Description
Book SynopsisA wry and beautifully observed memoir about coming of age in the era of conceptual art.
Trade Review"Moving…capture[s] the era…poetically." -- Peter Plagens - Wall Street Journal
"We could all use an avant-garde education. If it's too late for you, please read
My Avant-Garde Education. Bernard Cooper is one of the funniest writers I know, and like all the best humor, his work is tinged with the darker streams of life." -- Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
"[Cooper] put[s] together words in a combination of funny scenes, astute observations and moments of quiet poetry… The book is filled with moments…that practically require the reader to stop and savor the sentence again." -- Carolina A. Miranda - Los Angeles Times
"A smart and funny coming-into-consciousness narrative of an extraordinary writer, a precise and evocative art-history lesson, and (above all) a persuasive reclamation of the everyday. A beautiful book." -- David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
"[O]ne of L.A.’s great cultural critics and memoirists." -- Ed Leibowitz - Los Angeles Magazine
"In
My Avant-Garde Education, Bernard Cooper delivers a kind of magic. He works in a mode that is so subtle, so ingenious, so deeply rooted in the
visceral that it almost defies verbal description.…This book employs the best practices of the best memoirs…By asking, "what is art?" Cooper is really asking, "what is life?" And though he gives us no easy answers, he explores these questions with such insight, humor, and generosity of spirit that we come away not only educated but genuinely enlightened." -- Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
"Alternately funny and touching… Readers interested in conceptualism will especially value these personal reflections during such a critical moment in the recent history of art." -- Publishers Weekly
"Bernard Cooper is among my most favorite writers for his fearlessness, his honesty, his grace. He has written eloquently about subjects, many of us can find few words for and now he’s turned his eye onto his own coming of age the world of Cal Arts—an epicenter for art, creativity and a kind of highly intellectual absurdity. Cooper brilliantly captures what it is to awaken to ones creative self and the need to find what is ones own in terms of intellectual and personal identity while making sense of the world that surrounds." -- A.M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven
"Bernard Cooper has created another elegantly simple testament to the power of the personal story. This is a riveting, soulful, whimsical, mournful, and triumphantly moving story about that weirdly mysterious process of transferring meaning from life to art, and then back again into life." -- John D’Agata, author of About a Mountain
"The paradox of making something from nothing, of threading the maze of reality, is finely illuminated in this honest, articulate, and moving memoir. Through his search for the avant-garde, Bernard Cooper found something rarer, a wisdom grounded in humility before unanswerable questions. In doing so, he has achieved a combination of 'beauty plus pity,' Nabokov's definition of art." -- Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head
