Issue 30: On Minding Your Own Business (a review of Adrian Tomine’s “Q&A”)
Soft Labor, is a newsletter about visual culture written by Sarah Hromack, principal of Soft Labor, an advisory that provides digital and cultural strategy to organizations, artists, and designers. Please share this newsletter and subscribe.
I credit a seminar with Kevin Killian about twenty years ago (actually, I credit chatty Kevin himself) for helping me to recognize and comprehend how a personal anecdote might be employed as a narrative tool in a piece of writing. Most of what I write isn’t fully about the seeming subject at hand — Kevin, in fact, was the first person to ever notice and call me out for that strange tendency — and my recent review of Adrian Tomine’s new book, Q&A, which Hyperallergic published today, is no exception.
I open the piece with a harmless little story about passing Tomine in the street while schlepping my kid to school and while I do consider the book itself in relationship to his body of work — I know it very well — this brief review is really about the space between people, the various positions we all occupy in the world, and maybe even our sense of reality itself as it pertains to art and artists. I hope you read it.
Related:
It’s been about a month since Dean Kissick’s Harper’s cover story, “The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art,” began ripping its way around the Internet.
Just yesterday, however, I found myself in conversation with a friend of a friend while standing in a downtown gallery — a studio art professor at a major Ivy League University. She had assigned Kissick’s piece to a group of freshman who had spent the better part of the semester studying the genres he takes issue with. Commenting on the author’s opening salvo — a bit of clickbait depravity about his mother losing her legs in a bus accident outside of the Barbican Art Gallery — a student exclaimed “What is this, a college entrance essay?”
Sick burn.
Copyright 2024 Sarah Hromack; all rights reserved.