1: Take a Look?
A repackaged set of articles from The New Yorker. I liked the short form for each chapter of this book and many of the descriptive or explanatory insights, but think the individual articles probably had more impact when read closer to the event being described, normally a special art exhibit at some museum.
The author, Peter Schjeldahl, certainly knows a lot about art and artists but comes across in this book as more interested in showing his erudition through a prose style that seems to be always in search of the obscure word or phrase towards the destination of a sweeping judgement.
The back cover of the dust jacket shows a man who is as close to the "look" (beat up, buttoned-up rain coat with woolen scarf carelessly wrapped around a neck crowned by a head with wind-swept gray hair) of the stereotypical New York City intellectual as you might ever want to find. I also found the twenty questions (of course adoringly posed by famous art-world friends) format of the introduction annoying. My final minor annoyance is the fact that a one-paragraph only description of the author (located on the inside flap of the dust jacket) manages to shoehorn in the fact that he "has taught at Harvard University." How nice.
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