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Overview
In these ten intertwined essays, one of our most provocative young novelists proves that she is just as stylish and outrageous an art critic. For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us."Art Objects is a book to be admired for its effort to speak exorbitantly, urgently and sometimes beautifully about art and about our individual and collective need for serious art."--Los Angeles Times
Synopsis
In these ten intertwined essays, one of our most provocative young novelists proves that she is just as stylish and outrageous an art critic. For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us.
"Art Objects is a book to be admired for its effort to speak exorbitantly, urgently and sometimes beautifully about art and about our individual and collective need for serious art."—Los Angeles Times
Susan Shapiro
My mother knew that books would lead me astray and she was right," says Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects, her ambitious new essay collection. The author of such provocative recent novels as Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, and Art and Lies, she here digs into such disparate topics as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, art appreciation, modern lit and lesbianism. The academic pieces are filled with such abstractions as, "The reality of art is the reality of the imagination," and far too many quotes from Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Blake.
Winterson, who lives in England, is much more spicy and engaging when she gets personal. "I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write," she states in The Semiotics of Sex, where she also argues that the "Queer World" misreads art as sexuality and that a great deal of gay writing about the AIDS crisis is therapy and release -- but not art. Her charming essay The Psychometry of Books chronicles how, brought up in a home without books, she is now an avid book collector, calling it "an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate." As in her fiction, the author is most exciting when writing intimately about obsession. --Salon
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Jeanette Winterson is one of Britain's brightest alternative literary lights. Her quirky, madly poetic prose has won her a loyal cult following and a lot of respect from the mainstream. —H.J.Kirchhoff, The Globe and Mail"Thrilling, persuasive, challenging and written with a skill and beauty entirely shorn of artifice...Should be bought, read, re-read and read out loud as often as possible." —The Edmonton Journal
"Brilliant essays, the finest I=ve read in years, a wonderful, timely endorsement of what art is and what it isn't. In 10 separate ways, from 10 different angles, she takes clear, intelligent aim at the modern wish that art be less arty, and more entertaining; that art be easier for people to chew and quickly digest...Should be required reading." —The Ottawa Citizen
"It is invigorating to read these essays by a woman who believes in art, full stop." —The Globe and Mail
"A delight...I find Winterson an invigorating critic, as well as an exhilarating literary soul mate...At a time when literary commentary is bogged down by dense, impenetrable post-modern and post-structuralist twaddle, Art Objects...offers itself as a breath of fresh thought and fresh expression." —Kitchener-Waterloo Record
"Brilliant, challenging, funny, highly personal." —Family Practice
"A witty, reasoned look at the power of, and our powerful need for, all forms of art." —The Ottawa Citizen
"A book of essays to set your intellect on fire." Bruce Powe, The Financial Post
"Potent.... Part soulful meditation and part fiery manifesto.... Ms. Winterson is a passionate writer.... Hers is a book born of a restless, uncompromising intelligence and a life of practicing what she preaches, of taking the kind of artistic risks she so fiercely espouses." —The New York Times Book Review
"Winterson is in fine form in these essays about art, arguing, admonishing, infuriating, teasing...She fights solemnly, beguilingly, for ecstasy and silence and the revival of our ability to contemplate...She says much that is important about energy and passion. Her stalwart defence of the modern is a challenge to the barrenness and niggliness with which we live." —The Observer, U.K.
"There is no denying the beauty and precision of her writing, nor the clarity of her expression...On her heroines — Stein, Woolf, Eliot, books themselves — she is particularly strong and passionate. Through it all, a central theme occurs: that art, true art, is and will remain a vital force, without which life is scarcely worthy of the name." —Time Out, U.K.
Susan Shapiro
My mother knew that books would lead me astray and she was right," says Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects, her ambitious new essay collection. The author of such provocative recent novels as Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, and Art and Lies, she here digs into such disparate topics as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, art appreciation, modern lit and lesbianism. The academic pieces are filled with such abstractions as, "The reality of art is the reality of the imagination," and far too many quotes from Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Blake.Winterson, who lives in England, is much more spicy and engaging when she gets personal. "I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write," she states in The Semiotics of Sex, where she also argues that the "Queer World" misreads art as sexuality and that a great deal of gay writing about the AIDS crisis is therapy and release -- but not art. Her charming essay The Psychometry of Books chronicles how, brought up in a home without books, she is now an avid book collector, calling it "an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate." As in her fiction, the author is most exciting when writing intimately about obsession. --Salon