Book Review | ‘The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing’ by Adam Moss

I first saw Adam Moss’s The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing in a bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont, and immediately, like Wallace Stevens’s jar in the wilderness, this tome made the rest of the volumes in the shop feel as though they were simply surrounding it. In short, I coveted the book. It’s a thick hardback with a fabric cover displaying a handwritten manuscript with blue lines crossing out the text. Inside, the Pentagram design team has packed the pages with art-in-progress, often in full color: sketches and photographs and paintings, text message exchanges and scribbled notes on binder paper, Post-Its, and envelopes. It’s a delightful visual hodgepodge.

The book contains 43 chapters, each beginning with a photo-based black-and-white image of the person under discussion, their occupation, the title of the work that will be focused on in the chapter, and the year of the person’s birth. With those few basic facts established, Moss has given himself free rein to interview just about any creative individual who catches his fancy. To be sure, there are major figures in contemporary letters — Suzan-Lori Parks, George Saunders, Louise Glück, Marie Howe, Michael Cunningham, Sheila Heti, Tony Kushner — and in the traditional visual arts — Kara Walker, Gregory Crewdson, Amy Sillman, Simphiwe Ndzube, Cheryl Pope — but we also meet decoupage artist John Derian and fashion designer Marc Jacobs. There are filmmakers — Sofia Coppola and Andrew Jarecki — and composers and musicians — Nico Muhly and Rostam Batmanglij — and choreographers — Twyla Tharp — but also chefs like Samin Nosrat, and the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, Will Shortz, and makers of avant-garde sandcastles like Ian Adelman and Calvin Seibert.

It’s an eclectic group, and the fact that Moss has cast such a wide net allows him to see the creative process from a multiplicity of angles. The book also benefits from his willingness to recast the prose analyses so that they suit each particular creation. Sometimes we have straight interviews, other times the artist does most of the talking, and sometimes it’s up to Moss to recap how “something comes from nothing.” That said, he acknowledges that many of the creatives in The Work of Art referred him to other creatives who he ended up interviewing. Gay artists and artists of color are well-represented, but this does feel like a book about an extended friend group whose heart is very much in New York City.

In his Afterword, Moss sums up the commonalities he found among the various creative people he interviewed. (I’m excluding the parenthetical mentions of the various artists’ last names, which could be confusing for someone who hasn’t read the book.) The people he spoke with were “[s]pectacularly disciplined, with an impressive ability to focus…. They were keenly aware of rules, but unafraid to break them. They had patience. They were perfectionists, up to a point, but, crucially, they were able to tolerate imperfection. They were decisive, even if sometimes it took a long while to get there: when they needed to commit, they could. And endurance. They had it in droves. Art requires stamina. Each of the subjects was a dog with a bone: relentless, relentless, relentless, with the power to tolerate tedium and chaos and doubt and rejection and despair, because they had faith, a product of their experience but also, I am certain, of their temperament.”

Moss goes on to say that, as a secularist and a skeptic, he thought faith (and magic) were just excuses for not talking about the actual nuts and bolts of the creative process. Ultimately, though, he comes to believe that “Faith — the bedrock confidence that you can actually do what you are trying to do — is what makes stamina possible.”

One of the book’s throughlines is that, having drifted away from his position as a journalist (he was the editor of New York Magazine), Moss has turned to painting as his primary form of expression. As he admits, he was often just as eager to get tips for creating his own work as he was to round up material for The Work of Art. The connections he makes between his interviewees’ processes and his own make this a very personal project.

When I closed the book, I couldn’t help asking myself what I had learned from The Work of Art? After all, I’ve spent a good part of my own life composing poems, novels, and songs, so surely, I, like Moss, could glean some useful advice from the many people he spoke with. In fact, mostly what I found myself doing was nodding along. Undoubtedly, the various genres require different approaches, but Moss largely confirmed my own beliefs about the creative process. It’s hard work, as the book’s title suggests, but you do it because you love it, you can’t stop doing it, and, above all, you believe that something worthwhile will come out on the other end.

This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.