The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing, by Adam Moss, published last spring, is a captivating attempt to peer inside what can seem the black box of the artist’s creative act. Moss was editor-in-chief of New York magazine from 2004 to 2019. In his retirement he took up painting, which he found to be both rewarding and maddening, and the experience vaulted him as a practitioner into the heart of the creative process that during his career he had often written about from the outside, as a journalist. In an attempt to understand this process, he reached out to over 40 artists to “render the experience of creativity—that is, the frustration, elation, regret, first glimmer, second thoughts, distress, and triumph that leads to works of art.”
He asked the artists to describe, in as much detail as possible, “the evolution of a novel, a painting, a photograph, a movie, a joke, a song, and to supply physical documentation of their process as a map of their thinking.” These “process artifacts,” as he calls them, render the book densely illustrated. The Work of Art is a work of scrawls and scribbles, sketches and outlines, photographs and drawings and notes. It has an invitingly messy allure as one skims through it.
Moss construes art broadly. Samin Nosrat provides six pages on the birth and evolution of the idea for her cookbook (and eventual Netflix series) Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and concludes with a personal note on the relation of depression to work and social media. The artist Tyler Hobbs recounts the process of designing an NFT that sold for $3 million in 2021. Michael Cunningham talks about his novel The Hours, Lousie Glück her poem “Song,” and George Saunders (“a writer other writers worship,” notes Moss) his work Lincoln in the Bardo. Will Shortz provides annotated documentation of the making of a New York Times crossword puzzle. David Mandel provides a blow-by-blow of the evolution of a joke for the TV series Veep.
Sofia Coppola describes writing the script for and directing the film Lost In Translation. She found inspiration for the script (“a series of little moments”) in the poems of Richard Brautigan, and the story came to her when she was in Tokyo, feeling disconnected in her marriage, “lonely and drifting, and it was just sort of a fantasy that Bill Murray would show up at the bar. And I mean, really Bill Murray. I wrote it for him and I wasn’t going to make it without him.”
The choreographer Twyla Tharp (“no one I talked to was more brazenly confident, more willing to own the narcissism it takes to make art”) leads Moss to a 14-foot-long scroll of paper unspooled across her floor. It is densely scribbled with words and diagrams, her notes towards “In C,” a dance to Terry Riley’s minimalist composition of the same name. “The scrolls are like the unconscious,” she says. “And I can do proportions on them. As I move along, I can do timing - all of which you can’t do on pieces of paper.”
Moss is, he notes, continually tempted to use the word “miraculous” to describe “the wonderful thing that art is,” but he resists it, as well as the temptation to regard the process of its making as a kind of magic. And yet to characterize the process of shepherding something into being is challenging, even for the artists. “Where art comes from is mysterious. I talked to a lot of very rational artists for this book, and to the one, they went fuzzy when trying to describe a cathartic moment, as if they’d gone under anesthesia when the big idea came … the mind is weird.” But this series of documents, images, and sustained reflections may get us as close as we can to the mechanics of the endlessly varied processes of creation. For any lover of makers, making, and the made, The Work of Art is an engrossing archaeology of the creative act.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.