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Why Look at Art? This Critic Has Some Ideas.
“How It Feels to Be Alive,” by Megan O’Grady, blends criticism with personal history to explore how and why art affects us.
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“Picnic on the Esplanade,” by Nan Goldin, 1973. “Art meets us wherever we are, with our affinities and weltschmerz, our material circumstances and deeply sunk memories,” Megan O’Grady writes.
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Nan Goldin and Gagosian
By
Charles Finch
Charles Finch is a novelist and the author of “What Just Happened,” a memoir of the pandemic.
April 21, 2026,
5:00 a.m. ET
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HOW IT FEELS TO BE ALIVE: Encounters With Art and Our Selves
, by Megan O’Grady
Marcel Duchamp once said he believed in artists, not art. The sheer truth of that heresy! It isn’t to deny the transformative relationship a person might have with “Middlemarch,” say, or “
Kind of Blue
,” or indeed Duchamp’s own “
Large Glass
” — but to acknowledge that every artwork is mediated by society, money, the changing winds of taste. Whereas the artist, driven to create, has an unchanging integrity that stands athwart power and fashion. That she never defeats them can only affirm that integrity.
Megan O’Grady believes in art. In her conscientious and heartfelt but profoundly conventional new book, “How It Feels to Be Alive," she ascribes it mystical, far-ranging qualities. “Art meets us wherever we are, with our affinities and weltschmerz, our material circumstances and deeply sunk memories,” she writes. Later, she adds that art “is an unfixed mooring, not a secure berth, in the face of the blackening sky,” and, inevitably, that it “slices deeply into our certitudes and comforts.”
In fact, this reverence ultimately forestalls real engagement with the artists she considers. It’s hard to challenge, or in some sense critically consider, what you worship.
How It Feels to Be Alive
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“How It Feels to Be Alive” is a blend of criticism and personal history in the style of Olivia Laing, Maggie Nelson and Teju Cole, among others, all of them indebted to John Berger, whose runic books about art as a mode of understanding the world signal, like the paintings of Géricault, a genre’s crucial break from classicism into romanticism. O’Grady’s novelty is to incorporate into that familiar style her interviews with artists, several of them conducted for T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
She is a thoughtful interviewer, sincerely curious about her subjects. The book’s finest section, “Home Fires,” weaves together a profile of the late performance artist Pope.L — whose revelatory “crawls” through New York on his hands and knees distilled the strange visceral lessons about race, money, revulsion and dark humor that homelessness offers a city dweller — with the story of the fire that destroyed O’Grady’s own Chicago apartment. Here, she is absolutely correct that art marks and diffracts our experience. Focused on her own affective experience or on the viewpoint of an individual artist, she is assured and sensitive.
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