Four Things To Check Out
Art! Literature! The Last Temptation of Christ!
Hello friends! I hope your summer is off to a pleasant start. It’s finally warm here in New York City. I returned home last week from two weeks in Europe — Cannes for the film festival, then Milan for the Cao Fei show at the Fondazione Prada Milan, then Venice for the Biennale, plus the Arthur Jafa & Richard Prince show at the Fondazione Prada Venice and the astonishing Canicula show at the Fondazione In Between Art and Film, which was started by a scion of the Bulgari family. That’s a lot of high fashion sustaining a lot of art, isn’t it? (I posted some carousels on Instagram.)
And now, I would like to draw your attention to four matters!
A Paperback You Can Buy: The paperback version of my book We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine is due out in a few weeks, on June 23. If you pre-order by June 16 from The Strand or Books Are Magic, I’ll sign your copy. (They’ll mail it to you, of course.)
Look, the paperback cover matches the hardcover, I can’t get over how cute this matching set is:
A Reviews Workshop You Can Take: As I occasionally do, I am teaching a little workshop on “The Art of the Review” through the Center for Fiction this summer. And this year, good news, it is on Zoom! And it’s just a weekend long! The dates are Saturday and Sunday, August 8 and 9, from 11am to 2pm ET. It’s $175, and the Center offers a limited number of need-based scholarships covering 50% of tuition, so if you want to take the workshop and that describes you, definitely consider applying.
An Event You Can Attend: My good friend Isaac Butler has written yet another brilliant book that, if you’re a subscriber here, you almost certainly will want to read: “The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars.” It also comes out June 23 (serendipity) and it’s about the battles over art and the NEA and — well, I mean, it is really good. I’ll be chatting with Isaac about his book after he screens Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens on Saturday, June 27 at 12:30pm, and you should come. (It’s obviously more than a little relevant to “We Tell Ourselves Stories,” too.) He’ll be signing books afterward and, given the timing, I’ll have some too.
An Artist Development Program You Should Check Out: I suppose many people don’t know this, so: My husband runs a pretty awesome year-long artist development program (facilitated online) called Artist Commons, and their new cohort starts on July 1, with applications due June 15. They have weekly lectures on the business, history, and philosophy of art, and every artist is paired with a small group of artists and a mentor who offer weekly feedback and support in their art practice. I’m not involved at all other than being a cheerleader, but I think it’s worth looking at if you’re a visual artist in any discipline and could use that support!
That’s all for now.