How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves
A beaming testament to how art makes us who we are and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives.
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Barbara Kruger once defined art as “the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.”
Turning that question to the witness, to those of use who look to art for ballast, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find a clearer sense of ourselves in an uncertain world. Art can stoke our dreams and shape our politics; it can challenge or make granular our abstract notions of beauty and belonging. It can make visible and even reconfigure our relationship with the histories and geographies we thought were givens, including the exploited planet we inhabit.
In each chapter, Megan O’Grady looks closely at an individual artwork and the biographical context in which it was made, often drawing on personal conversations with the artists. From there she traces the work's unfurling impact in her own life, implicating other, sometimes unexpected works, lineages, and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention, and to what end? At a time when bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our fracturing public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it propose?
A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to live one’s deepest life, How It Feels to Be Alive both inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture and in our selves, and the connections between the two.
How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves
A beaming testament to how art makes us who we are and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives.
Barbara Kruger once defined art as “the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.”
Turning that question to the witness, to those of use who look to art for ballast, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find a clearer sense of ourselves in an uncertain world. Art can stoke our dreams and shape our politics; it can challenge or make granular our abstract notions of beauty and belonging. It can make visible and even reconfigure our relationship with the histories and geographies we thought were givens, including the exploited planet we inhabit.
In each chapter, Megan O’Grady looks closely at an individual artwork and the biographical context in which it was made, often drawing on personal conversations with the artists. From there she traces the work's unfurling impact in her own life, implicating other, sometimes unexpected works, lineages, and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention, and to what end? At a time when bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our fracturing public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it propose?
A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to live one’s deepest life, How It Feels to Be Alive both inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture and in our selves, and the connections between the two.
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How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves
288
How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves
288
29.0
Pre Order
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374613327 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 04/21/2026 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
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