Lynne Tillman: Paying Attention: Essays on Art and Culture

From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, Paying Attention is the first collection of essays devoted to her incisive, provocative, and singular reflections on art and culture.

"A clear eye on contemporary arts. . . Thoughtful, incisive perspectives." --Kirkus Reviews

Paying Attention gathers nearly seventy of the best and varied examples of Lynne Tillman's writings in reference to art and culture published over the course of forty years. In essays that operate outside typical categories or genres, Tillman reflects on forms including film, painting, photography, poetry, and fiction, as well as notions of fame, originality, embodied viewing and thinking, collective activity, aging, illness, American identity, cultural politics, modernity, strangeness, and time. Such is the stuff that relates art to life, and life to art.

Collected mainly from museum and gallery catalogues, artists' books and monographs, her column in Frieze, and magazines including Aperture and Artforum, these meditations on artists and writers, in the broadest sense of these labels, collide as a portrait of our cultural moment. Tillman's inventive use of language and lateral thought, her ability to evoke conditions of the larger world in often just two thousand words on a specific artwork or individual, make her one of the most significant critics of our time. As she acknowledges, in a piece on the artist Robert Gober, "In writing on art, words reach for other words, phrases, idioms, and through them more images and ideas leap out." In her introduction, Elizabeth Schambelan notes that a hallmark of Tillman's writing alongside artists is an "elegant rendering of complexity," and in approaching Tillman's body of work and thought, Schambelan herself deftly imbricates the art, voice, and language of criticism.

Author: Lynne Tillman
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Published: 04/21/2026
Pages: 480
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.26lbs
Size: 7.94h x 5.54w x 1.01d
ISBN: 9781644231746


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2026

About the Author
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant; and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize awarded by The American Academy of Arts and Letters for contributions to literature. She is a professor and writer in residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany.

Elizabeth Schambelan is a writer and editor in New York. She has written for publications including Art in America, Artforum, Bookforum, Film Comment, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and Triple Canopy. She was an executive editor of Artforum from 2019 until 2023. She is currently working on a book forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.