Funny Weather: Art In An Emergency

"In Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency ( public library ), Olivia Laing — one of the handful of living writers whose mind and prose I enjoy commensurately with the Whitmans and the Woolfs of yore — occasions a rare gift of unselfing through the lives and worlds of painters, poets, filmmakers, novelists, and musicians who have imprinted culture in a profound way while living largely outside the standards and stabilities of society, embodying of James Baldwin’s piercing insight that “a society m…"

"Olivia Laing’s new nonfiction collection, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, is a group of essays loosely constellated around the question “What use is art – and the people who think and talk about it – in a moment of crisis?” The pieces, which jump from Freddie Mercury to gardening to migration to Ali Smith, showcase Laing as an imaginative and empathetic critic. She gets at texture, technique, feeling and politics all at once. And even better, her question is never “Is this good?” but rather “What might this work of art do for someone?”"