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Affinities: On Art and Fascination
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About This Book
A meditation on the power and pleasures of the image, from paintings to photographs to migraine auras, by one of Britain's finest literary minds. In Affinities, Brian Dillon, who Joyce Carol Oates has said writes "fascinating prose . . . on virtually any subject," explores images and artists he is drawn to and analyzes the attraction. What does it mean to claim affinity with a picture? What do feelings of affinity imply about the experience of art and of the world? Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or solidarity, but has aspects of all three. Approaching this subject via discrete examples, Dillon examines works by artists such as Dora Maar and Andy Warhol, Rinko Kawauchi and Susan Hiller, as well as scientific or vernacular images of sea creatures and migraine auras. Written as a series of linked essays, Affinities completes a trilogy, with Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.
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Reviews
"A principled approach to critical work, one that illuminates connections without insistence, proposes without foreclosure and reflects, of course, the path of art itself: observations, juxtapositions, alliances — affinities, indeed — that resist easy determination."
"He is intrigued by the obstinate opacity of affinity, which is so misty as to defy definition ..."
"In lesser hands, Dillon's essays would have been used simply to make the case for the benefits of close attention."
"Unsurprisingly, Affinities is a bit of a rag-bag; after all, that's the point ..."
"However, the book is more than the sum of its parts, and Dillon conjures an uncanny mood, as the individual observations combine to create a sense of how eerie and disorienting images can be."
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