A beautiful book ... It’s the thoughtful and careful writing that makes the book work so wonderfully, together with the editorial choices. It’s a curated tour through one life.
Conscientious and heartfelt but profoundly conventional ... She is a thoughtful interviewer, sincerely curious about her subjects ... In her actual explorations of art, she is a font of received ideas ... The problem is not that O’Grady’s opinions are wrong; the problem is that they are never wrong. They court no risk ... The book’s writing bears the same weakness: Too little thought has been put into it ... Perhaps all this seems harsh. But our present situation is no joke. America is sick, and the bourgeois capture of the arts, after the beautiful and genuine radicalism of 20th-century painting in particular, is a symptom of that sickness.
O’Grady’s voice is beautiful and inventive. She pushes the reader to think of seeing as a pan-panoramic endeavor, and a principled one ... Extraordinary ... Delivers on its title: the writing is exhilarating, reminding us of the power of art-historical analysis and scholarship but also of the decidedly even heavier weight of our own emotional, physical, political, ethical responses to art ... Timely.
