My Avant-Garde Education: A Memoir [Hardcover]

A wry and beautifully observed memoir about coming of age in the era of conceptual art. Moving&capture[s] the era&poetically. We could all use an avant-garde education. If it's too late for you, please read [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. 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. [O]ne of L.A.s great cultural critics and memoirists. In 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. 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 hes turned his eye onto his own coming of age the world of Cal Artsan 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. 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. 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 al“+