I loved Jeanette Winterson's opening address for the 2008 Sydney Writers' Festival this year, and perhaps even more her chat with Romana Koval on the ABC's Book Show, which covered some of the same ground. So I picked Art Objects up with hope in my heart. The book and I got off to a bad start with the epigraph, 'If truth is that which lasts, then ...': I muttered under my breath, 'If truth has nothing to do with lasting or otherwise, then there's no point reading the rest of that sentence.' But after that initial skirmish I was, alternately, putty in Jeanette's hands or driven nuts by her indulgences. The thread that runs through this collection of essays is an argument for taking art seriously, for the need for the reader or viewer of art to work. This is wonderful, and there are bright flashes of insight on every page. She's a brilliant and passionate advocate for things that are very dear to my heart, and yet ... somehow her pentecostal rhapsodies leave me cold, and on occasion her self-proclaimed love for words can be hard to distinguish from love of the sound of her own voice. It's probably telling that having read her lively, intelligent, lyrical essays on Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, I felt not the slightest stirrings of desire to read any of their works.

The book's voice often shifts into preacherly cadences. Teresa Nielsen Hayden memorably said in her classic blog post, Things I Believe: 'I believe we’re bound to occasionally confuse God with His creation. The part of creation I most frequently confuse with God is the English language.' Jeanette Winterson should be forgiven if she occasionally makes the same mistake, and preaches accordingly.
[http://homepage.mac.com/shawjonathan/...] ( )

Jeanette Winterson has a lot of nerve. She sees herself and her work as a sort of logical next step in the development of literary modernism. The essays in this collection are a way of explaining this lineage, and reveal her physical, lyrical, visceral attachments to language, books, art. Her way of writing about Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein is unlike anything one usually finds when looking at "criticism"; it's more personal, more intuitive, than that. If you are a devoted fan of her fiction, this collection is worth reading for the ways it illuminates (and sometimes obscures) the way Winterson approaches her art. If you care about the way we experience the aesthetic, the ways we think about and engage with art of all kinds, you won't be disappointed by this read. You may disagree with her, and may find her, well, effrontery rather incredible, but the richness of her prose and the strength of her insight are worth the effort. ( )

The title essay is outstanding. An excellent argument for the importance of art. ( )