Carey Logan is the luminous art star at its center. In this sparkling art thriller, a young artist narrates her obsession with the Pine City collective, a group of beautiful and rambunctious young artists who live, work, and love together at a colony upstate. Ultimately, in each of these novels, art is the great seducer, sometimes spiraling the lives of its victims out of control. Some of the books are populated by those infatuated with the artists’ mythologies, and others by artists at the mercy of their own infatuations. Some of the books embed with artists seeking attention for themselves in the pursuit of fame, whether through self-mythologizing, exploitation, posturing, or fakery.

These nine novels feature spellbinding artists and their rapt admirers-and spellbound artists enrapt by their own subjects. Much fiction has been written about the art world and the mystery and magnetism of artists, historical and invented. Throughout history, creators have self-mythologized to drum up interest in their work, cement their careers, and shape their legacies. The counterpoint to making art is disseminating it, and there’s no small pressure on an artist or writer to create a kind of persona for themselves, to seduce the public through a carefully designed mask. I also like delving into the joys and challenges shared by writers and artists, including the common anxiety about finding an audience for our work. With a few descriptive sentences, I can beam wild pieces out of my head and directly into readers’ minds without getting out of my chair. When writing about art, I can also vicariously, temporarily be an artist, making artwork on any scale without the restrictions of space, time, or materials. In my work, absorption in their aesthetic visions can blind artists to the impact they’re having on others and lead them to make questionable decisions. Artists are often obsessive, and obsessives are my favorite characters. Being around art lit me up.įrom the get-go, I wrote about art and artists, and I return to them again and again.

I brought my notebook with me everywhere, including museums. The fact that I ultimately chose to write instead might have had something to do with my lazy aversion to workaday art jobs, like stapling canvases onto stretchers and dealing with paint tubes and turpentine. Coming from a line of artists, I learned to draw and paint early on and found exaltation in the wordless, thoughtless, instinctive act of making pictures.

The art of seduction book