Art Monster
On the Impossibility of New York
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Why do people choose the life of an artist, and what happens when they find themselves barely scraping by? Why does New York City, even in an era of hypergentrification, still beckon to aspiring artists as a place to make art and remake yourself?
Art Monster takes readers to the margins of the professional art world, populated by unseen artists who make a living working behind the scenes in galleries and museums while making their own art to little acclaim. Writing in a style that is by turns direct and poetic, personal and lyrical, Marin Kosut reflects on the experience of dedicating your life to art and how the art world can crush you. She examines the push toward professionalization, the devaluing of artistic labor, and the devastating effects of gentrification on cultural life. Her nonlinear essays are linked by central themes--community, nostalgia, precarity, alienation, estrangement--that punctuate working artists' lives. The book draws from ten years of fieldwork among artists and Kosut's own experiences curating and cofounding artist-run spaces in Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Chinatown. At once ethnography, memoir, tirade, and love letter, Art Monster is a street-level meditation on the predicament of artists in the late capitalist metropolis.
About this Author
Marin Kosut has published fiction and nonfiction in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Cabinet Magazine, Hobart, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. She founded Pay Fauxn, a gallery in an abandoned pay phone shell at a Brooklyn bus stop. A MacDowell fellowship recipient, she holds a PhD in sociology from the New School and teaches the sociology of art at SUNY Purchase College. She lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews
Art Monster can't be contained in a blurb. Light on its toes and sharp in its wit, it's both a celebration and an excoriation of New York's art world. An absolute delight to read a book that deftly describes those of us who "yearn for the mud"-- I loved it.
Kosut combines ethnography, cultural analysis, and personal essay in a way that feels seamlessly elegant and exceedingly smart. She possesses a sharp eye for the most telling of details, a level of analytic insight that would be the envy of even the most seasoned ethnographers, and tremendous literary skill. Engaging, lively, and beautifully written, this book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the social meaning and definition of artistic identity, what it means to do artistic labor, and the role of the arts in the social lives of cities.
Art Monster is both an ode to and an interrogation of New York--amid the city's history, ambition, and impossibilities, what kinds of art can survive and flourish? Marin Kosut's pursuit of this answer is not to be missed--this is an important book for anyone making art right now.
A must read for artists who don't believe in selling out, fear the inevitability of doing so, and are looking for company as they lay their course through late-stage art capitalism.
Compelling writing, vivid descriptions, and real insight into the real art world.
A shape-shifting hybrid of a scholarly text, conversation, manifesto, and love letter, Art Monster is a book that gestures continually toward its own evolution. Kosut writes in a tone that feels alive and dynamic on the page, unafraid to let her work transform as she is writing it.
A simultaneously gritty and seductive collage of what it means to make and experience art in the center of it all.
Books about art that are both insightful and compellingly readable (not to mention funny) are exceedingly rare, but Kosut has written just such a work.
Named one of the ten best books of 2024
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