Mar 4, 2016
The book’s subtitle—“Adventures in the Art of Being Alone”—is slightly misleading and much too cheery, but it signals toward what Laing is getting at. Even if being alone does not qualify as an art form, Hopper’s mysterious portraits of loneliness would never had existed if it weren’t for his complex feelings of isolation. We would be without Warhol’s masterpieces and Wojnarowicz’s meaningful documents of detachment if somehow their destinies had realigned, free of loneliness. Loneliness, Laing finds, must not end in itself. Let it instead be a prerequisite for something more.
Zack Hatfield, The Rumpus