Lynne Tillman: Paying Attention - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, Paying Attention is the first collection of essays devoted to her incisive, provocative, and singular reflections on art and culture.

Paying Attention gathers nearly seventy of the best and varied examples of Lynne Tillman's writings in reference to art and culture published over the course of forty years. In essays that operate outside typical categories or genres, Tillman reflects on forms including film, painting, photography, poetry, and fiction, as well as notions of fame, originality, embodied viewing and thinking, collective activity, aging, illness, American identity, cultural politics, modernity, strangeness, and time. Such is the stuff that relates art to life, and life to art.

Collected mainly from museum and gallery catalogues, artists' books and monographs, her column in Frieze, and magazines including Aperture and Artforum, these meditations on artists and writers, in the broadest sense of these labels, collide as a portrait of our cultural moment. Tillman's inventive use of language and lateral thought, her ability to evoke conditions of the larger world in often just two thousand words on a specific artwork or individual, make her one of the most significant critics of our time. As she acknowledges, in a piece on the artist Robert Gober, "In writing on art, words reach for other words, phrases, idioms, and through them more images and ideas leap out." In her introduction, Elizabeth Schambelan notes that a hallmark of Tillman's writing alongside artists is an "elegant rendering of complexity," and in approaching Tillman's body of work and thought, Schambelan herself deftly imbricates the art, voice, and language of criticism.

Review Quotes

This collection of Lynne Tillman's essays on art is a revelation. Like her great fiction, Tillman's writing about photography, painting, sculpture, and more thwarts expectation and disrupts convention; art seems new again. So does looking. Carry this book wherever you go. --Andrew Durbin

"Paying Attention makes you pay attention, often to things you never thought of. Lynne Tillman takes you on a meandering walk through a huge old ramshackle house of our culture. Each chapter opens a door to another room, another cabinet of curiosity, and Tillman's brain is an erudite and delightful companion." --Marilyn Minter

Diane Sawyer Gertrude Stein Eggleston and Wittgenstein! Lynne Tillman's collection of essays is a gourmet buffet of your favorite artists and others, the nuts and bolts of material practice alongside personal rumination and analytic flair. Her highways of thought go fast, connecting cultural mile markers with the great art Tillman witnessed firsthand. Lynne sees it all. Running throughout are some key quotes: "Feelings are facts" (Yvonne Rainer), "Any reality is an opinion" (Timothy Leary), and "I'm very much a part of my times" (Andy Warhol). Reading this book you realize Lynne, too, is exactly that. --Rachel Harrison

If there is such a thing as an "artist's artist," Lynne Tillman regularly makes the case for the "artist's writer," from consequentially aesthetic plot points in her novels to the nimble provocations and intuitive depths brought to her artist conversations, and the absolutely necessary invention of Madame Realism, the porous critic, the one every artist wants, still capable of being shocked. Whatever the context, Tillman regularly reminds her audience that when it comes to art, there are far more interesting things to want besides wanting to be merely right. --John Pilson

Lynne Tillman writes, "Close readings aren't popular, but I like doing them." In Paying Attention, Tillman really does pay attention. In her tonal, rich, accessible voice, describing becomes a kind of thinking. These essays, from 1973 to 2025, focus not about what art is but what it tells us. Paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures, novels, movies, criticism: Tillman shows us how all these forms are embedded not only in their own categories, but within a grand history of literature, philosophy, science, pop culture, politics, and, not least, psychoanalysis. Each essay, each a stand-alone story, carefully builds momentum until you see how art can tell you almost everything. --Josiah McElheny

Lynne Tillman's writing mimics the movement of her mind. Glancing like light, it's alive with coincidence, rhyme, and (free) association. Her language is both precise and wandering, and her intelligence goes deep and wide, a spotlight searching across the dark sky to illuminate philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the sheer absurdities of being human. The encounter of thought and language is never seamless: It gapes, frays, and tears, and reading her work, we sense the writer in history, connected to the moving world, yet grasping and braiding together divergent and living strands of conscious and unconscious experience. Perpetual and persistent detours provide openings to her inner world, where big ideas bump up against the everyday, and the apparently insignificant resonates like a bass guitar. Tillman created the literary field of "art writing" and in doing so, she transformed criticism and critical discourse, inventing new forms to take account of her own complicated, wry apprehension of art and life. Here, as in her other books, she continually pays, and plays out, her attention: lucid, piercing, and generous. --Leslie Dick

No one pays attention like Lynne Tillman does. Whether it's at a canvas, a screen, or a page, she looks, lingers, refuses to leap to pontificatory conclusions. Each sentence, scourged of in-crowd bromides, is astute, droll, long-memoried. There's so much generosity here. Inflection and insight. An incurable curiosity. --Sukhdev Sandhu

About the Author

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant; and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize awarded by The American Academy of Arts and Letters for contributions to literature. She is a professor and writer in residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany.

Elizabeth Schambelan is a writer and editor in New York. She has written for publications including Art in America, Artforum, Bookforum, Film Comment, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and Triple Canopy. She was an executive editor of Artforum from 2019 until 2023. She is currently working on a book forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.