Art

There are novelists who seem to spend their entire careers either apologising for being themselves or trying to become someone else entirely. And then there’s Dave Eggers, who has spent much of the last quarter century trying – and, it has to be said, as far as one can tell, very happily succeeding – to become Dave Eggers. Ever since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius appeared in 2000, fulfilling almost entirely the audacious promise of its title, Eggers has occupied that peculiarly American position of being not simply Yet Another Novelist, but the Guy, the Man, the yardstick by which all others might be judged and found wanting. He’s a publisher, campaigner, literacy activist, editor, artist, children’s author, philanthropist and impresario.

Exhibition, Alex Hyde’s second novel, recounts the intimate, messy, ambiguous and ultimately ill-fated relationship between two fictionalised Young British Artists in the early 1990s. Rosie ‘Rabble’ Stone, the narrator, is a gifted but grounded Mancunian photographer, newly arrived in London to begin her studies at a prestigious art school. There she meets, and soon moves in with, a beautiful and accomplished (and throughout nameless) figurative artist destined for greatness. They are inspired by, though very different from, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas and the works they produced in this period. The story begins in Brixton, at an ‘upside-down’ house to which Rabble has been directed to find lodgings.

In this clever, moving mosaic of a book, Sara Baume tells us she originally wanted to be an art critic and that she wrote exhibition catalogue copy. It has served her well, as Opening Night is an evolved form of that genre – including 39 excellently reproduced images of paintings by the subject, and one extra – but it is also a form of memoir. By that I do not mean ‘life writing’ or ‘autofiction’, as it is a work of remembering and memorialising, even if that involves recording the gaps and lapses. The lacunae operate like an undercoat: the occluded thing that changes how you see. Just before the pandemic, Baume states in the opening sentence: ‘I met Mollie’s paintings before I met Mollie.

If there’s any consolation to be had in the prospect of AI filling the world with humanoids, it will be the look on their glassy faces when they realise that one of us has beaten them to it. The Turner Prize-winning sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, 75, has installed casts of himself from Crosby beach in Liverpool to Gateshead, from Texas to the Netherlands and western Australia. He and his simulacra might not detain our new overlords for very long, of course, but in the meantime ‘The Gormleys versus the Bots’ is the Doctor Who episode I’m here for. The man responsible for the magnificent ‘Angel of the North’ studied at Goldsmith’s, the playground of Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and other YBAs.