Funny Weather - Art in an Emergency

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We’re often told that art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living. Olivia Laing is the author of five acclaimed works of nonfiction, including The Lonely City and Funny Weather. Her first novel, Crudo, won the 2019 James Tait Black Prize. The recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in nonfiction, Laing lives in Suffolk, United Kingdom.