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Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing – review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/30/funny-weather-art-in-an-emergency-olivia-laing-review

Laing combines passion and curiosity in a collection of art-based essays and profiles that reflect the uncertainty of our age

Funny Weather collects essays, reviews, profiles, occasional writings, and a column for the art magazine Frieze, that Olivia Laing wrote over the 2010s. The bulk of the work dates from the decade’s turbulent latter half and is thus synchronous with Laing’s vault on to the bestseller lists via her third nonfiction book, The Lonely City, and her sole novel, Crudo.

Dealing mainly with contemporary art and anglophone writing, the collection’s binding sensibility is indicated in its subtitle. The “emergency” in question is the one that distressed Crudo’s author-narrator, who “saw the liberal democracy in which she had grown up revealed as fragile beyond measure, a brief experiment in the bloody history of man”. In a foreword, Laing acknowledges that she values art principally for its political capacities of “resistance and repair”. Art can and should change the world, she insists; it reveals the interior lives of others, “makes plain inequalities” and suggests new ways of living.

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