The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

by Michael Kimmelman

A New York Times bestseller—a dazzling and inspirational survey of how art can be found and appreciated in everyday life

Michael Kimmelman, the prominent New York Times writer and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, is known as a deep and graceful writer across the disciplines of art and music and also as a pianist who understands something about the artist's sensibility from the inside. Readers have come to expect him not only to fill in their knowledge about art but also to inspire them to think about connections between art and the larger world - which is to say, to think more like an artist. Kimmelman's many years of contemplating and writing about art have brought him to this wise, wide-ranging, and long-awaited book.
It explores art as life's great passion, revealing what we can learn of life through pictures and sculptures and the people who make them. It assures us that art - points of contact with the exceptional that are linked straight to the heart - can be found almost anywhere and everywhere if only our eyes are opened enough to recognize it. Kimmelman regards art, like all serious human endeavors, as a passage through which a larger view of life may come more clearly into focus. His book is a kind of adventure or journey.

It carries the message that many of us may not yet have learned how to recognize the art in our own lives. To do so is something of an art itself. A few of the characters Kimmelman describes, like Bonnard and Chardin, are great artists. But others are explorers and obscure obsessives, paint-by-numbers enthusiasts, amateur shutterbugs, and collectors of strange odds and ends. Yet others, like Charlotte Solomon, a girl whom no one considered much of an artist but who secretly created a masterpiece about the world before her death in Auschwitz, have reserved spots for themselves in history, or not, with a single work that encapsulates a whole life.

Kimmelman reminds us of the Wunderkammer, the cabinet of wonders - the rage in seventeenth-century Europe and a metaphor for the art of life. Each drawer of the cabinet promises something curious and exotic, instructive and beautiful, the cabinet being a kind of ideal, self-contained universe that makes order out of the chaos of the world. The Accidental Masterpiece is a kind of literary Wunderkammer, filled with lively surprises and philosophical musings. It will inspire readers to imagine their own personal cabinet of wonders.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Essays, Philosophy, Art History, Art Design, Criticism

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

New York Times architecture critic.

Reviews

[Heidi Wiechert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michael Kimmelman, art critic for the New York Times, gives art trivia and philosophic insights in The Accidental Masterpiece.

... I have come to feel that everything, even the most ordinary daily affair, is enriched by the lessons that can be gleaned from art: that beauty is often where you don't expect to find it; that it is something we may discover and also invent, then reinvent, for ourselves; that the most important things in the world are never as simple as they seem but that the world is also richer when it declines to abide by comforting formulas." pg 5

Though, at times, I felt as if he was getting too deep into the art "appreciation" portions, I learned a great deal about not just unconventional forms of art, but how art can be found in your every day life. It is all a matter of adjusting how you view reality.

There were some historical tidbits I particularly enjoyed. For example, did you know that when Kodak film was invented and made the art of photography available to the general public, that some professional photographers believed the medium was doomed?

"The placing in the hands of the general public a means of making pictures with but little labor and requiring less knowledge has of necessity been followed by the production of millions of photographs," wrote Alfred Stieglitz in 1899. "It is due to this fatal facility that photography as a picture-making medium has fallen into disrepute." pg 32

Wonder what Stieglitz would have made of Instagram.

Or this other bit of trivia, which seemed particularly apropos with the news reporting today that so many people climbing Mount Everest that they've become a danger to themselves and others: humankind didn't always find mountains beautiful or worthy of appreciation. The Romans hated the mountains — they were difficult to maneuver armies across and also enemies had a nasty habit of popping out of them. (Think Hannibal.)

Here's a young Thomas Hobbes' view of mountains:

"Behind a ruin'd mountain does appear
Swelling into two parts, which turgent are
As when we bend our bodies to the ground,
The buttocks amply sticking out are found." pg 55

Hilarious. And now we highly value mountain views and the sublime feeling of ascending a mountain's peak.

"The evolution of the whole modern worldview, including the notion of beauty, you might even say, is exemplified by the evolution of our feelings toward mountains." pg 56

I also enjoyed Kimmelman's thoughts on the art of collecting objects, every day and otherwise. I live with someone who has serious collecting tendencies — notably a large military hat collection. It made me appreciate my husband even more when I found out there are people in the world who collect things like light bulbs to the extent where they've set up light bulb-themed museums. In their own homes.

We've agreed (so far) to keep the collection in one room. So, comparably, I'm doing pretty well. :)

Recommended for readers who enjoy non-fiction reads about art, philosophy and a curious mix of the two.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a little better than I expected. While it didn't achieve greatness, it avoided that lazy, thrown-together feel that similar slim, ruminative books often have. Kimmelman has always struck me as a very likable, humane critic, and his text here reinforces that. I would have liked to see better cover art. Instead of the stock photo of a gumball machine on the back (an echo of the chapter on Wayne Thiebaud and his gumball machine paintings), why not an actual piece of art?

The strongest chapter for me was the one on making pilgrimages to see art which is not readily accessible, in some urban museum. It begins with a discussion of Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, Alsace and moves on to Donald Judd's installations at Marfa, Texas and Michael Heizer's giant earth forms in Nevada, touching on the ego or crustiness of each artist. (Walter de Maria, Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson, and James Turrell also get mentions.) Kimmelman throws in a comment from figurative painter John Currin, who finds earthworks (Heizer, Smithson, and Turrell's type of art) "depressing and sanctimonious" rather than heroic. "I don't like religion," [Currin] told me. "And this sort of work appeals to a type of spirituality I've never been able to work up enthusiasm for..." Kimmelman quotes critic Clement Greenberg on Judd - Greenberg "thought Judd's art lacked taste because it trafficked in 'aimless surprise' and a 'boredom so undifferentiated as to constitute a surprise all in itself'". After a long bit about the rigors involved in constructing Heizer's giant work City (at one point Heizer asked "that hundreds of thousands of yards of dirt be moved 27 inches to align" two different parts of the design), Kimmelman concludes the chapter with a nearly deadly visit to Matthew Barney's outdoor set of Cremaster 2 in the salt flats of Utah, where he became lost and disoriented walking from a broken down car back to the road in total blackness and waist-deep icy waters.

Other chapters discuss Pierre Bonnard and the strange relationship with his lover/muse/wife Marthe; TV schlock artist Bob Ross, Yoko Ono, and the odd art of Ray Johnson; mountain climbing for the views; a vast collection of lightbulbs, which Kimmelman relates to the Barnes Collection and art and wonder cabinets (Kunst- und Wunderkammern); three female artists who died young; the photography of Shackleton's Endurance voyage; the creation of a Philip Pearlstein nude painting (after spending many sessions watching Pearlstein paint, Kimmelman elicits a self-effacing comment: "I expect this one won't sell either. There isn't much of a market for chest hair. But this is what I do..."); and the small, unpretentious subjects of painters Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Thiebaud.

In the first anecdote of the book, Kimmelman relates how years ago he toured the Pompidou museum with Henri Cartier-Bresson. Arriving at one of Bonnard's late self-portraits, Kimmelman finds Bonnard "more pathetic" in it than in photographs:

...an old man before the mirror, shadowy against a brilliantly colored backdrop, his head a pulpy, sunburned blob on a skinny naked torso, the face slightly out of focus, the eyes recessed in the skull. It is one of the humblest, most unsentimental self-portraits in modern art. Cartier-Bresson looked at it for a moment, turned to me, and said, "You know, Picasso didn't like Bonnard and I can imagine why, because Picasso had no tenderness. It is only a very flat explanation to say that Bonnard is looking in a mirror in this painting. He's looking far, far beyond. To me he is the greatest painter of the century. Picasso was a genius, but that is something quite different."

[Sparrow .]

There’s a bitter old guy – an artist, apparently – who sells books on Prospect Park West, in my parents’ Brooklyn neighborhood. I bought four books for my wife for her birthday last year, and this guy – I don’t know his name – pressed this book on me (as a free bonus). “You have to read this!” he insisted. So I did, shortly afterwards.

"The Accidental Masterpiece" has a simple thesis: in the old days, before postimpressionism, art and life were separate. An artist did his work (or her work), then went home, had dinner and fell asleep. But starting around the time of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) art began to look like daily life, and daily life began to look like an “art practice.” In this book, Kimmelman wanders around the USA, meeting artists, noticing how they work and how they live. About a third of the way through the book, he forgets his thesis – because, to be honest, these are actually a bunch of essays he wrote separately for the New York Times – and maybe other periodicals. (I read a galley addition, so the acknowledgments are absent.) But I must say, "The Accidental Masterpiece" is adroit and necessary. (Even though art is widely popular now, very few people actually study contemporary artists. More is known about hedge fund managers than about Philip Pearlstein (to give one example).)

Though Bonnard constantly painted his unsettling but pretty wife – even after her death! – and seemed to be recording the quotidian details of their lives (especially their breakfasts), the rest of the artists just seem like a bunch of obsessed people. For example:

"Finally, in 1969, eleven years after she had begun working on it, 'The Rose' was exhibited, but by then the art world had changed. Conceived in the era of Jackson Pollock and the Beats, the painting, a massive grey monolith of strange delicacy and gloomy bohemianism, emerged in the age of Pop Art and psychedelia. A reviewer dubbed it 'a glorious anachronism.' It was falling apart. Slabs of paint were sliding off it like lava from a volcano. Museums didn’t want to buy it, fearing it would cost a fortune to restore, and DeFeo refused to give it away."

(I opened the book at random, and found that passage.)

How does one define 'art' and 'life'? 'The Rose' is a painting, an abstract painting. It doesn’t seem to be inextricable from the artist’s life, anymore than the Mona Lisa was inextricable from Leonardo’s. An artist is not a taxi driver. Her work is GENERATED by her life; it’s not just a occupation anyone can do. But perhaps Jay DeFeo made a clear delineation between her 'working' hours and her 'personal' hours, just as a taxi driver does. We can’t really know. And Kimmelman doesn’t seem terribly interested. He loves his thesis, more than he loves proving it.

Yesterday I was reading "The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell", and found a great statement: “I would much rather trade my paintings than sell them, but very few people who have what I want are art collectors.” (Motherwell is a better writer than Kimmelman.)

[Angeline · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book felt like I had walked into the middle of someone else's conversation, and while I understood everything that was being said I had missed the context and purpose. I kept wondering what the point was. I also found myself wishing it was either more - a full art history analysis - or less - a short article in a magazine.

[Lara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not every aspect of this book is perfect. There are some chapters that are less interesting or compelling than others. But overall, this is a gem and a complete surprise. The book is about art and the comfort it can give, not just to the viewer, but to the artists making it. Yet this description is not enough - it also explains art that most do not consider beautiful, or consider in any way: it explains where the artist is coming from, why the creator has chosen this subject to devote all of her or his (unfortunately, a majority of the artists covered here are men, with a few notable exceptions) time - in this way, the author makes the reader appreciate what she would not have appreciated, or even considered except in passing, before. He picks art that is generally not appreciated or understood by the majority of the population - he's not examining the Pieta here, folks - and in that way, makes what may be considered aloof a little more accessible.

Kimmelman divides up his chapters to resemble some of the different ways artists have made art in life - from how it depends on your point of view of what beauty is ("The Art of the Lofty Perspective") to the way artists can fixate on one small aspect of their lives and make it their world ("The Art of Making a World") to how art can come from the harshest of circumstances ("The Art of Finding Yourself When You're Lost") to my favorite, how some artists can immerse themselves completely in one work, one piece, and make it the reason they get up in the morning, for their entire lives ("The Art of Maximizing Your Time"). This book covers modern artists and Yoko Ono and Pierre Bonnard and mountain vistas, and it's only 226 pages. And the author has some insight about each! There is overlap amongst the chapters - one theme can easily apply to another section of the book - but that does not make it contradictory in the least. If anything, it lets the reader see a piece of art from several different viewpoints, and consider the tunnel-vision of the artist in fixating on this piece.

I'll never be a great art-lover, but the author makes me think about the world around me. He gives me a glimpse of what these artists see, and how something that on first glance is nothing special, can be called art.

[Christine Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This slim book is a fabulous collection of meditations on the art that surrounds us everyday. Written by Michael Kimmelman, art critic for the New York Times, it is a collection of essays on paintings, sculpture, etc that is perceived as Art, and the process of looking at our lives and the lives of others as being artful. One of his underlying themes is the importance of passion in creating art. That passion can be in the form of collecting an example of every light bulb known to exist and sharing that collection in your basement. As the former curators of the Squished Penny Museum www.squished.com I can really relate! Or the passion can take the form of putting yourself in harm's way or at least risk in order to experience something like the Antarctic explorers and the photographer who documented their journey. Kimmelman provides a thoughtful reflection on what art is, and made me think about why so many people seek art in their lives.

One of my favorite pieces in the collection explores the PBS denizen of peace and tranquility among happy trees, Bob Ross. Michael Kimmelman instinctively grasps Ross' love for both art and the process of finding that artistic space within yourself, a passion that he shared for hundreds of quietly encouraging hours of his televised paint-along series. The most provocative part of the essay was when Kimmelman shared the fact that Bob Ross knew that most viewers were not painting along, but simply enjoyed watching him paint. Kimmelman explores the idea that it was the sight of creation rather than the act of creation that was so compelling. It is this kind of insight that makes this book well worth exploring.

[E L K Y · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would not say this book is bad, but at times it feels incredibly pretentious.
Overall, you will learn something new about the scene of artists that focus, as the title says, more on life, and your ability to change and influence it based on stories from real-life artists.

My main problem with this book is the readability, at times I feel it's trying to be so fancy with its word it loses the human touch it so desperately tries to have.

[Brynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We can learn, among other things, that a life lived with art in mind might itself be a kind of art." (3)

"But having spent much of my own life looking at it, I have come to feel that everything, even the most ordinary daily affair, is enriched by the lessons that can be gleaned from art: that beauty is often where you don't expect to find it; that it is something we may discover and also invent, then reinvent, for ourselves; that the most important things in the world are never as simple as they seem but that the world is also richer when it declines to abide by comforting formulas." (5)

"Bonnard is the great example of an artist who made the most of a relationship that, to outsiders, seemed tragic, but which proves that all relationships are finally unknowable except to those inside them." (11)

"And on one level, that's the art's optical point: it's about looking hard enough to recognize, say, that things appear different when seen out of the corner of your eye or squinting into the sun or staring from light into shadow." (13)

"As Bonnard proves, a circumscribed world can be made to seem enormous through a rich enough imagination." (20)

Bonnard: "It is better to be bored on one's own than with others" (22)

"The inherent poignancy in any photograph, whether a Stieglitz or a family memento, entails both the private memory it tries to preserve, by stopping time, and also the hope, however tiny or even unconscious on an amateur's part, that something interesting might result in the expression on the face of a beloved relative or in some other serendipitous gem captured when the camera's shutter is released." (32)

"This picture would be less likable, I suspect, if we learned that a professional had planned it, because the amateur's fluke reminds us of a basic fact in life, which is heartening: that art is out there waiting to be captured, the only question being whether we are prepared to recognize it." (45)

"Art on one level already may be a state of mind. Of course it is first of all a physical object with which we interact in the moment. But after we have seen a work, what do we take away except a memory of it? And memory is thought, a mental seed planted by the artist, which is reproduced in as many different variations as the number of people in whom the memory exists. What makes art good is partly its power to proliferate as a variable memory, an intangible concept, filtered through individual consciousness." (81)

"Be alert to the senses. Elevate the ordinary. Art is about a heightened state of awareness. Try to treat everyday life, or at least parts of it, as you would a work of art." (84)

"'Life makes sense not when reason tells you that everything is as it should be,' he wrote. 'Life makes sense when some imponderable and apparently random event confirms your most irrational prejudices about the world." (85)

"Collecting is way to bring order to the world, which is what museums, our public collectors, do." (95)

"Just as art promises wonderment - an access to a realm beyond the everyday, through the experience of which we may understand the everyday better - a collection of things, even everyday things, promises wonderment, too, as these things become no longer everyday, having been enshrined by a collector." (97)

"Connoisseurship entails making distinctions through slow, comparative observation, whether it involves paintings or wooden ducks." (104)

Sol LeWitt: "Don't worry about cool. Make your own uncool. Make your own, you own world." (119)

"Art, not unlike raising a child, may entail much sacrifice and periods of despair, but, with luck, the effort will produce something that outlives you." (130)

"Novelty in creative endeavors usually arises from routine - you have to be familiar with something before you know what is novel." (151)

On Giorgio Mornadi: "His message - look slowly and hard at something subtle and small - was simple but turned out to be plenty." (172)

"Even via a benign and comfortable form of travel, a modest pilgrimage may restore to the act of looking at art its desired and essential otherness. It can get us back to the root of art as an expression of what's exceptional in life." (177)

"On the other hand, Kelley's pictures tell us that the world is full of small miracles. Its basic democratic message is that these miracles - whether they are squashed pats of butter or fluttering flags - are accessible to all of us, at almost any time, if we are just prepared to look for them. This is the message of all great art that celebrates the beauty of ordinary things." (214)

"A vivid memory can play a mysterious role in the imagination out of proportion to its significance, like a smell or some notes of music or a breeze that triggers the recollection of a pleasant trip or a childhood game or a lost relative." (215)

"Thiebaud invites us to bring a careful discrimination to our appreciation of the world around us...It is typical of an artist like Thiebaud to make the best of this mundane situation - waiting in an airport - and to see art in what might appear to be a waste of time." (223)

[Ren Juza · Rating 3 out of 5]

huzzah! finally sat down and finished this one. i liked these super niche artists x art history intro class vibes, might be a 3.5 star read. nonfiction always be goin a bit slow tbh

[Mikey B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicely written book

This book is not about art per se, but more about how art came about. I enjoyed in particular the chapters on collecting and Antarctica. Collecting led to museums and what went into them (art). Antarctica was about travel photography and how the photographs taken there are now a part of our historical memory.

What is particularly nice is how non-judgmental the author is - this adds value to every chapter and the various types of art represented.

In the last chapter Michael Kimmelman relates well the realism of objects painted in our current era to past era's - capturing something innocuous like a gum-ball machine or earlier representations of simple commonplace things that surround people in everyday life. Capturing everyday things that we hardly notice is art in itself.

All-in-all an enjoyable read.

[Pollopicu · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm reading all the reviews and am wondering if we're discussing the same book...

I can't say I remember much details about it.. Mostly interesting yet useless information. It's about how people's projects and passions accidentally become works of art. In one chapter of the book I remember the author talking about a friend who had this modest library in his small NYC city apt, how it had become sort of his masterpiece. The books were placed just so, not necessarily organized.. and I got the impression the collection was nourished throughout it's growth and had become part of this man's personality. I thought that was extremely interesting since I've always felt like that about my own collection. But other than that story the book was pretty dull.

[Kasandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some mildly interesting essays on the place of art in life and the life of particular artists; most of these were artists I'd already heard of or seen works by, so the essays weren't particularly edifying. If you make art or have any appreciation of it, these essays will probably seem a bit simplistic to you as well. I can't think of an appropriate audience for this book other than perhaps those people who see artists as weird outsiders or snobs, and who see art as a waste of time (and I don't personally know anyone like that). Not a bad book, not completely uninteresting, but nothing particularly noteworthy, on the other hand.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is maybe the third time I tried to start this essay collection, and I'm so happy I finally got past the first one. I get why it's placed first, but the rest of the pieces are SO much better. Genuinely well-written, meticulously researched (often hands-on), and wonderfully woven. I don't know that there's anything exceptionally new said here, but half the pleasure of an essay is the structure, and most of the other half is the weird shit you learn on the journey to the point, so it's all good. The standout essay for me, though all were solid, was "The Art of Having a Lofty Perspective." Beautiful example of a fab essay -- and beautiful, period. Total pleasure to read!

[Mitch Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This definitely was not a perfect book. A lot of the chapters felt tedious and boring. His writing gets a bit purple and long-winded at times. But overall, I appreciated the ideas that the author presented.

[Carl Denton · Rating 1 out of 5]

ugh this book was such an uncritical sentimental mess. please don't subject yourself to this

[Lizzy · Rating 2 out of 5]

TLDR: It reads like a lecture, and it's about as fun as reading a textbook-- you're either enthralled by the subject, or you couldn't care less.

I would have quit early on had I not been required to read the whole thing for an Art History + Studio Art program.

This book is not that bad if you go in with the expectation of reading trivia about obscure famous artists intertwined with anecdotes from the author. It's also like a textbook, as it tends to run off into the weeds about facts and points that are mildly related but ultimately you couldn't care less about.

I think he gets his main point of appreciating the objects and experiences of everyday life across relatively well. By reading this book, you will learn that you, too, can appreciate everyday life, if you didn't already know you could do that.

I'd say the main benefit of this book is to help you live out your Good Will Hunting fantasies-- absorbing random information to pull out of your back pocket at random times when you overhear a conversation about something or someone discussed in the book.

However, I had a very very very difficult time staying focused. It's quite boring. Again, like a textbook. I could hardly make it through a 20 page chapter in a single sitting, and this is coming from a person who would rather sit still for 12+ hours working on a project than to take breaks. The content is chock-full of references to artists, writers, critics, friends, artwork, places, etc. If you're unfamiliar with the background knowledge Kimmelman has, it's difficult to keep track of what's what and who's who and what on earth he's describing without looking something up every other paragraph to claw for a more substantial frame of reference.

Additionally, what killed me the most is the way Kimmelman describes, critiques, and analyzes the works mentioned. He recounts personal experiences and historical events pretty well, and I stayed relatively interested, but I do not enjoy whatsoever his art-critic style of writing. Maybe if I were a fellow art critic, I'd enjoy his language, presumptions, and conclusions more, but I'm not part of that world. I'm not sure who his intended audience is, but a lot of his conclusions are a stretch, and I kept getting annoyed that he would jump to such a conclusion and then teach his opinion to us if it's a lesson that we should take away as fact. I think the people who would enjoy this the most are either other art critics who already like to overcomplicate art, or idiots who can't think for themselves. He uses extremely flamboyant language and spins up all sorts of stories, secret meanings, intentions, and metaphors for each piece that I think is overkill. In addition, he tends to generalize the reactions of an audience of a piece of art-- he'll say something along the lines of "the general audience craves to search for themselves in the piece". Like, no. The general audience will probably look at the colors and the subject and be like "Nice." His art-critic writing always jerks me out of my immersion because I am in complete disbelief that he's going so overboard about something that isn't as significant as he's making it seem.

The best chapter is The Art of Finding Yourself When You're Lost. It was the best because most of it is a historical account of a very charismatic photographer, Frank Hurley, who had an insane journey to Antarctica and back, twice. It also helped that the historical account spared hardly any room for Kimmelman's personal thoughts. The worst chapter is The Art of Being Artless, because he tries to make every photographer sound like some sort of exploratory genius with hidden irony who's preserving a historic moment, frozen in time. It was painful to read, and all of my scribbles in the margins were about how much I didn't care about anything he was writing.

I'm walking away satisfied with the fact that I know a bunch of random crap that a normal person doesn't. However, the entire time I wished I was reading something else. And honestly, for a book about art by an art critic, the cover is totally garbage.

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know why I keep believing that I can enjoy non-fiction. Every time I read it I can't help but feel the content is better suited for a different media, like a documentary or podcast. While Michael Kimmelman includes reproductions of many of the artworks he discusses—and I know that obtaining the rights is a difficult and expensive process—it's so underwhelming to read a description of a miles long piece of earth art and then see a black and white 2" photo of it.

An Accidental Masterpiece takes the worst parts of art writing and the worst parts of memoir and cobbles them together in a book that's so boring that I couldn't read a twenty page chapter in one sitting. I studied art so I probably know more than the average person, but instead of feeling enlightened by Kimmelman's writing, his flowery descriptions took me back to those terrible art history lectures where my professor spent three hours reading from a textbook. Sure, the chapters have enticing names like "The Art of Having a Lofty Perspective," "The Art of Finding Yourself When You're Lost," "The Art of Staring Productively at Naked Bodies," or "The Art of Gum-Ball Machines, and Other Simple Pleasures," but everything is superficial. The author describes the work, blathers about his personal experiences seeing it or meeting with the artist, and maybe throws in some social context or a pithy quote. The artists featured in this book are overwhelming American or European men. While there's a good variety in art style, period, and medium, it's still kind of insulting that Kimmelman continues the tradition of viewing "Masterpieces" as the realm of old white guys.

[Barrie Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking for something more personal. When the subtitle to your book is “On the Life of Art and Vice Versa,” I expect the author to cough up a little more self-revelation.

Why was it important for Kimmelman to write this book? What did he get out of writing it? His account of the time he spent with Philip Pearlstein and his models, Desirée and Alexander, appeared capable of providing us with some description of the meaning or emotional weight of his time watching the artist finish the painting. After weeks spent in the company of the artist and his models, Kimmelman stated he “became melancholy” in knowing that “the end was near.”

I thought, that’s it? That’s the depth of your emotional attachment to the work and the people you spent time with as they created it together?

There are lots of interesting anecdotes and stories of how various artists approached their work. And some interesting connections made between the art, the artist, and the time they lived in or the philosophies that guided them. But, Life? I’m sorry. I could find very little of that in this book.

[Lingyuxiu Zhong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a college art course but only the best parts. Of the 10 chapters, my favorites are:
4. the art of making art without lifting a finger (about living life intentionally as an act of Art)
5. the art of collecting lightbulbs (collection as an act of wonderment at the marvolous, of creating order out of chaos, and as an act of internment and burial and hence bestowing a sense of permanence)
6. the art of maximizing your time (art can't hold death at bay, but can provide clarity and purpose while one's still around)
9. the art of the pilgrimage (art didn't used to travel to us, but rather has to be seen after a pilgrimage)
10. the art of gumball machines, and other simple pleasures (ordinary objects are neither naive nor primitive, they just had a plainspoken eloquence, are democratic in nature, and opsortunities to suspend the imperfections of the world to contemplate how things ought to be)

[Phyllis Elkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a terrific book on all aspects of different types of art. It is provocative especially in the beginning. He discusses "what is beauty." I wrote a whole three pages after thinking about this question he posed. I would never have thought about some of the types of art he brings into the forground. We tend to think of paintings hung on the wall, or sculpture in a garden. He discusses collections and why people collect...just because they have a passion/obsession for an object he concludes. He identifies artists who are not the most popular today but have this passion for what they do. What a ride

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kimmelman's style of writing make this one of the more readable books on artists. The reader is able to experience both the personalities and the artistic passions of a wide range of artists. But what makes this book more unusual than other contemporary art books is the way Kimmelman interweaves art and life. No longer does one feel that art exists only in a sterile white box environment or in the rarefied sanctuaries of museums. No longer is the artist another contemporary celebrity. Art and artists exist everywhere, sometimes quietly and anonymously making their ways into the world.

[Kim Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michael Kimmelman was the chief art critic for the New York Times when he wrote this book of essays. The main premise of the book was that one can find and enjoy art in the little simple and sometimes mundane elements of everyday life. I found it challenging to find a real connection among the various artists and their sometimes bizarre passionate pursuits. Some chapters were much more impactful than others. But the book did inspire me to learn more about a few of the artists he profiled.

[christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great writing by art critic Kimmelman. His approach to this collection of essays is capsulized best here: "Art becomes our entree to the the sublime. It illustrates that beauty is not something static or predictable and always there at the top of a mountain, but an organic, shifting, elusive, and therefore more desirable object of our devotion, which we must make an effort to grasp."

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating collection of essays with insights into art, artists, and the lessons once can learn from both. The tone is wistful, but not maudlin, and each essay bears reading several times through.

[Iva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Některé části knihy jsou nesmírně zajímavé, např. o fotáku, servisu formule 1, plavba lodi Endurance... Některé kapitoly vtipně napsané s nadhledem, vysokohorská turistika, ale bohužel poměrně velka část obsahu je tak trochu nudná. Ale stále platí, že kniha je dobrá a stojí za to si ji přečíst.

[David Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A conversational chat with the New York Times art critic on a wide range of topics. Kimmelman is adept at sharing his fascination for unusual people, places and things, especially artists and their works.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. There were some interesting stories and historical tidbits and I liked hearing about the author's interaction with various artists but otherwise, I found this book kind of dry and boring, hence it took me forever to finish. Oh well.

[Tim Belonax · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a solid, enjoyable read that was possibly ahead of its time in terms of combining art and philosophy. But it doesn’t quite hold its strength today since that type of book is more common. Nonetheless, this was my first full Kimmelman read and I’ll be looking for more of his work.

[Jasper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intelligent but always lucid

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of essays on art and life, lots of interesting bits