This encompasses not on Magritte's work, life, and philosophy, this book flexes an illusive, easily comprehendible style that makes the sections upon Wittgensteinian philosophy enjoyible to read and easy to digest. Highly, highly recommended.

This book illustrates the reader through Magritte's life while giving background to the works. I read this book for fun and subsequently decided to study Magritte in school. It discusses surrealism as a whole as well as the historical context of Magritte's work. This book got me hooked on Magritte!!

Suzi Gablik's personal memoir, Living the Magical Life: An Oracular Adventure, is a biographically oriented and self-described mystical life journey that stretches beyond the limitations of the mundane world, which touches upon eternal paradox, which reveals the inscrutability of the universe, and which showcases the interconnectedness of all life and all things. A moving, spiritual guide told from a personal point of view, Living The Magical Life is very highly recommended reading for students of Metaphysical Studies, Women's Studies, and unique autobiographies.

The Reenchantment of Art is a passionate plea for artists to reacess the thought and practice of a century of modernism. Gablick`s earlier book, 'Conversations before the end of time' was a collection on interviews and discussions with critical thinkers on environmental issues. The Reenchantment of Art refines the issues raised in the interviews of the earlier book toward a contemporary art focus. It speaks against individualist thought in art making, pointing artists toward new possibilties in art practice.

Using examples of environmental artists, Gablick provides insights into new working methods of important contemporary artists. These artists are using their creative abilty to ammend the destruction of modern society by engaging in art practices that give 'something worthwhile' back to the earth and its people.

Environmental art is of critical importance in this next century. Gablick`s book shapes the foundation of perhaps the most important movement in contemporary art theory.

Gablik's book takes off with the question of whether art in the 1960s and 1970s actually has any social function. Gablik is of the opinion that, for the most part, modern art has become little more than a commodity in Western society and, hence, "the avant-garde, and its modes of protest and resistance, have become obsolete or irrelevant" - pg 70. Gablik maintains that a shift late in the century has "transformed the avant-garde from an ethical into an aesthetic movement" - pg 74. She makes little allowance for art objects whose aim is to challenge viewers through estrangement ("violently antisocial works intended to defy the ruling ideology" - pg 43), because these works (particularly during the 60s and 70s) were so often filtered through the gallery system to be bought and sold at astounding prices. "Art which lodges itself firmly in a world of superabundance and excess . . . can hardly serve as a model of cultural resistance" - pg 43. She quotes Carl Andre here: "As artists we have sold off inspiration to buy influence" - pg 46.

These things all make sense, but Gablik's attempt to offer solutions didn't seem to me like any kind of improvement, which is where this book really stumbled for me. Gablik calls for reasonable things - social responsibility, goodness, anti-consumerism, etc. She continually glances past politics, instead suggesting again and again that what modernism really needs is a return to "soul." She argues for "reintroducing the artist in his role as shaman - a mystical, priestly, and political figure" - pg 126. This, she tells us, is useful because it will help define our culture's relationship to the cosmos. Huh. She holds up Neo-Expressionism's reversion to classic pictorialism as heroic in this manner, which to me is enormously ironic when you consider how much repetitious blue-chip painting spilled onto gallery floors throughout the 1980s under that way-too-much-lauded banner. Additionally, she seems to view Neo-Expressionism as the harkening of an end to experimentation in modernism, which to me seems quite beside the point. "Rebellion and freedom are not enough," she tells us. "Modernism has moved us too far in the direction of radical subjectivity and a destructive relativism. At this point we might do well to make the most of a few well-observed rules again" - pg 127. If this seems to you like a solution for a better modernism free from commerce, maybe this book is for you. Not so much to me. But to be fair, there is a lot of good information in this book, and I applaud her for questioning the validity of some of our most canonized modernists, hence the second star.

... from my University days ( well, just ten or eleven, I'm still young and slim), but I remember perfectly the good impression this book caused to me. I strongly recommend it. For contemporary art fans and also for those who hate it.

Suzi Gablik promises a thoughtful collection of discussions with various artists and critics regarding the relationship of art with life and spirituality. Unfortunately, in each section (the book is written in dialogue form) she directs the conversation towards her own personal extreme apocolyptic environmental worldview.

In those dialogues where the participant agrees with her viewpoint, they happily conclude that a highly politicized, non-traditional art world is the desired aim. But in those conversations where the participant doesn't happen to see the Earth on the verge of environmental breakdown, the conversation seems to break down. Gablik seems so entrenched within this worldview that she is unable to understand other views.

In one instance, a critic used as an example the changes that we have undergone in the development from a society of hunter-gatherers to our present modern society. He made the seemingly obvious point that today our immediate survival is not as at risk now as it was when each day's food depended on that day's hunt.

Gablik seemed shocked that he did not see the Earth on the verge of an environmental apocalypse, meaning that she feels that our immediate survival is very much at risk.

This is not even a the classic liberal versus conservative argument regarding the role of art and aesthetics. That dialogue would have been productive. Rather, the author consistantly focuses on her own personal biases, leading to disappointing results.

I found her choices of who she interviewed to well-round her theme (Leo Castelli, The Guerrilla Girls, those who study human behavior, environmentalists, etc.) Leo Catelli developed his fame with avant-garde artists. Artists which could be labeled as aesthetic artists. Castelli discusses the 1993 Whitney Biennial as a change of guard between aesthetic art and a more social art. Sure there are gray areas. What is avant-garde today? Does it exist today? Are we borrowing from those before us more than ever?
In this book, thoughtful people explore questions that the comfortable and apathetic will not. Questions about squeezing everything out of everything.....art, the environment, community.... She brings out how most art is for only a select and priviledged few due to the way Western Cilvilization exists now.
Some of the views might seem a bit extreme, but after all, it is the extremists on both sides who shape the future. Suzi Gablik interjects that the strongest(industrial/polluting/rich) extremists might be winning today. I think this book suggests that some artists are saying we should care about each other by connecting more closely to each other and the resources we live with.
Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, the Bauhaus school and many other thinkers stated these similar things some 90 years ago.
This book restates this modified theme today. This is a very important book.