What to get for your hard-to-buy-for friends and/or loved ones during this gift-giving season? It helps if said gift doesn’t break the bank and can also fit into a stocking hung over the fire escape window with care — though you’re gonna need a really big stocking for those beautiful coffee-table art books. Below we look at books about art and artists we reviewed this year and in late 2023 that are definitely worth a second look.
Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995 (2024)
For more than 30 years, Stan Mack took sketchbooks to bars, restaurants, art galleries, and anywhere else New Yorkers got together, capturing real-life dialogue like “Y’know what really fucks up society today? Two things! Television and air conditioning!” and “I say, bullshit, people go into art because it’s an accepted way to fail.” New York denizens still have a lot to say, and this large-format tome reminds us that “While cartoons have in many cases changed from pen and ink to pixels and phones, the humor, pathos, frustrations, passions, regrets, and subway trips that make us all New Yorkers remain the same in any medium.”
Full review by R.C. Baker, June 7, 2024
Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York, by Marin Kosut (2024)
Gentrification, which is both brought on and stomps on artists, is the subject of this ambivalent book. Kosut’s hope: “I want to believe poets still speak in narrow rooms with tin ceilings. I want to believe people still go downtown to hear a poet speak.” But, living in Brooklyn herself, “she recognizes that artists are having to live further and further from Manhattan.” Is nostalgia dangerous? Is New York over? Yes and no. You can decide for yourself.
Full review by Ben Gambuzza, September 16, 2024
The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters, by Dave Hickey (2023, 30th anniversary edition)
Arriving three decades years after its original publication, with five essays added to the book’s original four, this essay collection captures the words of art critic Dave Hickey, who “argued repeatedly and convincingly for beauty as the most effective Trojan horse for smuggling ideas into the unsuspecting noggins of specialists and lay people alike.” Some things never get old.
Full review by Christian Viveros-Fauné, September 11, 2024
The Fluxus Newspaper (Primary Information, 2024)
All 11 issues of The Fluxus Newspaper (1964–1979) have been gathered into a single tabloid-size volume, in which “the editors have let the fervent typography, snippets of news, Frankenstein-esque conglomerations of photos and clip art, mix-and-match quotations … all presented in cleverly rambunctious layouts, do the talking.” Founder George Maciunas proclaimed in 1963’s Fluxus Manifesto, “PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART … to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.” We all need a little Fluxus in our lives right now.
Full review by R.C. Baker, June 3, 2024
Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen: An Authorized Biography, by Brendan Greaves (2024)
A genre-defying brick of a biography about an acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic musician who “manages to simultaneously occupy the worlds of contemporary art, theater, film, and country music.” Depending on your perspective, Allen is an artist who sings or a singer who makes pictures and sculpture, or maybe a filmmaker who writes plays. “The truth,” as Allen has said, “is multiple.”
Full review by Shana Nys Dambrot, August 6, 2024
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