It is a compilation of contemporary artists profiles from The New Yorker. Calvin Tomkins has been writing for the magazine for over three decades.
I only read profiles of Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, Richard Serra, Maurizio Cattelan, Jasper Johns, and Jeff Koons. Would read it again. I will search for more books by Tomkins.
Some exerpts from the book I want to have handy:
(Jasper Johns profile )
"... The four men shared certain ideas and ambitions which would soon become much more influential than they were then: ideas of an art based not on self-expression or heroic individualism or some concept of the sublime but on a field of aesthetic possibilities reachable through nontraditional means such as chance, experimentation, and the unapologetic embrace of everyday experience..."
"... why he quit painting... Duchamp has told the interviewer that it was "because of dealers and money and various reasons... And then he looked up and said," But you know, it wasn't like that. It's like you break a leg - you didn't mean to do it." What Johns loved about this, I think, was Duchamp's denial of consious intention as a ruling principle. It coincided with his own feeling that an artist does what he is helpless not to do. "
" Marcel Duchamp, too, believed that the viewer was an essential part of the creative process. The artist initiated the creative act, he said, but it was up to the viewer to complete it, by interpreting its meaning and its place in art history.."
