Why anything exists at all is the first question of philosophy, Heidegger once said.
For Adam Moss, the same is true of the page. In THE WORK OF ART: How Something Comes From Nothing (Penguin Press, $45), Moss, the former editor of New York magazine, interviews nearly 50 people who make things — in a very broad sense of that phrase — with a caseworker’s interest in what we feebly call “the creative process.”
Some are his friends, and many are illustrious. Most retrace a single work: George Saunders recounts the decades of doubt and resignation that yielded the strange conventions of “Lincoln in the Bardo” (2017), his magical realist novel peppered with scholarly footnotes.
Excellent layouts by the design firm Pentagram turn dense arrays of project ephemera into legible timelines. Like any good editor, Moss wants a text; reaching back to 1966, Gay Talese unearths his color-coded storyboards to explain the obsessions that consumed him while reporting on the elusive Frank Sinatra for an Esquire profile that became a model for New Journalism.
The subconscious is duly invoked. The late poet Louise Glück and the playwright Tony Kushner are most practiced on that front, and we hear of the dreams that primed their work. Though Moss joins an investigative tradition forged by James Lord’s “A Giacometti Portrait” (1965) and the great artist-critic Dan Hofstadter’s “Temperaments” (1992), he has fresh things to say with his remit. Employing an à la carte Freudianism, he suggests that receptiveness to chance guides art as much as skill. It’s a liberating fact.
And while he’s eager to explore all areas of thought, Moss has no time for “magical talk,” as he puts it in one of many asides. He wants to demystify creation, and often succeeds. Even the improvisations of Amy Sillman, the articulate and funny abstract painter who walks us through 39 iterations of a single canvas, read as responses to observable stimuli.
By giving cookbooks, crossword puzzles and newspaper design equal documentation, Moss seems to level all created commodities. In this vibrant, companionable and punchily precise dossier, that reduction will either madden or empower you.
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