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Critic Megan O’Grady On Art and Feeling Alive

"We need art, almost as a kind of life buoy. Music, film, books that I read as a child really taught me who I could be or what to want, or how to think of myself in relation to the world or as part of a community—really everything about being human."

“What drew me to criticism, before I knew to call it criticism, was its assertion that ideas were central to life, which hadn’t, in my experience, always been a given,” Megan O'Grady writes in her new essay collection How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters With Art and Our Selves, which hits the shelves April 21. O’Grady—an art critic at the New York Times and a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder—writes here about artists from painter Agnes Martin to photographer Carrie Mae Weems to performance artist Pope.L. And in each case, she tries to explain why their ideas have been central to her life and experiences of break-ups, of motherhood, of living in an increasingly authoritarian America. Art, she writes, “provokes unanswerable questions,” sparks “energy, joy and defiance,” and “suggests new forms of question and belonging.”

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Fine art is usually seen as an elitist undertaking for elitist audiences—an aesthetic experience approachable only through multiple higher ed degrees and a boatload of cash. But O’Grady tells Observer that in her own life, she’s found that, “we need art. Many of us do, almost as a kind of life buoy—or I did, certainly growing up. Music, film, books that I read as a child really taught me who I could be or what to want, or how to think of myself in relation to the world........

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