The Blazing World is a highly intelligent, challenging read. She intends to complete the experiment with a big reveal at the end, but it goes horribly wrong, ending tragically for one of the artists and with Harry discredited and disbelieved. She concocts an elaborate hoax, she calls Maskings, whereby she uses three male artists as a front to showing her art, but in their name. She’s seen as either too clever, or perhaps worse, simply as the wife of her more famous art collector husband. The story revolves around Harry’s belief that misogyny in the New York art world had prevented her from being taken as seriously. Presented as a work of research into the life of artist Harriet ‘Harry’ Burden, it is composed of journal entries, interviews, reviews and written statements from her children, lovers and friends. This is the opening to Siri Hustvedt’s latest work, The Blazing World. ‘“All intellectual and artistic endeavours, even jokes, ironies, and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls.”’
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |