How is the life of a creative person—an artist, a designer, a composer—related to his or her work? This week, we’ve brought together stories from the archive that explore that question. Some, like Janet Malcolm’s Profile of the painter David Salle, speak to the elusiveness of the artist’s “real” self; others, like Peter Schjeldahl’s critical take on Damien Hirst, examine how an artist’s work is shaped by his economic surroundings.
“Forty-One False Starts” (1994): Janet Malcolm’s forty-one-part Profile of David Salle confronts the complexity of the artist’s life.
“Banksy Was Here” (2007): Lauren Collins goes in search of Banksy, whose anonymity allows him “to seek fame while shielding him from the meaner consequences of fame-seeking.”
“The Misfit” (2005): Judith Thurman profiles Rei Kawakubo, the Japanese designer who insists that “she works in a vacuum of influence and a tradition of her own creation,” and whose label, Comme des Garçons, has changed women’s fashion.
“Eerily Composed” (2008): Rebecca Mead on Nico Muhly, the brilliant young composer whose “associative intelligence … is facilitated by Google and iTunes.”
“Spot On” (2012): Peter Schjeldahl on Damien Hirst: he “will go down in history as a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth. That’s not Old Master status, but it’s immortality of a sort.”
“Drawn from Life” (2012): Judith Thurman on the cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Bechdel says, “By looking inward deeply I’m trying to get outside myself and connect with other people.”
“Dealer’s Hand” (2013): Nick Paumgarten profiles the superstar art dealer David Zwirner, who says, “One of the reasons there’s so much talk about money is that it’s so much easier to talk about than the art.”
We hope that you enjoy these pieces, as well as the stories we’ve already shared in previous collections, and that you’ll follow us on Facebook and Twitter, where our regular contributors continue to recommend their favorite articles from the archive.
