Book by Professor Marin Kosut Named Best of 2024
California Review of Books placed Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York on their list of 10 Best for 2024.
Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York (Columbia University Press) by Professor of Sociology Marin Kosut has been touted as one of the 10 Best Books of 2024 by the California Review of Books (CRB).
The CRB also published a review by David Starkey, who opens with, “If you’ve ever had a friend who is brilliant, super-sarcastic, notices everything, can be incredibly mean but always employs that anger in the service of some greater ideal, then you will recognize the authorial voice of Marin Kosut in Art Monster. Books about art that are both insightful and compellingly readable (not to mention funny) are exceedingly rare, but Kosut has written just such a work.”
Read an interview with Kosut in BOMB magazine, “Precarity and passion in New York City’s artist community.”
According to Columbia University Press, “Art Monster takes readers to the margins of the professional art world, populated by unseen artists who make a living working behind the scenes in galleries and museums while making their own art to little acclaim.
“Writing in a style that is by turns direct and poetic, personal and lyrical, Marin Kosut reflects on the experience of dedicating your life to art and how the art world can crush you. She examines the push toward professionalization, the devaluing of artistic labor, and the devastating effects of gentrification on cultural life.
“Her nonlinear essays are linked by central themes—community, nostalgia, precarity, alienation, estrangement—that punctuate working artists’ lives. The book draws from ten years of fieldwork among artists and Kosut’s own experiences curating and cofounding artist-run spaces in Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Chinatown.
“At once ethnography, memoir, tirade, and love letter, Art Monster is a street-level meditation on the predicament of artists in the late capitalist metropolis.”
Kosut teaches courses on art, urbanity, and visual culture and was co-author of Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee (NYU Press).