In ten interlocking essays, the acclaimed author of Written on the Body and Art & Lies reveals art as an active force in the world-neither elitist nor remote, available to those who want it and affecting those who don't. Original, personal, and provocative, these essays are not so much a point of view as they are a way of life, revealing "a brilliant and deeply feeling artist at work" (San Francisco Chronicle).
A novelist whose honours include England's Whitbread Prize, and the American Academy' s E. M. Forster Award, as well as the Prix d'argent at the Cannes Film Festival, JEANETTE WINTERSON burst onto the literary scene as a very young woman in 1985 with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Her subsequent novels, including Sexing the Cherry, The Passion, Written on the Body, and The PowerBook, have also gone on to receive great international acclaim. She lives in London and the Cotswolds. Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. The public gallery experience is one that encourages art at a trot. There are the paintings, the marvellous speaking works, definite, independent, each with a Self it would be impossible to ignore, if...if..., it were possible to see it. I do not only mean the crowds and the guards and the low lights and the ropes, which make me think of freak shows, I mean the thick curtain of irrelevances that screens the painting from the viewer. Increasingly, galleries have a habit of saying
