"The allusion in the title of this collection of New Yorker profiles to Giorgio Vasari’s biographical sketches is only partly apt. Like Vasari, Tomkins approaches art writing as a raconteur rather than a formalist: artists’ lives, Tomkins says, are “integral to what they make.” But while the highly opinionated Vasari wrote of the “progress” of art toward “the perfection” of the Renaissance, Tomkins is a creature of our anything-goes cultural era. Though not a strictly nonjudgmental postmodernist, Tomkins is cheerfully ecumenical, defying both the squabbling sectarians of the art world and critics who believe art is becoming increasingly frivolous. These 10 profiles, which originally appeared from 1999 to 2008, helped ratify the contemporary canon in all its eclecticism, from the market-savvy provocations of Damien Hirst to the austere if gigantic minimalism of Richard Serra to the enigmatic theatricality of Cindy Sherman. Declinist critics might fault Tomkins for not advancing a broader aesthetic defense of the artists he champions, but his consummate mastery of the magazine profile form and enthusiasm for his subjects are winning. And it’s hard to begrudge these artists their charmed lives. These pages are filled with amiable but ambitious eccentrics who follow their whims (“What gave him the confidence to make art out of petroleum jelly and tapioca and athletic equipment?” he asks about Matthew Barney) and soon earn riches on a scale that would impress their Wall Street patrons. The painter John Currin sums up the current mood when he tells Tomkins, “All art is about saying yes.”
LIVES OF THE ARTISTS
By Calvin Tomkins
John Macrae/Holt, $26.
