How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves - Hardcover

by Megan O'Grady (Author)

A vital testament to how art makes us who we are--and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives.

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, Megan O'Grady takes us on a journey to explore art's intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world.

When O'Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. When she was at the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. When she was a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether she was seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation.

Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made--and often drawing on personal conversations with the artists--O'Grady traces the works' rippling impacts, suggesting sometimes unexpected lineages and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imagination and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does art offer?

A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to consider all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template for thinking through the knottiest problems in our culture and our selves, and the connections between the two.

Author Biography

Megan O'Grady is a critic and an essayist. While she was a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, she created the Culture Therapist column. Her reviews and essays about art and life also appear in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. She was previously a contributing editor at Vogue and a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Currently, she is an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she lives with her family.