How It Feels to Be Alive - by Megan O'Grady (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A beaming 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."

Turning that question to the witness, to those of use who look to art for ballast, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art's intimate effects and how it might help us find a clearer sense of ourselves in an uncertain world. Art can stoke our dreams and shape our politics; it can challenge or make granular our abstract notions of beauty and belonging. It can make visible and even reconfigure our relationship with the histories and geographies we thought were givens, including the exploited planet we inhabit.

In each chapter, Megan O'Grady looks closely at an individual artwork and the biographical context in which it was made, often drawing on personal conversations with the artists. From there she traces the work's unfurling impact in her own life, implicating other, sometimes unexpected works, lineages, and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention, and to what end? At a time when bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our fracturing public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it propose?

A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to live one's deepest life, How It Feels to Be Alive both inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture and in our selves, and the connections between the two.

About the Author

Megan O'Grady is a critic and an essayist. She was a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she created the Culture Therapist column, which ran from 2019 to 2021. For more than a decade, she was a contributing editor at Vogue. Her essays about art and life also appear in The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. In 2012, she was the Arts Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She has an MFA from New York University and a BA from Rice 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.