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The Imaginary Museum
- A Personal Tour of Contemporary Art featuring ghosts, nudity and disagreements
- Narrated by: Matt Bates
- Length: 2 hrs
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The Imaginary Museum
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Publisher's summary
Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary, imaginary museum. Stand in front of some of the most incomprehensible art works in the world with an expert guide by your side, full of personal stories, expertise and human understanding.
In a stunningly original memoir and art guide we find ourselves among outrageous artworks and we return again and again to the same question:
But what does it mean?
With the help of a cast of critics, guards, curators, artists, protestors and ghosts, Eastham explores the idea that the value of art is not to be found in what it means, but in what it does to you.
This is an argument to forget about what is and is not art and to instead think courageously and creatively about how things really make you feel. You don’t have to like the art works in this or any gallery, you don’t have to fully understand them either, but we can benefit from existing alongside them. And in doing so we learn about ourselves and each other.
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-
Story4 out of 5 stars 191
In Tom Wolfe's hands, the strange saga of American architecture in the 20th century makes for both high comedy and intellectual excitement. This is his sequel to The Painted Word, the book that caused such a furor in the art world five years before. Once again Wolfe shows how social and intellectual fashions have determined aesthetic form in our time and how willingly the creators have abandoned personal vision and originality in order to work a la mode.
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5 out of 5 stars
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So snarky I kept having to back up and repeat
- By Ellen on 04-08-09
By: Tom Wolfe
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The Geography of Genius
- A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley
- By: Eric Weiner
- Narrated by: Eric Weiner
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 488
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 425
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 423
In The Geography of Genius, acclaimed travel writer Weiner sets out to examine the connection between our surroundings and our most innovative ideas. He explores the history of places, like Vienna of 1900, Renaissance Florence, ancient Athens, Song Dynasty Hangzhou, and Silicon Valley, to show how certain urban settings are conducive to ingenuity.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Very, very disappointing
- By Tamara Greer on 06-08-16
By: Eric Weiner
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Known and Strange Things
- Essays
- By: Teju Cole
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. Minute after minute, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Book that Teaches and Shares
- By Carolyn J. on 10-08-17
By: Teju Cole
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So Much Longing in So Little Space
- The Art of Edvard Munch
- By: Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 44
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 43
In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard sets out to understand the enduring and awesome power of Edvard Munch's work by training his gaze on the landscapes that inspired Munch and speaking firsthand with other contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, for whom Munch's legacy looms large. Bringing together art history, biography, and memoir, Knausgaard tells a passionate, freewheeling, and pensive story about not just one of history's most significant painters, but the very meaning of choosing the artist's life, as he himself has done.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Good start
- By Barbara O on 11-08-23
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Letters to a Young Artist
- By: Anna Deavere Smith
- Narrated by: Anna Deavere Smith
- Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 86
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 53
From "the most exciting individual in American theater" ( Newsweek), here is Anna Deavere Smith's brass-tacks advice to aspiring artists of all stripes. In the manner of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Deavere Smith mentors her young artist over a period of five years, sharing her hard-won wisdom about the challenges and rewards of the artistic life.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great advice for artists of any age.
- By S. Barker on 10-30-17
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In Montparnasse
- The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dalí
- By: Sue Roe
- Narrated by: Kristin Atherton
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 56
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 56
In Montparnasse begins on the eve of the First World War and ends with the 1936 unveiling of Dalí’s Lobster Telephone. As those extraordinary years unfolded, the Surrealists found ever more innovative ways of exploring the interior life, and asking new questions about how to define art. In Montparnasse recounts how this artistic revolution came to be amidst the salons and cafés of that vibrant neighborhood.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great Second of Two Books
- By Robert Keith on 10-26-19
By: Sue Roe
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Where the Heart Beats
- John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
- By: Kay Larson
- Narrated by: Jason Wineinger
- Length: 15 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 51
Composer John Cage sought the silence of a mind at peace with itself - and found it in Zen Buddhism, a spiritual path that changed both his music and his view of the universe. "Remarkably researched, exquisitely written", Where the Heart Beats weaves together "a great many threads of cultural history" (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) to illuminate Cage’s struggle to accept himself and his relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Freed to be his own man, Cage originated exciting experiments that set him at the epicenter of a new avant-garde forming in the 1950s.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Mind Expansion
- By Robert Keith on 04-04-15
By: Kay Larson
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ArtCurious
- Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History
- By: Jennifer Dasal
- Narrated by: Jennifer Dasal
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 105
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 93
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Story4 out of 5 stars 93
We're all familiar with the works of Claude Monet, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous reproductions of his water lilies on umbrellas, handbags, scarves, and dorm-room posters. But did you also know Monet and his cohort were trailblazing rebels whose works were originally deemed unbelievably ugly and vulgar? And while you probably know the tale of Vincent van Gogh's suicide, you may not be aware that there's pretty compelling evidence that the artist didn't die by his own hand but was accidentally killed - or even murdered.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Couldn’t take it
- By Amira on 03-05-22
By: Jennifer Dasal
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Why Architecture Matters
- By: Paul Goldberger
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 100
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 77
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Story4 out of 5 stars 76
The purpose of Why Architecture Matters is to "come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually" - with its impact on our lives. "Architecture begins to matter," writes Paul Goldberger, "when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads."
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4 out of 5 stars
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Reading too mechanical
- By Petrie on 09-01-15
By: Paul Goldberger
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How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 129
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 83
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 85
Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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The Art of Rivalry
- Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
- By: Sebastian Smee
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 224
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 192
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 192
Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary - one who was equally ambitious but who possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Death by bob souer
- By SKWAD on 01-18-18
By: Sebastian Smee
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Tom and Jack
- The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock
- By: Henry Adams
- Narrated by: Wayne Thompson
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 41
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 41
The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, trailblazing Abstract Expressionist, appear to be the polar opposite of Thomas Hart Benton's highly figurative Americana. Yet the two men had a close and highly charged relationship dating from Pollock's days as a student under Benton. Pollock's first and only formal training came from Benton, and the older man soon became a surrogate father to Pollock.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I suggest you READ, not listen...
- By Grace O'Malley on 07-01-16
By: Henry Adams
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In Montmartre
- Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art
- By: Sue Roe
- Narrated by: Emma Bering
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 257
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 218
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 218
A lively and deeply researched group biography of the figures who transformed the world of art in bohemian Paris in the first decade of the 20th century. In Montmartre is a colorful history of the birth of Modernist art as it arose from one of the most astonishing collections of artistic talent ever assembled. It begins in October 1900, as a teenage Pablo Picasso, eager for fame and fortune, first makes his way up the hillside of Paris’s famous windmill-topped district.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Florid narrative history with suspect details
- By Keith on 10-30-19
By: Sue Roe
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,048
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 922
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 916
Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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4 out of 5 stars
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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The Mark on the Wall
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Teresa Gallagher
- Length: 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 44
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 44
This is a story from the Classic Women's Short Stories collection.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Just a stunning piece
- By Alfie on 08-07-22
By: Virginia Woolf