Ben Eastham – författare

Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary museum. Let him walk you through a building constructed from memory and filled with a series of bewildering art works, while he delivers a guide comprised of personal experience, professional expertise and sympathy. In this stunningly original book, an introduction to contemporary art is combined with the author's own memories and reflections on what art means. With the help of a cast of interfering security guards, pretentious curators, sceptical visitors, angry protestors and elusive ghosts, Eastham proposes that the art of today offers a way of understanding our increasingly strange and complex times.Eastham doesn't ask you to like the artworks in his imaginary museum, but offers the tools for you to formulate and express your own opinion of them. He argues that art should be judged by the feelings it provokes and the conversations it generates: in talking about art, we learn to talk about ourselves and the world in which we live.

Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary museum. Let him walk you through a building constructed from memory and filled with a series of bewildering art works, while he delivers a guide comprised of personal experience, professional expertise and sympathy. In this stunningly original book, an introduction to contemporary art is combined with the author's own memories and reflections on what art means. With the help of a cast of interfering security guards, pretentious curators, sceptical visitors, angry protestors and elusive ghosts, Eastham proposes that the art of today offers a way of understanding our increasingly strange and complex times.Eastham doesn't ask you to like the artworks in his imaginary museum, but offers the tools for you to formulate and express your own opinion of them. He argues that art should be judged by the feelings it provokes and the conversations it generates: in talking about art, we learn to talk about ourselves and the world in which we live.

Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary museum. Let him walk you through a building constructed from memory and filled with a series of bewildering art works, while he delivers a guide comprised of personal experience, professional expertise and sympathy.In this stunningly original book, an introduction to contemporary art is combined with the author''s own memories and reflections on what art means. With the help of a cast of interfering security guards, pretentious curators, sceptical visitors, angry protestors and elusive ghosts, Eastham proposes that the art of today offers a way of understanding our increasingly strange and complex times.Eastham doesn''t ask you to like the artworks in his imaginary museum, but offers the tools for you to formulate and express your own opinion of them. He argues that art should be judged by the feelings it provokes and the conversations it generates: in talking about art, we learn to talk about ourselves and the world in which we live.

On a remote Aegean island, the billionaire Thanassis Morel is building the Floating World: a climate-controlled utopia beneath a vast geodesic dome, promising refuge for the ultra-wealthy from the chaos consuming the outside world. When a struggling journalist is hired to propagandize the spectacular exhibition that will inaugurate this new Eden, he jumps at the chance to work with a cult artist – the reclusive Finn Reith – and to restart a life that stopped with the death of his wife two years earlier. Yet beneath the dazzling surface of this collaboration between art and power, he comes to suspect, run deep currents of violence. As Morel’s monumental folly prepares for its glittering unveiling, he finds it ever more difficult to distinguish the dream from the reality. Who is being excluded from this new paradise? On what buried traumas is it being constructed, and are they poised to return? And how can art protect us against the end of the world? The Floating World is a dystopia, satire and Bildungsroman, steeped in ancient mythology and contemporary politics, a deeply moving, often hilarious and beautifully written debut novel that heralds the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction.

Addressing what Stephen Spender called the 'shared subject matter of art and literature,' this book explores the celebrated writer's connections with a remarkable constellation of cultural figures.Over a life spanning the twentieth century, the celebrated writer Stephen Spender came into contact with—and connected—many of the most influential cultural figures of the era. Complementing a constellation of artworks by artists linked by personal friendship, family ties, or spiritual kinship to Spender—from Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud to Arshile Gorky—this publication is addressed to what he termed the ‘shared subject matter’ of art and literature and is replete with archival photos of Spender and his circle.