Overview
In ten interlocking essays, the acclaimed author of Written on the Body and Art & Lies reveals art as an active force in the world—neither elitist nor remote, available to those who want it and affecting those who don't. Original, personal, and provocative, these essays are not so much a point of view as they are a way of life, revealing "a brilliant and deeply feeling artist at work" (San Francisco Chronicle).
Editorials
Donna Seaman
One suspects that the title of this essay collection is not meant to be a noun. What, then, does Winterson think art objects to? The answer surfaces readily in her first essay, a probing piece about learning to look, to "really" look, at paintings. Art objects, she imagines, to our propensity for doomsaying, for seeing the glass as half-empty rather than half-full. Winterson continues to develop this notion as she shifts her focus from the visual arts to various aspects of literature, her true metier. In the course of invigorating discussions on Woolf, Lawrence, and others, Winterson offers a thoroughly convincing argument for keeping writer's lives especially their sexuality separate from their work, but then she executes one of her adept pirouettes and grants us a glimpse of her past. In a flash, we understand just how profound her involvement with art is, and our appreciation for her superb essays deepens.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