The Work of Art

Informationen zum 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. Klappentext 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 workthe tortuous paths and artistic decisionsthat led to great art. From first glimmers to second thoughts, roads not taken, crises, breakthroughs, on to one triumphant finish after another. Zusammenfassung 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 workthe tortuous paths and artistic decisionsthat led to great art. From first glimmers to second thoughts, roads not taken, crises, breakthroughs, on to one triumphant finish after another....

Autorentext

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.

Klappentext

"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, [and] breakthroughs--on to one triumphant finish after another"--

Zusammenfassung
**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

Leseprobe
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 …