 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com Whether writing about Jasper Johns or Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman or Richard Serra, Calvin Tomkins shows why it is both easier and more difficult to make art today. If art can be anything, where do you begin? For more than three decades Calvin Tomkins’s incisive profiles in The New Yorker have given readers the most satisfying reports on contemporary art and artists available in any language. In Lives of the Artists ten major artists are captured in Tomkins’s cool and ironic style to record the new directions art is taking during these days of limitless freedom. As formal technique and rigorous training continue to fall away, art has become an approach to living. As the author says, “the lives of contemporary artists are today so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation.” Among the artists profiled are Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the reigning heirs of deliberately outrageous art that feeds off the allegedly corrupting influences of capitalist glut and entertainment; Matthew Barney of the pregenital obsessions; Cindy Sherman, who manages multiple transformations as she disappears into her own work; and Julian Schnabel, who has forged a second career as award-winning film director. Tomkins shows that the making of art remains among the most demanding jobs on earth. Average Customer Rating:  
Engaging Stories of Modern Artists
| Customer Rating: | I loved this book! I actually thought it was going to be short biographies of Old Master artists, so I was surprised to find essays about the contemporary art world. The artists portrayed here are all modern (and living) conceptual and/or abstract artists. The current "hot" artists like Damien Hirst are here, as well as the older members of the modern art movement, like Jasper Johns.
I don't follow the modern art scene that closely, so this was all refreshing and new for me. I was familiar with some of the names in the book, but not with all of the artwork described. Tomkins clearly loves art and appreciates artists, and is able to write in a clear, lucid manner about the artworks themselves. None of that crazy "artspeak" jargon that I've read in some of the modern art magazines. He followed the artists around to get his material, and clearly spent quite a bit of time with all of them. After reading each chapter, I felt compelled to look for art by those particular artists, and he really piqued my interest in them. I had heard of and seen artwork by a couple of the artists in the book, but hadn't been impressed by it previously, but the way that Tomkins explains the art and lets the artist explain the motives behind their work, it made me want to look at the art again with a new perspective.
If you are unfamiliar with the modern art world or are interested in learning about contemporary art, this book would be a perfect introduction to a few of the top names out there today. It's in-depth and beautifuly written. |
Art Insights
| Customer Rating:  | Calvin Tomkins, a quite talented writer, who loves Marcel Duchamp, strings previously published magazine articles on several contemporary artists into an interesting book.
I found the words devoted to Jasper Johns the best, but this may be because the other subjects of Mr. Tomkins' book mostly create art that eludes my personal appreciation.
If you are interested in the buying side related to similar art (including works by some of these same artists), please consider purchasing Giuseppe Panza's "Memories of a Collector." |
A portrait of the motives and minds of some great artists
| Customer Rating: | In an instant gratification society where 15 minutes seems to be a long time and an hour devoted to one subject is almost a career, Tomkins explains how 10 of today's artists became great.
In brief -- it takes decades of devotion to a central alluring ideal. No artist sets out to do an instant $100,000 or $ 1 million work of art; instead, they create to explain the world as they see it. When they succeed, we lesser mortals call them great and pay them their due.
James Turrell is an example; he's worked since 1974 to turn an extinct volcano just west of Arizaona's Painted Desert into an innovative celestial observatory. Most people have heard of Stonehenge; his Roden Crater is the first innovative celestial artwork in 4,000 years.
Four thousand years from now, people will view his art and, if imagination is still riotous and ridiculous, they'll create legends of how it was built by Merlin and the Druids, or by Navajo medicine men and Coyotes. Terell may be a Trickster for a far distant future.
To start, he built and lived in a tiny log cabin for 19 months to study the crater's light and landscape. Sculpting the landscape is an ancient North American craft, as shown by the Moundbuilders. Watson Brake, in northeast Louisiana, was built 2,500 years before the great Egyptian pyramids, about 3,500 years before Stonehenge.
Egyptians built pyramids, as did the Maya and Aztec. Europeans built henges. In North America, the landscape is an inspiration from the Hudson River School to the Group of Seven to the Sedona buttes in the background of Krazy Kat cartoons and to Monument Valley where John Ford filmed his most notable westerns. Terrell continues a proud legacy.
The genius is not in the landscape; Tomkins explains how artists such as Terrell see something that slips invisibly past the vision of us mere mortals. He does a beautiful job of piecing together the artistry, dedication, skill and labour required to draw out a new vision from old familiar surroundings.
Art has an interesting evolution. For the Pharaohs, it was a sign of permanence. A painting of people baking bread meant the occupant of a tomb would have bread for eternity. Gradually, art evolved into picturesque and decorative.
Today's art explains things we cannot otherwise understand, such as Terell and his look into the universe. Tomkins makes it real for the average reader who cannot otherwise take part in such creativity, deftly explaining 10 significant modern artists.
All in all, a superb book about a usually unfathomable subject.
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