Ben Eastham

Imaginary Museum

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.

The Imaginary Museum: A Personal Tour of Contemporary Art featuring ghosts, nudity and disagreements

A cautionary tale of a young, newly widowed art critic who goes to work for a mysterious billionaire determined to build a geodesic-domed paradise to shelter the rich. For fans of novels of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection and Blake Butler’s Molly On a remote island in the Aegean, Morel, a billionaire, is constructing a utopian community beneath a giant geodesic dome. The “Floating World” is advertised as a refuge for only the wealthiest people from the crises engulfing the planet. Our protagonist is offered a job working on the spectacular art exhibition that will inaugurate this closed society. Recognizing that this is a branding exercise for ethically dubious property development, he is nonetheless attracted by the opportunity to work with an artist he once hero-worshipped—the reclusive, semi-retired Finn Reith—and to restart a life that stopped with the loss of his wife. At first glance, the Floating World seems like a paradise, but it soon becomes clear that all is not well beneath the shimmering dome. Why is the billionaire head of the corporation ensconced in his own residence on the far side of the island, surrounded by bodyguards? Why are the workers so reluctant to speak of their experiences? Our protagonist’s gaze is distracted from these indicators of some deeper disturbance by Selima, the uncannily familiar technical director of the exhibition. The Floating World is a dystopia and Bildungsroman, steeped in atmosphere and sparkling with intelligence, and signals the arrival of a major new talent on the fiction scene.

The Floating World

A reexamination of postwar Italian visual culture through the life of artist and critic Fabio Mauri This book takes the life of the Italian multimedia artist and writer Fabio Mauri (born 1926) and the history of his family--a publishing dynasty with close connections to radical Italian art, poetry, cinema, philosophy and literature--as a starting point for a reexamination of the forces shaping Italian visual culture between the end of the Second World War and the "Years of Lead. Before or After, at the Same Time combines commissioned essays and first person accounts with translated writings from the period to explore the ideas circulating in Rome and Milan in the 1950s and '60s. In doing so, it provides an alternative, anecdotal and partial perspective on a turbulent period, drawing attention to the pivotal personal and professional networks that shaped postwar Italian art. Particular focus is given to the relationship between the American and Italian art scenes in the intersection of different artistic disciplines, and the influence of Roman and Milanese cultures on the artists working in the cities.

Rome, Milan, and Fabio Mauri, 1948-1968

Before Or After, at the Same Time

The White Review Anthology collects the best fiction and non-fiction published in the magazine's seven-year history, including work by Anne Carson, Chris Kraus, China Mieville, Samanta Schweblin and Lauren Elkin.

The White Review Anthology

Katya Tylevich

Why is this art? The world of contemporary art can seem intimidating, absurd, and self-obsessed, while the sums of money exchanged are baffling. Writing on contemporary art is often tortured and confused, ignoring the important questions: What is contemporary art? How does it relate to money and power? How is it made? Will it survive? To answer these questions, Katya Tylevich and Ben Eastham offer a series of short biographies on eight great works of twenty-first century art by Martin Creed, Barry McGee, Camille Henrot, Marina Abramovic, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, Erwin Wurm, Michaël Borremans, and Gregory Crewdson. They follow these paintings, films, installations, experiences, experiments, sculptures, and performances through all the key stages of their existence so far – from the delicate quiet of the studio to the grand chaos of the art world. A funny, engaging, personal guide through the world of art today, My Life as a Work of Art takes as its starting point the only really important thing: the work of art itself.

The Art World from Start to Finish

My Life as a Work of Art

Jacques Testard

The White Review is an arts and literature quarterly magazine, with triannual print and monthly online editions. The magazine launched in London in February 2011 to provide 'a space for a new generation to express itself unconstrained by form, subject or genre', and publishes fiction, essays, interviews with writers and artists, poetry, and series of artworks.

Ben Eastham

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