After chronicling the contemporary art scene for her broadly successful 2009 Indie Next selection Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton spent the next four years taking her sharp eye and candid questions into the studios and homes of 33 working artists to sniff out just what it takes to be an artist today. Presenting these interviews and visits in a loosely dramatic structure, 33 Artists in 3 Acts suggests that art today is, in many ways, theater. Thornton's three acts focus on politics, kinship and craft; her global cast of artists includes big-money rock stars Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Ai Weiwei, as well as the lesser-known Wangechi Mutu, Maurizio Cattelan and Andrea Fraser. She is agnostic with regard to the value of their artistic media--performance, photography, video, paint, found objects, sculpture, even Lena Dunham's TV work (Girls)--but relentless in her pursuit of their nuggets of self-definition.
As an art writer for the Economist and occasional contributor to the New Yorker, Thornton has a journalist's touch and makes no attempt to play the role of critic. She sees what she sees--like Koons in a hot auditorium, where he "glistens rather than sweats," or a small Venice Biennale audience of "two blondes with complicated handbags and beige Uggs." Her interviews often elicit surprising comments from her subjects, such as Michael Elmgreen's observation that "if I didn't behave myself as an artist, I'd be reborn as a curator or an interior decorator" or Cattelan's admission that "I speak through images because I can't talk." Turn Thornton loose in artists' personal lives and you are reassured that art is refreshingly alive regardless of its who, where or what. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.