Customer Reviews

Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude

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I purchased this book after reading Nigel Spivey's other book, How Art Made The World, and also watched the compelling BBC video that accompanied this. This particular book is very deep and comprehensive, involving what we all know about art, namely we depict, in picture after picture, through sculpture and beyond...not just man's triumphs but also man's deepest, anguished hours. Why do we do this? What is the connect of pain to pleasure? What drives us to create and recreate, even the deepest sorrow. For example, how many many paintings, how much art, has been created that has the crucifixion as its central and ongoing themes? The author begins this book with a meditative piece on Auschwitz and throughout, the author's commentary on art, artists, the historical context, raises important questions about pain, art, and the need to transcend and "endure". I find the book's title itself compelling because it's so about art, how we endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fate and what lasts, even, beyond us, as a legacy of pain and hope, into the future. As a reminder? Beyond a reminder?

Yes, I would recommend this book highly for its depth, its scholarship and its humanity. It's not a book one can read right through because it's dense and should, I think, should be taken slowly, chapter by chapter. Let it simmer. Let it shimmer. And then let go and come back.

I did write an essay/review of this for the Michigan Quarterly Review; this also included an e-mail interview with Prof. Spivey.
(I am an essayist and literary critic.) Perhaps you would like to excerpt a piece of that (favorable) review for your site.