Tell Me Something Good: Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail

Description

The legendary Brooklyn Rail has been a platform for artists, academics, and writers in New York and abroad for almost twenty years. No other publication devotes as much space to the artist's voice, allowing ideas to unfold through open discussion, with all their idiosyncrasies. The journal's continued appeal is due in large part to its wonderfully diverse contributors, many of whom bring contrasting and often unexpected opinions to conversations about art and aesthetics. Since its inception, co-founder and artistic director Phong Bui and his team have interviewed over one hundred artists for the Brooklyn Rail . Here, we bring together a selection of sixty of the most influential and seminal interviews with artists ranging from Richard Serra and Brice Marden, to Alex Da Corte and House of Ladosha, for the first time. While each is important in its own right, offering a perspective on the life and work of a specific artist, together they tell the story of a journal that has grown during one of the more diverse and surprising periods in visual art. There is no unified style or perspective; Brooklyn Rail's strength lies in its ability to include and champion difference. Selected and coedited by Jarrett Earnest, a frequent Rail contributor, with Lucas Zwirner, the book includes a new introduction to the project by Phong Bui as well as many of the hand-drawn portraits he has made of those he has interviewed over the years. This combination of verbal and visual profiles offers a rare and personal insight into contemporary visual culture.

Lucas Zwirner is Head of Content at David Zwirner where he oversees all aspects of gallery publishing through books, web, video, and the podcast Dialogues. Lucas has contributed texts to gallery publications, including Rudolf Zwirner: Give Me the Now (2021), A Balthus Notebook (2020), and Tell Me Something Good: Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail (2017). At David Zwirner Books, he began the ekphrasis series, dedicated to publishing short texts on visual culture by artists and writers, rarely available in English. He has also written on contemporary art and literature for publications The Drift and The Paris Review, and translated books from German and French. His translation of Elias Cannetti's The Profession of the Poet is forthcoming in I WANT TO KEEP SMASHING MYSELF UNTIL I'M WHOLE: An Elias Canetti Reader, edited by Josh Cohen and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Brooklyn Rail "has run more than four hundred interviews with visual artists since its inception in 2000. This book collects sixty of the best..."--Editors "Art in America" "For 20 years, [The Brooklyn Rail's] interviews have challenged artists to talk about their work and facilitate new conversations with non-artists."--Sarah Spellings "The Cut" "Veteran Rail interviewers, such as Phong Bui, the journal's founder, Chris Martin, Robert Storr, and John Yau, have often known their subjects for years; their interviews eschew cleverness to probe personal issues and let the artist speak."--Christopher Lyon "Hyperallergic"