The Accidental Masterpiece: On The Art Of Life And Vice Versa

The Accidental Masterpiece: On The Art Of Life And Vice Versa

An exploration of art as a great passion of life, written by a chief art critic forThe New York Times,considers what can be learned through pictures, sculpture, and the artists who create them, in a personal exploration that invites readers to become more aware of art and the creative spirit within one's own life. 30,000 first printing.From Publishers WeeklyThechief art critic of theNew York Times, Kimmelman (Portraits) delivers an uplifting art-is-good-for-you message that is surprisingly easy to swallow. Intelligent but not obscure, warm but not intrusively personal, Kimmelman manages in 10 chapters to cover a lot of ground, with a working definition of "art" that goes far beyond what's found in galleries and museums. The reader encounters not only the likes of Pierre Bonnard and Matthew Barney but Hugh Francis Hicks, a serious collector of lightbulbs, and Frank Hurley, whose miraculously preserved images of the 1914 AntarcticEndurance expedition are as haunting as any "art." This is Kimmelman's point: though passionately concerned with "gallery" art, he is more concerned with the rewards of aesthetic experience, how the attentiveness we bring to art can help to make a "daily masterpiece" of ordinary life. Kimmelman's enthusiasm is infectious; he has an impressive ability to incorporate recent artistic trends into his argument; the chapter on "The Art of the Pilgrimage," for instance, discusses the earth art of Michael Heizer and the minimalism of Donald Judd with a clarity that doesn't shortchange the work's difficulty. If Proust can change your life, so can Bonnard.(Aug.) Copyright