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 w...
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reviews
Oct 22, 2011
Ally
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Not only can she write beautiful novels and short stories, but Jeanette Winterson can hold her own as a solid philosopher, art critic, and essayist. "Art Objects" is just that--a meditation on art and the men and women who create and view it. Whether discussing the Mona Lisa or Gertude Stein's poetry or Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Winterson explores the complexities of learning to "sit" with art, allowing what at first seems perplexing and foreign to seep in, confuse us, and
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Mar 17, 2009
Angie
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This book, as others have said, is not necessarily revolutionary, but it made me reexamine everything I have have ever learned or taught myself about art.
It changed me.
This is going to sound really cheesy, but it's not - I mean it in the deepest sense...there is this one passage in the book that I think perfectly articulates what it is to really feel something to core, and one of those things that you feel is what love really is. It is in her passage about Complex Emotio More...
It changed me.
This is going to sound really cheesy, but it's not - I mean it in the deepest sense...there is this one passage in the book that I think perfectly articulates what it is to really feel something to core, and one of those things that you feel is what love really is. It is in her passage about Complex Emotio More...
Feb 02, 2009
Destiny
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While what Winterson has to say isn't exactly revolutionary, she had the power to make me examine my own relationship to literature and art. I think that the most important piece to me was the distinctions that she draws between reading as an alternative to watching television vs. reading for the appreciation of art and the living language.
There were a lot of passages in these essays that I wanted to copy into my journal so that I could ruminate over them some more. In particular, t More...
There were a lot of passages in these essays that I wanted to copy into my journal so that I could ruminate over them some more. In particular, t More...
Oct 24, 2011
Andrea
rated it:
I wish that I could spend just a single afternoon with Jeanette Winterson. This book was transformative. If you have an interest in literature as an evolving art form, if you are interested in how to be a reader or what it means to be an artist, or if you're just a person searching for deeper meaning in a shallow world, you need to read this book.
While I was resistant to some of the philosophical principles presented here this book provided lots to think about and launched a reevalu More...
While I was resistant to some of the philosophical principles presented here this book provided lots to think about and launched a reevalu More...
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Dec 14, 2011
Charlie
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I've been a fan of Ms Winterson's work for a while, but have even more respect for her and her sharp mind after reading her nonfiction. She has a way with, and a passion for, words; and her ideas here exploded in my mind so that I spent minutes thinking for each page of text. I have a feeling I will turn to this slim volume again and again when I start feeling drained by the emotional flatness of other people's reality. It's nice when a book makes you think and feel so much you get a headache an
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Dec 30, 2008
Energy in patience. . ."Art is conscious and its effect on its audience is to stimulate consciousness. . .The comfort and the rest to be got out of art is not of the passive forgetting kind, it is inner quiet of a high order, and it follows the intensity, the excitement we feel when exposed to something new. Or does it? Only it seems if we are prepared to stay the course, not give up and doze off, not leap from rock to rock after new thrills."
Jan 02, 2009
Anie
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Winterson talking on art - her passion and her life's work - is an amazing thing to read. Her language is a hypnotic, finely crafted dreamscape, and is a beautiful place to romp for a while. She is obsessively in love with art, and angry at a society which seems to have no place for it. The passion, the dreamscape, the obsession all combine to create a very, very powerful work; a work which heats, tempers, excites the reader.
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Oct 28, 2011
Susan
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A short, dense, small format book. Well written. The author writes about art from the point of view of a writer and there is plenty to think about and plenty to disagree with. I liked it and will probably look at some of the essays again. The chapters about writers, especially Virginia Wolfe, are crowded with adulation and affectation. Perhaps a better stimulus to conversation than good reading. The reviews seem to admire Winterson as a gifted "young" writer. She was about 40 when thi
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Jan 16, 2012
Pat
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I somehow thought this book would be about a writer finding how to look at paintings. And the first essay is and I really loved it. The remaining essays are about writers and writing. Here I found some revelatory ideas but to me the tone was often strident and I grew impatient. I know this book gets rave reviews and I feel somewhat of a heretic.
I do recommend the first essay especially to Erin as food for ekphrastic.
I do recommend the first essay especially to Erin as food for ekphrastic.
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Jul 11, 2009
Rae
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"The reality of art is the reality of the imagination." (133)
When my dear friend Emily first introduced me to Jeannette Winterson, I felt an intellectual kinship that reached every corner of my writerly longings: her sentences were compound, her demands intimate, her arguments muscular. Lub dub. This woman's fiction makes me want to write fiction, but her essays are an entirely amazing animal of their own. Art Objects is probably my favorite work of Winterson's - the reader More...
When my dear friend Emily first introduced me to Jeannette Winterson, I felt an intellectual kinship that reached every corner of my writerly longings: her sentences were compound, her demands intimate, her arguments muscular. Lub dub. This woman's fiction makes me want to write fiction, but her essays are an entirely amazing animal of their own. Art Objects is probably my favorite work of Winterson's - the reader More...
Apr 09, 2009
Suzanne
rated it:
I've been thinking hard about this book since I pulled it off my shelf in February to read outloud at a Flashmob here in Paris. Between Ms Winterson's words and the artistic forum in which I was re-reading it, I was moved to tears and simultaneous giddy laughter. Many notes, highlights and underlines throughout... this book is a go-to for almost any project I'm working on.
Mar 25, 2009
A book about viewing art, becoming art, searching yourself for its meaning, finding yourself within the art... becoming interactive vs just 'critiquing' art. Winterson's writing is dynamic. She could write 'the phone book' and retell it as a Christmas story. In this essay about art, she pulls in EVERYBODY, into art, into writing, into breathing, into life... great!
Apr 05, 2010
Randa
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It's really more like 3.5 stars- Winterson is fantastic when she writes about other writers, but when she introduces examples from her own work, she sounds too cocky. There's something really young about her voice here, too, but also something enjoyable and new. I still recommend reading it, just not every single essay.
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Jan 07, 2012
Elizabeth
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From a completely personal standpoint, I loved this book, and spent a great deal of time underlining and scribbling notes all along the margins. In fact, "Art Objects," almost made me want to go back to school. From a more general standpoint, the reason why I would recommend this book to anyone is because of the essay on, "Imagination and Reality," in which Winterson states: "The education system is not designed to turn out thoughtful individualists, it is there to get
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Oct 24, 2011
Avi
rated it:
I don't remember it that clearly, but I remember being deeply moved by it quite a few times. I was rereading my book page photographs from two years ago, and saw a lot of stuff from this book that I *really* liked. I wonder if I'd like the book as a whole even more now.
Oct 08, 2007
Evan
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This book of essays talks about art, writing, other writers, Stein, Eliot, Shakespeare, Dickens, Adrienne Rich, Woolf, Graves and many others. It is a interesting account of one woman's view of art and the artist, language, and creation. In answer to a friend who's hope for me is that I have/develop a firmer grasp on reality here is a quote from the book that puts into words what I couldn't at the time of the conversation:
"The earth is not flat and neither is reality. Reality More...
"The earth is not flat and neither is reality. Reality More...
Nov 05, 2010
Petar
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Prelepo skrojeni eseji. Wintersonva je majstor jezika i to se ovde oseća. Malo nervira udaljavanje od fenomenalnog eseja o slikama na početku knjige, ali opet, ne možeš očekivati od pisca opsednutog jezikom da slikama i ostalim oblicima umetnosti posveti celu knjigu.
May 20, 2008
Rebecca
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Winterson articulates why art is essential and relevant in such a way that puts passion over pretension. It objects to the safe and the known. It shows us another way. It is essential to the forward movement of humanity. [Note to pretentious dudes holding forth on Art in San Francisco sushi joints: Please read this book before you go around having philosophical discussions about Art in public places, so that by understanding many before you have written on these subjects more thoughtfully an
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Oct 13, 2011
Louise
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These stories are magnificent. She's my new favorite author, not least because she's not afraid of gender or of sex.
Sep 19, 2007
Macel
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I was totally taken aback by these statements in the first section of the book: " ...falling in love challenges the reality to whihc we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world upside down. We want and we don't want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed our physical environment. An are we happy with all these tameness?
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Jul 07, 2009
Kylin
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This book is a must for anyone who likes to think about the role of art in society.
Jan 23, 2011
Mark
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I seem to like her nonfiction better than her fiction, and this is one of the best philosophy of art books I've read from anybody. If you ever get a chance to watch interviews with her, do; she's a great speaker, too.
Feb 25, 2008
Lori
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i'm chewing through this book more slowly than jeanette's other works. i am a visual artist, so her first essay on not knowing how to sit with a painting for an hour was so foreign to me i just couldn't relate. but if she was dedicared enough to spend time with paintings to possibly better understand my ability to sit in the Georgia O'Keefe room for an entire afternoon, i'm going to spend time with these essays to better understand one of my favorite authors.
Nov 16, 2011
Daniel
rated it:
A lot of discussion of Gertrude Stein. A lot more still of Virginia Woolf. Some discussion of being lesbian.
Seems to me rather a lot of rather shallow ruminating on the purpose of Art. Made me think, several times of the alien in Hichicker's Guide to the Galaxy. The alien that finds Arthur Dent to insult him. "You're a Jerk, Dent," says the alien, "a complete asshole." This is what one should say to Art.
There's angst in space.
Seems to me rather a lot of rather shallow ruminating on the purpose of Art. Made me think, several times of the alien in Hichicker's Guide to the Galaxy. The alien that finds Arthur Dent to insult him. "You're a Jerk, Dent," says the alien, "a complete asshole." This is what one should say to Art.
There's angst in space.
May 09, 2008
"We are an odd people: We make it as difficult as possible for our artists to work honestly while they are alive; either we refuse them money or we ruin them with money; either we flatter them with unhelpful praise or wound them with unhelpful blame, and when they are too old, or too dead, or too beyond dispute to hinder any more, we canonise them, so that what was wild is tamed, what was objecting, becomes Authority" (12).
Nov 07, 2011
Eskje
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After dog-earing far too many pages, I realized I'm just going to have to buy myself a copy and reread this, on occasion, for the rest of my life. The chapter 'Reality and Imagination' is my favourite, I want to make photocopies and send it to people! :)
May 12, 2007
Sarah
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I love Jeanette Winterson's fiction, but I have a hopeless passion for this non-fiction book about the place of art in the world and in our society, the function of artists, and what makes art great. As I read it, I marked passage after passage as memorable, beautifully written, and true. This book placed Winterson in my own personal pantheon of Inspirational Saints of Writing.
Dec 04, 2007
Sylvain
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Great essays with exquisite clarity and insight. It was a pleasure reading about these fresh ideas on art and writing from such an aesthetically invested perspective. Winterson is a heavyweight champ of literacy! She writes on painting, and on writing, with a meticulous mojo that keeps opening me up to useful information.
