A Year in Reading with Jarrett Earnest
A 2021 awardee
Tell us what you read in 2024 that …
… was so beautifully written that you were envious.
Trophy Lives: On Celebrity as Art Object by Phillipa Snow
… ripped open a rabbit hole that you fell down for a while.
Taxidermist's Handbook by Alissa Bennett
… you’d recommend to other arts writers.
Distinguishing Piss From Rain; Writings and Interview by Glenn Ligon
… introduced you to an artist that you didn’t know much about.
Dispersed Events: Selected Writings by Nick Mauss
... was old, a little obscure and absolutely delicious.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
I’m especially interested in artist’s writings — Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography (Doubleday, 1948) is one of my favorite books of all time, which I returned to recently.
The newly published collection of Glenn Ligon’s essays and interviews, Distinguishing Piss from Rain (Haser & Wirth, 2024), bring together some of his criticism that have been hugely influential on me personally, as well as on our discourse as a whole (especially on David Hammons, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the recurring genius Sun Ra).
Similarly, Nick Mauss stands out as one of our great artist-thinkers and his volume of criticism, Dispersed Events (After 8 Books, 2024) charts expansive new paths of interconnected modernisms, connecting dots from his brilliant analysis of Madame Grès gowns to the embroidery of Nicholas Moufarrege to Susan Cianciolo among many others.
To my mind, both are essential for understanding the possibilities of the present, and I was lucky to talk with them both on Angelic Transmissions, my show on East Village Radio.
My favorite work of criticism this year was Philippa Snow’s Trophy Lives (Mack Books, 2024), on artists who engage the intersections of celebrity, image and self. Stylishly written and incredibly smart, it perfectly captures the psychic and aesthetic impasse of our moment.
It reminded me of my ongoing conversations with one of my favorite writers and people, Alissa Bennett (whose 2008 frieze essay on the Kardashians is quoted in Snow’s book), and whose own anthology, Taxidermist’s Handbook (Heinzfeller Nileisist, 2023), is a tour-de-force of deep-dive research into “bad objects” that should be on everyone’s bedside table.
