passing, that someone ought to put these kinds of documents in a book. So, to begin with, that’s what you’re holding right now.

But that’s not really what this book is about. The true value of unbaked scrawls and sketches and whatnot is as a window to an artist’s process. Process is an ugly-sounding word—pedestrian jargon for the inherently wondrous act of creation—but it describes a method by which a thing evolves, which has always had a hold on me. For over forty years I was an editor, of magazines mostly: New York most recently, The New York Times Magazine before that, and also a short-lived weekly called 7 Days. Particularly in the kinds of general-interest magazines I was editing, you could follow your curiosities any old place (that was the job description), and mine was often the how of anything. While a childlike interest perhaps—naive and open-ended, each how toppling into another—it was also opportunistic. I published a lot of what is known as process journalism, origin stories especially, which could then be fashioned into narrative.

As an editor, what I liked about these stories (beyond their answers to my questions) was the classic structure of them—each inherently dramatic, starting with nothing and ending with something. Cultural procedurals were especially good material. Years ago I assigned a story on Stephen Sondheim in which he explained, in thousands of words, how he wrote a single song. That was pretty great. I published the story on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao that compared the building with Marilyn Monroe. I traced the evolutions of songs and novels and soap opera arcs. As an editor and as a reader, I found the story of how creators create irresistible.

And that interest wasn’t restricted to the page. When I could get a closer look, I took advantage of opportunities that came my way. One day I was invited to visit the set of the HBO political satire Veep. There I watched David Mandel, who ran the show, tune a joke. Its punchline was a Jewish holiday. He kept barking out variations, landing the joke on different holidays—Yom Kippur or Simchat Torah, which is funnier?—improving it steadily until one turn fell flat. That’s when he knew he had gone too far. All that for a throw- away joke? I was mesmerized.

You’ll see I talk to Mandel about that later on. But I mention it here to say that I’ve always been a freak for the zealous pursuit of the better, especially where culture is concerned. I love the story of it, and also the motive. So that, too, is what this book is—a celebration of the art that happens when instinct meets rigor. But it isn’t only that either.
 
I’m a painter. I feel ridiculous saying that. But when I quit my magazine job sometime before that trip to Spain, I decided to try my hand as an artist. It wasn’t entirely abrupt: in my work I always found it satisfying telling stories in photographs and graphics and drawings, and in spare moments—a whim at first—I picked up a paintbrush to try making images myself. I have no background in art at all, but I liked it, and I dabbled. Then I left my job, and I began to paint more seriously. That was the beginning of my torment: I just wasn’t very good.

After I learned a few skills, I could paint all right—basic stuff. My drawing got better, I knew my way around a color wheel, I could represent in a primitive way. And representation was what I was after—mainly because I didn’t have the courage to be more adventurous. If I were to try to describe what sort of painter I was, I guess you could say I was a figure painter with a distorting style (much like Alice Neel in my fantasies), but the distortion wasn’t always exactly deliberate. I just couldn’t do any better. Decent paintings sometimes emerged, but they seemed almost by accident. And they were accidents I couldn’t necessarily re-create. I...

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059329758X
ISBN 13 
9780593297582
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
432
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