So You Want to Learn Some Things About Art

You know that thing people say about wine? “I don’t know what it is, I just know that I like it.” That’s me with art.

Twenty-five years ago, on my first trip to Chicago, I fell in love with the Art Institute and stood in front of Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day, completely transfixed. I had never before encountered a piece of art that made me feel like I could step right into it. Ever since, art museums have been among my favorite places. If I’m visiting a city with an art museum, you can bet it’s high on my must-see list. And if I’m traveling solo? I might spend a whole afternoon sitting with a painting for reasons unknown even to myself, as I did with Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing when I happened on it at the Getty. I love the mystery and magic of the way art bypasses my conscious mind and just makes me feel things. But somewhere along the way—probably while contemplating some gonzo piece of modern art—I started wanting to understand it, at least a little bit.

Join me as I roll my own Art 101 syllabus.

I picked up David Salle’s How to See in the gift shop of the Baltimore Museum of Art way back in 2019 after Mickalene Thomas’s installation A Moment’s Pleasure quietly blew my mind. I couldn’t have explained it to you for all the money in the world, but it made my whole body buzz. What sorcery?!

Salle promises to help us answer the questions: “How does art work? How does it move us, inform us, challenge us?” A blurb from Salman Rushdie (!) crows, “The ‘how’ of art has perhaps never been better explored.” These essays about 20th-century artists and how they think about their work offer an engaging and accessible starting point.

Though my conversion moment as an art lover happened with a centuries-old painting, modern and contemporary art are my real loves. So weird! So language-defying! So likely to prompt people who don’t know what they’re talking about to say, “You call that art? I could do that!”

In What Are You Looking At?, art critic Will Gompertz, who served as a director at the Tate Gallery in London and worked as an arts editor for the BBC, sets out to explain “why an unmade bed or a pickled shark can be art—and why a five-year-old couldn’t really do it.” This book is billed as “art history with a sense of humor,” and honestly, the general humorlessness of Art People is one of the reasons I’ve put off learning more about it. Sign me up.

The following comes to you from the Editorial Desk.

This week, we’re highlighting the best new poetry collections of 2025 (so far)! From the deeply personal to powerfully political, many of these collections reflect the zeitgeist and introduce some fresh voices in poetry. Read on for an excerpt and become an All Access member to unlock the full post.

How is it that we’re already more than a quarter of the way through 2025? I’m ahead of my reading goals and still feel so far behind at the same time. I’ve packed in plenty of poetry, though, finding lots of wonderful and surprising voices emerging. It’s early, but totally time to check in with some of the best new poetry collections of 2025 so far.

It’s funny how timely these collections are. Keep in mind that publishing moves VERY SLOWLY, so books that have been released in the first quarter of 2025 were probably completed in late 2023 or early 2024, only seeing the light of day recently. So, these collections were written in the run-up to last year’s presidential election. Nevertheless, many of these collections feel like guttural reactions to the world right now. Amazing how prescient art and artists can be, huh?

These poetry collections run the gamut from deeply personal to powerfully political. Let’s face it, those two are often the same anyway, particularly when it comes to poetry. Most exciting to me is how many of these best new poetry collections of 2025 so far are fresh voices to the poetic scene. Let’s dig into those collections, shall we?

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