We Live Here Now
-
- $22.99
-
- $22.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2025 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE
A wickedly smart, Borgesian novel that explores the boundaries between art and life, vision and reality, beauty and commerce . . .
When visitors to a famous conceptual artist's installation start mysteriously disappearing, the aftershocks radiate outwards through twelve people who were involved in the project, changing all of their lives, and launching them on a crazy-quilt trajectory that will end with them all together at one final, apocalyptic bacchanal.
Mixing illusion and reality, simulacra and replicants, sound artists and death artists, performers and filmmakers and theorists and journalists, We Live Here Now ranges across the world of weapons dealers and international shipping to the galleries and studios on the cutting edge of hyper-contemporary art. It spins a dazzling web that conveys, with eerie precision, the sheer strangeness of what it is like to be alive today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rose (Who's Who When Everyone Is Someone Else) links the art world and the shipping industry in this beguiling and surreal novel, a spiraling set of narratives loosely tethered to a controversial artist. The book begins with an art critic's essay on Sigismunda Conrad, who dropped out of the art world after her 2015 installation We Live Here Now was rumored to cause visitors and gallery staff to disappear. The following chapters tell the stories of people in Conrad's orbit, such as art dealer Kasha, who's been moving a Conrad piece around the world for the past few years to avoid paying taxes on it. After traveling to Geneva to inspect the work, she's surprised to find the crate empty. Another thread concerns painter Ryan Vaunt, who once painted Conrad's portrait, and who's preparing to make a commissioned portrait of shipping magnate Anders Laerp. Rose playfully teases out echoes between the abstract language used to describe conceptual art and global corporations (Laerp's company claims to offer "robust, high-performance links to the AI-powered Internet of Things"). The chapters are further tied together by a dream shared by each of the characters of a ship on fire, an image that turns out to be central to the novel's dizzying conclusion. It's a diverting literary puzzle.
