In Megan O’Grady’s Magnificent New Book ‘How It Feels to Be Alive,’ a Treatise on the Art of Looking

The world at large likes to tell us what art is and should be and, often, how it ought to be executed.

In 1508, Pope Julius was telling Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel in Rome when all Michelangelo wanted to do was sculpt. More recently, Mayor Giuliani, famously upset by a Chris Ofili painting in 1999, deployed that classic anti-art critique. “If I can do it,” Giuliani said back then, “it’s not art, because I’m not much of an artist, and I could figure out how to put this [painting] together.”

I most recently heard that line at Dia:Beacon, in the vicinity of a Robert Ryman painting—abstract white pieces that were, up until that moment, quietly leading me through questions about landscapes and emotions. “I mean, I could do that,” the person next to me said, and I remember being mortified, for fear that the paintings might have overheard.

I also remember feeling sad, a sadness related to all the societal pressures around artists and artwork—how it’s made, who the artist is or was, who gets to see and understand it. This particular sadness is addressed early on in Megan O’Grady’s How It Feels to Be Alive, a beautiful book that traces O’Grady’s own life with art and artists—from her first visits as a child to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, not far from her childhood Kansas home; to her work profiling contemporary artists for magazines; to her life in Boulder, where she is a professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado.

Photo: Thorsten Trimpop

Early on, O’Grady tells a story that starkly sets the stakes for deeply considering the places that art—or the creations we call artwork—can take us if we allow it, or if, for example, we use that very human tool called empathy.

“Whenever I see a review of a novel or exhibition that claims the work isn’t relevant or relatable,” O’Grady writes, “I think of the couple who used to live next door to my parents in California. They told me that they had been reading The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s novel, for their book club, but ‘couldn’t relate’ to the characters: men and women, most of them queer, all of them contending with feelings of alienation or impending mortality. It did not feel relevant to their lives. It was too ‘niche’ and ‘about subcultures.’ A year later the wife succumbed to breast cancer and the husband hanged himself in their kitchen. Finding something relatable or relevant is subjective, sure, but the ability to recognize ourselves in each other, and the burst of compassion we feel when we do, is what makes us human.”