Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York

By Marin Kosut

Why do people choose the life of an artist, and what happens when they find themselves barely scraping by? Why does New York City, even in an era of hypergentrification, still beckon to aspiring artists as a place to make art and remake yourself?

Art Monster takes readers to the margins of the professional art world, populated by unseen artists who make a living working behind the scenes in galleries and museums while making their own art to little acclaim. Writing in a style that is by turns direct and poetic, personal and lyrical, Marin Kosut reflects on the experience of dedicating your life to art and how the art world can crush you. She examines the push toward professionalization, the devaluing of artistic labor, and the devastating effects of gentrification on cultural life. Her nonlinear essays are linked by central themes--community, nostalgia, precarity, alienation, estrangement--that punctuate working artists' lives. The book draws from ten years of fieldwork among artists and Kosut's own experiences curating and cofounding artist-run spaces in Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Chinatown. At once ethnography, memoir, tirade, and love letter, Art Monster is a street-level meditation on the predicament of artists in the late capitalist metropolis.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231216130
• ISBN13: 9780231216135
• Release Date: July 2024
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A highly engaging read on the myths, noise & independent ingenuity of New York Art World!

In a street leveled, highly informed voice Marin Kosut talks the desire & obstructions of art making in New York. Shattering myths & amplifying the determined few who persist against the current of the celebrated, Art Monster takes an unflinching look at the workings of the art world & its realities. Laid out in concise non linear sections, Kosut's conversational prose is an effortless, revealing & often hilarious read. Through interviews of artists & her own first hand experience, running her own gallery in the shell of an abandoned payphone for example, she lays out the contradictions of the established players & the often unrecognized ingenuity of those who continue to make New York their home. I can't recommend Art Monster enough. It is a wonderful engaging read from one of the sharpest minds in the field. Kosut knows her stuff & how to tell it!