“What attracted me to criticism, before I knew to call it criticism, was its assertion that ideas were central to life, which was not always, in my experience, taken for granted,” Megan O’Grady writes in her new collection of essays. How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Ourselveswhich will hit shelves on April 21. O’Grady—a New York Times art critic and professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder—writes here about artists from painter Agnes Martin to photographer Carrie Mae Weems to performance artist Bob L. In each case, she attempts to explain why their ideas were central to her life and her experiences with separation, motherhood, and living in an increasingly authoritarian America. She writes that art “raises unanswerable questions,” sparks “energy, joy, and challenge,” and “suggests new forms of questioning and belonging.”
Fine arts are often viewed as an elitist project for elitist audiences, an aesthetic experience that can only be accessed through multiple advanced degrees and a boatload of money. But O’Grady tells the Observer that in her own life she has found that “we need art. A lot of us do it, almost as a kind of life buoy – or did, certainly growing up. The music, films and books I read as a child taught me who I could be or what I wanted, or how to think about myself in relation to the world or as part of society – really everything about being human.”
Many people find music, books, and movies more accessible than the visual arts. One of O’Grady’s targets is in position How does it feel to be alive To go out into the world is to show how her interactions with the fine arts and with visual artists were powerful, personal, and poignant in a way that people often associate with less cultured culture. Her description of her first viewing of an abstract Agnes Martin painting Friendship– A kind of golden mesh – it could almost be a memory of a beloved pop song:
“The richness of the gold soothed me, made me feel full, as if I were facing the sun rather than setting out to tear down my life. The painting created a window on the wall, but it did not allow me to see through it; it was a threshold to something too big for me to take in all at once… It startled me to find myself in tears.”
However, O’Grady insists that affective emotionalism need not preclude intellectual engagement or revelation. In a long and researched essay on representation, self-representation, and mothers and daughters, she discusses Carrie Mae Weems’s book. Kitchen table series (1990) and the portraits and portraits of French Impressionist Berthe Morisot. Artists helped her see that “it’s really hard to have your own point of view when you’re aware of everyone’s point of view of you.” She also explains that Weems’ series “tells the fictional story of a woman, played by the photographer herself, and the different roles she embodies, such as mother, lover, friend, and self.”
Many Black female artists have spoken about how powerful it is to see a female artist representing Black women in a direct, respectful, and accurate way. O’Grady is white, but she wrote in her book that “something about seeing mother and daughter in their mirrors made me resentful.” As a young woman, O’Grady “got to know her daughter better.” Kitchen table series Who is with the mother? In particular, she was struck by the way the mother was “modeling to her daughter things about what impending femininity was like,” and that the modeling was both conscious and unconscious at the same time. O’Grady says it was a vision that haunted her as she raised her daughter.
O’Grady’s complex examination of the power and dangers of self-representation is reflected in her own approach to the sectarian aspects of the faith. How does it feel to be alive. She notes in the book that when she first started writing about art, she often kept herself in the background—she was not a character or presence in her writing. But over time, she felt that including herself, or representing herself, could also have value. Talk to artists, or go with Bob, she says. L to Ferguson, where he was creating artwork about the water crisis, “Those experiences were very important to me.”
Speaking about the artwork’s direct impact on her, O’Grady says: “What I was hoping for, of course, was that readers would read it, and not have the same experience that I had, but be pushed to think about other things in their lives, a book or a work of art, or something that maybe made them see something different.” Putting herself in her work mirrors the way an artist like Weems puts herself in her work. By showing herself, Weems allows her audience to think about self and identity in relation to art. Through her own medium, O’Grady tries to give that gift to her readers as well.
These gifts—recognition, solidarity, confusion, and possibility—are ones that our current system has made clear it does not want us to have. O’Grady finished the book shortly after Donald Trump’s reelection, so she doesn’t much discuss his attacks on arts funding or his interference with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But in our conversation, O’Grady points out that autocrats often target the arts early and often. The arts “make people feel things, make them upset and angry.” Trump’s blanket censorship “shows how important the arts are. I think in our capitalist society we sometimes forget how important they are.” O’Grady also says that despite the current series of mounting crises, she doesn’t want her students to feel like they have to do political work or that art should be something “used for political purposes.” This seems like a political statement too in a way. Authoritarians want all art and expression to serve the state, which is why the Trump-influenced Kennedy Center is suing artists who refuse to perform and use their talents to legitimize or glorify the ruler.
Making beauty or meaning that does not acknowledge the power of politics can itself be a kind of resistance. “The history of art is full of stories of people who redefined the world for each other on their own terms, who made room for each other in a world that did not,” O’Grady writes. reading How does it feel to be aliveit is clear that by making room for herself in art, O’Grady wants to make room for the rest of us.
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