A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life

In essays such as “The ism that dare not speak its name,” “Generation 2.5,” “Like a Veneer,” “Modest Painting,” “Blurring Richter,” and “Trite Tropes, Cliches, or the Persistence of Styles,” Schor considers how artists relate to and represent the past and how the art market influences their choices: whether or not to disavow a social movement, to explicitly compare their work to that of a canonical artist, or to take up an exhausted style. She places her writings in the rich transitory space between the near past and the “nextmodern.” Witty, brave, rigorous, and heartfelt, Schor’s essays are impassioned reflections on art, politics, and criticism.

Mira Schor is a painter, writer, and teacher living in New York. She is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and an editor of The Extreme of the Middle: The Writings of Jack Tworkov (forthcoming) and M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, also published by Duke University Press. Schor is a recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism.