Blake Gopnik's Top Book Recommendations

Blake GopnikThere are a couple things that are special about this book. One is that sense of immediacy, of a snapshot aesthetic, which was to become a hallmark of Shore’s work as one of our great photographers. (Source)

Blake GopnikThere’s this beautiful balance in these Gay Guides between an excitement about the possibilities of this particular subculture in American life, and the very real risks involved in pursuing those possibilities. (Source)

Blake GopnikOne of the wonderful things about this book is that we know Andy Warhol actually read it. His copy of this textbook still exists in the Warhol archive. This is one of the things that is surprising about Andy and that I think is extremely important to understand: Lots of people who knew him well said he was smart in a fairly traditional sense. (Source)

Blake GopnikWith Vasari, we begin thinking that artistic biography might matter. As much as we may want to resist the notion that biography is central to understanding art, it seems as though it is just inevitable – the life of the artist is an inevitable element in considering the art itself, as Vasari realised early on. (Source)

Kenneth BartlettHe invented art history as we know it…..Much of what we know, especially about the personal lives of the artists, comes from Vasari because there are no other sources. He got it from gossip and hearsay. That is how he did much of his research: by asking people who knew them or by asking somebody whose father had worked with them. (Source)

Blake GopnikWe assume that Andy knew that they might be published, and he may have wanted them to be published – and so would have controlled and manipulated their content. He didn’t scribble these entries down in a notebook, for his own eyes only. So you never know if he’s speaking to posterity in order to falsify the record – or at least to construct a record – or whether the Diaries are actually giving... (Source)

Craig BrownWarhol’s diaries came out shortly after he died, and at the time I couldn’t see the point of them at all. They were just a litany of names, all social gossip, very close to being boring. But reading them 20 years on, I find them fascinating. My edition is about 800 pages long. There aren’t many diaries you could read from start to finish, but this one is luminous. (Source)