Critic Megan O’Grady On Art and Feeling Alive

“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.”

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 or as part of a community—really everything about being human.”

Many people find music, books and film more accessible than visual art. One of O’Grady’s goals in putting How It Feels to Be Alive out into the world is to show how her own interactions with fine art and with fine artists have been powerful, personal and moving in a way that people often associate with less highbrow culture. Her description of her first viewing of Agnes Martin’s abstract painting Friendship—a kind of golden grid—could almost be a memory of a beloved pop song:

“The richness of the gold soothed me, made me feel replete, as though I were facing the sun rather than embarking on the demolition of my life. The painting drew a window on the wall, but it didn’t let me see through it; it was a threshold to something too vast to take in all at once… I was startled to find myself in tears.”

O’Grady insists, though, that emotional immediacy doesn’t need to foreclose intellectual engagement or revelation. In a long, searching essay on representation, self-representation, mothers and daughters, she discusses Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table Series (1990) and the self-portraits and portraits of French Impressionist Berthe Morisot. The artists helped her see how “it’s just really hard to even own your own perspective when you’re so conscious of everyone else’s perspective on you.” Weems’ series, she further explains, “tells the fictional story of a woman, played by the photographer herself, and the various roles she embodies, such as mother, lover, friend, self.”

Many Black woman artists have talked about how powerful it was to see an artist representing Black women in such a direct, respectful and nuanced way. O’Grady is white, but she writes in her book that “something about the sight of the mother and daughter at their mirrors sat me down.” As a young woman, O’Grady “identified more with the daughter” in Kitchen Table Series than with the mother. In particular, she was struck by the way that the mother was “modeling things for her daughter about what impending womanhood was about,” and that the modeling was both conscious and unconscious. That’s an insight, O’Grady says, that has continued to haunt her as she has raised her own daughter.

O’Grady’s complicated examination of the power and perils of self-representation is mirrored in her own approach to the confessional aspects of How It Feels to Be Alive. In the book, she notes that when she first began to write about art, she would mostly keep herself in the background—she was not a figure or a presence in her own writing. But over time, she felt that including herself, or representing herself, could have value too. Talking to artists, or going with Pope.L to Ferguson, where he was creating art about the water crisis, “these experiences were so important to me,” she says.

In talking about the artwork’s effect on her directly, O’Grady says, “what I hoped, of course, was that readers would read it, and not have the same experience I had, but more be prompted to think about other things in their life, a book or a work of art, or something that had maybe made them see something differently.” Putting herself into her work reflects the way that an artist like Weems puts herself into her work. In showing herself, Weems allows her audience to think about self and identity in relation to art. O’Grady is trying, in her own medium, to offer that gift to her readers as well.

These gifts—of recognition, of solidarity, of confusion, of possibility—are ones which our current regime has made very clear it does not want us to have. O’Grady finished the book shortly after the reelection of Donald Trump, so she does not much discuss his attack on arts funding or his interference with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But in our conversation, O’Grady points out that authoritarians often target the arts early and often. The arts, “make people feel things, and they make people upset and angry.” Trump’s sweeping censorship “does show just how important the arts are. I think sometimes in our capitalist society, we sometimes forget just how important they are.” O’Grady also says that, despite the current series of escalating crises, she doesn’t want her students to feel like they have to make political work or that art has to be something that is “instrumentalized for political means.” That seems like a political statement, too, in a way. Authoritarians want all art and expression to serve the state, which is why the Trumpified Kennedy Center is suing artists who refuse to perform and use their talents to validate or glorify the ruler.

To make beauty or meaning that doesn’t acknowledge the authority of politics can be a kind of resistance in itself. “Art history is full of stories of people who redefined the world for each other on their own terms, who made space for each other in a world that didn’t,” O’Grady writes. Reading How It Feels to Be Alive, it’s clear that in making space for herself in art, O’Grady wants to make space for the rest of us.

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