How It Feels to Be Alive
Regular price
€32.50
A01=Megan O'Grady
Agnes Martin
ana mendieta
Anne Truitt
art criticism
art history
art theory
artists
Author_Megan O'Grady
Barbara Kruger
Berthe Morisot
Beverly Pepper
Carrie Mae Weems
Category=ABA
Category=DNL
Deana Lawson
do ho suh
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
francesca woodman
heji shin
imani jacqueline brown
inspiring
life-affirming
memoir
nan goldin
narcissa niblack thorne
natalia ginzburg
nicholas galalin
norman lewis
painters
personal essays
pope.l
sophisticated self-help
thomas struth
Victoria Cantons
wolfgang tillmans
Product details
- ISBN 9780374613327
- Dimensions: 135 x 208mm
- Publication Date: 18 May 2026
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Barbara Kruger once defined art as “the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.” Testing that claim, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world.
When Megan O'Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. At the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. As a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation.
Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made - often drawing on personal conversations with the artists - O’Grady examines the work’s rippling impact, implicating sometimes unexpected lineages and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it offer? A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to rethink all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture, our selves, and the connections between the two.
Megan O'Grady is a critic and an essayist. She was a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she created the Culture Therapist column. Her reviews and essays about art and life also appear in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. She was a contributing editor at Vogue and a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Currently, she is an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she lives with her family.
