abandoned pay phone shell at a Brooklyn bus stop. A MacDowell fellowship recipient, she holds a PhD in sociology from the New School and teaches the sociology of art at SUNY Purchase College. She lives in Brooklyn.
Kosut applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York, and reported the following:
On page 99, I’m describing my conversation with ‘Jackson,’ one of the many artists I interviewed for Art Monster. We are in Jackson’s apartment in New York City, which is both an art studio and where he’s lived for decades due to rent control. He’s talking about how they are trying to kick him out of his building, and tells me “That chair you’re sitting on got thrown out of the apartment by the old lady on the third floor that took the buyout…” As the conversation progresses, I reflexively deconstruct the inadequacy of my interviewing skills because I clearly relate to his story and make mistakes. For example, I say to myself and the reader, “Why can’t I stop saying so, I know filler words slow everything down. The expletives, how cheap. I have my own junk I can’t rid myself of.” The conversation veers to the historical import of the East Village in the eighties and nineties, where artists once lived and made their own galleries in their apartments as an affront to the mainstream art system. Jackson tells me about Gracie Mansion, a gallerist who pioneered the East Village art scene by starting a gallery in her bathroom.Visit Marin Kosut's website.
This page speaks to some of the themes in the book, like the displacement of artists and the gentrification process that continues to impact the lives of New Yorkers. It also considers artist-run spaces, and later in the book there are chapters centering on my own gallery projects and their place on the edge of the larger art world. Page 99 toggles between past and present, then and now, which I do throughout the text. I chose to use a nonlinear time frame because in real life we experience and juggle time in complicated ways and I appreciate books that do that. Page 99 also breaks the fourth wall, where I invite readers into my own head, and I assiduously experiment with points of view in Art Monster. I’d say the test worked moderately well, despite the hybrid shape-shifting nature of the text.
Unlike other books on artists, which almost exclusively focus on famous artists or dead ones, I write about working artists' lived experiences, and how alienating and precarious the life of an artist can be. Most artists will never become professionals, earn enough money to live off their work, and yet they still devote their lives to art. Art Monster speaks to the lives of the artist 99 percent, those slogging paycheck to paycheck because they are compelled and committed. I wanted to tell the stories of the invisible artists who are the backbone of the art world, those who never appear in headlines or documentaries.
--Marshal Zeringue
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