Author Megan O’Grady - How It Feels To Be Alive: Encounters With Art and Our Selves

Join art critic and essayist Megan O'Grady to discuss her book debut, How It Feels To Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves.

Barbara Kruger once defined art as "the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive." Testing that claim, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art's intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world.

We encounter works of art at specific points in our lives, in a sense, when we are particular versions of ourselves. Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made—often drawing on personal conversations with the artists—O'Grady examines the work's rippling impact, implicating sometimes unexpected lineages and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it offer? A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to rethink all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture, ourselves, and the connections between the two. "An estrangement, however subtle or extreme, that allows us to apprehend the world anew: this is one of art's great strategies," O'Grady writes. "Art has always been a potent form of testimony."

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