Looking at Art in Times of Crisis with Megan O'Grady and Benjamin Saltzman
Art critic Megan O'Grady and U of Chicago professor Benjamin Saltzman explore the ethics of seeing and how art helps us confront difficulty. Free.
Why we picked this
Two writers who have each written about the act of looking meet at a loaded moment: O'Grady's debut book on art and the self, paired with Saltzman's scholarly inquiry into why we turn away from difficult things.
At the Salt Shed’s intimate Three Top Lounge, art critic and essayist Megan O’Grady sits down with University of Chicago professor Benjamin Saltzman for a conversation that cuts to the core of why we look at art at all — and what it means to keep looking when the world is hard. The evening draws on both writers’ new books: O’Grady’s debut How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves and Saltzman’s Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. A book signing follows.
O’Grady spent years as the Culture Therapist at T: The New York Times Style Magazine and has written for The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, and Vogue. Her book opens with a teenage encounter with a museum photograph that reshaped her understanding of the world, and builds into a meditation on what art actually does to us when we let it in. Saltzman, who coedits Modern Philology at the University of Chicago, approaches the same territory from a different angle: his scholarship traces the ancient and persistent human habit of turning away from pain, and what that gesture reveals about our relationship to beauty and suffering.
The combination makes for a rare evening — an argument about the ethics of attention, where two writers who have spent their careers looking arrive from opposite directions and meet somewhere in the middle. Free admission makes it one of the more quietly essential events in the spring festival.