What Bad Art Lacks

Chris Molnar interviews Naomi Falk about her new book, “The Surrender of Man.”

By Chris MolnarApril 22, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Art & Architecture

I FIRST MET Naomi Falk at the Columbia University MFA program; although younger, she was a few years ahead of me, in nonfiction. In the time since, we’ve worked together in the publishing world, in various art and literature capacities. Her long-awaited first book, The Surrender of Man, published this April by Inside the Castle, is a series of personal essays on artists ranging from Remedios Varo and Alfred Kubin to Carlo Zinelli and Gregory Crewdson. Her writing, which I have described elsewhere as “dense, allusive, beautiful, rich with feeling,” charts a unique and illuminating path through this material, biographical and narrative elements de-emphasized in favor of something more precise, alive on a human level. Falk’s work allows one truly to experience art and the slippery, kaleidoscopic feelings and revelations of one’s own life, “something I caught whispers of in passing, like a sad story.”

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CHRIS MOLNAR: Your chapters are organized around works of art, but they also function as long meditations on meaning, art, and mortality. Can you talk about the different parts and how everything came together? How did you know this was becoming a book? Which artists were first?

NAOMI FALK: When I had finished writing my thesis for grad school—which was about the ecology of Washington State, mostly, and growing up there—I felt like it was logistically difficult to keep writing about the subject matter if I wasn’t going to be executing archival research and hands-on fieldwork. It felt like stolen valor, to be writing it from the East Coast.

But even before that, I first wrote about art during school. I started going to some of the bigger gallery openings around Manhattan. The territory was so foreign to me—the fancy people and the art market. The first review I did was for Gregory Crewdson’s Cathedral of the Pines (2013–14) for the Columbia Journal. I had such a good time writing it. Crewdson is at times quite lonely and influenced by David Lynch (rest in peace, sweet king) … it felt like a lot of my interests were collapsing into this life-affirming, vigorous black hole.

Around Brooklyn, I started meeting a bunch of artists and wanting to write about them, for side projects and especially for BOMB.

So, that piece later became the first part of the book to come together, right? This is one of the things that is great about the book, that it’s very transparent about the context for each chapter and where you’re coming from with the artist.

The Crewdson piece is an expanded, updated iteration of what I had originally published years ago. I wanted to make it apparent in the prologue of my book that The Surrender of Man is not a compilation of my greatest hits. If you start listing out your favorite things, then you’re starting to bend your aesthetic arm toward yourself and not outward, toward the world that engages you. I wanted to compile a range of different objects that seemed to punctuate the path of the past sixish years of my life. Some of it is seemingly arbitrary: there’s a topaz in the book. Then some of the other pieces are artists I’ve happened to work with.

I was thinking about the meditation in Midtown in the Kubin chapter or the childhood death of the bird in the Bianchini chapter, and the focus ties into the fact that it’s not a list of your favorite artists, rather a sort of a flaneuse, philosophical mode, and that that’s where meaning is starting. Like these things are important to you because of the context in your life. It almost makes it seem like your favorite art is beside the point.

I like the tail end of what you said, that it’s beside the point. I think that’s true and does not negate the context of the artwork. What’s fascinating to me about interacting with anything—whether it’s food, a feeling, or anything that you experience—is that it’s just so specific to who you are and who you have been. To be a bit of an Epicurean: I guess there’s no such thing as free will. Because you really can’t ever understand yourself, and I think contemporary social media-isms boil people down to such a prescriptive set of ideals and causes and effects. Most things just aren’t universal experiences; there’s something so porous about being associative about the things that you love. And that’s what a lot of the section breaks are—just free-associating and trying to enjoy creating a narrative thread to be the good author that everyone wants writers to be.

The art becomes seamlessly part of your life, and your life is influencing how you look at the art and makes it more of your own story. You say, “If you understand the relationship between the writer and the subject of her work, you are granted both transparency and dimensionality,” and I feel like that that kind of gets to it.

That comes back to the problem for me as a writer reading scholarly writing about art, where you’re constantly having to apologize in a way and reframe again and again. That’s the chorus of whataboutism that plagues me when I write more formally. Perhaps my own shortcoming. You have to make everything airtight, which is the point of practice, right?

At the same time, there’s a significant amount of historicity; reading Kubin’s memoir at the library even makes it to the text itself. To what extent was there research?

Well, it felt lazy to just write based off looking and impression, and, of course, despite my anxieties, that wouldn’t be fun for me. That gets into the actual formalistic approach of criticism.

I also want to get to know artists. There’s a tango between you and the creator, especially when they’re not around to talk about their own work. There’s always a fear of them not wanting to be known. With people like Kubin, I feel that I’m allowed to know about the difficult details of his life because he expanded his practice by doing extracurriculars such as writing this weird novel, writing his memoir as well. And he was a working artist of sorts. I’m finding out more about them to deepen my understanding, not to smother their personhood.

There is a thread in the book, at the end of the chapters and between the chapters, that’s this almost fictional fugue; it seems like the most distinctive part of the book to me.

It plays into my larger purpose for writing the book. It had a lot to do with thinking about forms of salvation and renewal from hard places. Everybody experiences their own lows. I’m in the school of thought that engaging with our artistic intake and thinking about purposes combats depression. It’s such an antidote to our condition, in the same way that creating art is antidotal, or can be. It feels like a universalizer, and it makes me feel good about being a person.

You talk about how you used to write your dreams in a way that didn’t feel like you were getting at what you wanted …

Even if you’re having your dreams analyzed, so rarely is the dream about the images represented. I feel like there’s too much room for people to receive dreams; you’re constructing the dream for a new purpose like I have in this book. But it reveals so much. It’s more telling than writing directly about your childhood.

The way that you write about it becomes like a metaphor for looking at art, talking about how your dreams are “a series of images with the capacity to shape memory into story.” I feel like that can be true of both dreams and art, and it’s like trying to navigate how art becomes more significant and more real than your dreams. Both looking at it and creating it.

I think that that’s one of the saddest (or maybe most fascinating) parts of being a writer. Do your daily experiences of life as it happens mean anything? Or are they overshadowed by intentional recollections?

However you’re going through the world, you’re constructing some meaning out of these disparate things that don’t have meaning other than what you’re bringing to them, or the narratives that you’re accepting. I feel like that’s what you’re trying to parse.

I don’t think that things happen for a reason—obviously, I’m an atheist—but I think if that’s your baseline, then what is the point of it all? You have to figure it out. So, you have to do the work to get yourself out of the hole. “Down in the hole,” you know, Alice in Chains.

I feel like that, to me, is what a lot of the book is: trying to find that meaning, or construct that meaning through memory, writing, creating, and also looking.

Constructing meaning is essentially a way—as we would say, in 2024 to 2025—for people to cope with being alive, you know? So, the book is a very long cope.

There’s a part in the Remedios Varo chapter where you’re talking about the exclusivity of art, and how seeing art in person to you is meaningless. I thought that was great, because you just don’t really see that take.

I couldn’t believe I wrote that when I was going through my final revisions. I do think that there’s purpose, value, and necessity to seeing art in person, if you can. But what if you don’t live near a museum or ways to see art? To say, “Oh, you need to be three feet away to see the brushstrokes,” and see all of this and that. I read about Remedios Varo because the curators at the Art Institute went through the painstaking work of putting together a beautiful exhibition catalog. There are limitations on how we can approach art, and I use what is available, and then the rest of it is just looking at it on a screen. Our new internet condition. That’s how the book begins: when I started looking at art on Tumblr when I was a girl.

That’s a great one; you don’t even really lean into that too much, but it feels profound. What do you think about that being the way that people are experiencing things? It goes back to how there’s the aura of inaccessibility that drives the art market, and a lot of interest in art, but at the same time, the accessibility has really skyrocketed in a way that I feel like people haven’t really grappled with, including Tumblr.

Including Tumblr. I mean, you don’t have to know anything about art to understand how American capitalism has made the “art industry” incomprehensible and impenetrable to nonparticipators. And despite the alleged democracy of information we were promised by the internet …

How many works of art are in private collections that don’t get loaned? And even for people who research art, you’re looking at a catalog and a work is listed as “private collection.” So then, how are you finding it and getting confirmation on its specifications or hi-res files? Well, you’re going to have to get in contact with the curator, and if you’re not connected at museums or if you don’t get lucky enough to find someone who can really help, then how will you ever find out where this work of art is held?

At the same time, being able to hear the voices of people who aren’t just curators helps democratize the conversations around art. I used to work at MoMA, and I thought it was pure energy to walk around the galleries and hear how museumgoers were talking about what they saw. People have such interesting things to say, especially when they don’t like something.

It’s honest. Going back to the idea of trying to find meaning, at the end of the chapter on Juan Antonio Olivares—to me, it’s the central chapter in a lot of ways because it gets really specifically memoiristic, gets into the idea of escaping to museums, and what exactly art means to you.

That chapter was especially profound to me because—you know how in dreams sometimes (not to talk about dreams again) the atmosphere is extremely bright, so you can’t really perceive everything around you? It might be a universal thing. When I saw Moléculas (2018) and came out of the theater, I was experiencing a particularly transitional and difficult point of my life. I was so moved by the film, and I came out of the dark theater, and it was blindingly sunny in the hallway of the Whitney. I just had one of those moments where I told myself, I’m never going to forget this tiny window into my own life. Art is the connective material that gets you through.

That’s one thing that comes through really strongly with all the parts that we talked about, where each one of these means so much to you in this subjective way, it’s a testament to both the power of art and to how you can construct that meaning through it.

I know a few artists in the book through the gallerist Ki Smith (whom I met through Ryan Bock, whose chapter is one of my favorites in this book). I was his founding editorial director and helped him develop his spaces up in Harlem and the Lower East Side. Now he’s got a beautiful place on Forsyth. For a few years, I got to oversee every detail of our catalogs and written material. So, in Ki-related chapters, life and art collapse into one. The artist and their artwork are part of my day-to-day. The Kiyomi Taylor drawing was made at the beginning of the pandemic, because Ki had this idea that all of the artists would do these works on paper that were affordable and could bring some beauty into people’s homes. It’s work that ostensibly wouldn’t have happened if the gallery hadn’t asked the artist to make it.

When you read about people who are involved in the arts for a job, there’s a sense of being bored or jaded by it. But this is the opposite, where, between MoMA and Ki Smith, there’s a lot of the book that you’re deeply involved with, but that’s why it’s really important, and you can feel it, because it’s part of your life, that this is why the art is meaningful.

It also has to do with living in a city to which artists flock. In terms of people being bored of talking about art … A lot of institutions work to make their writing more accessible, but even then, there remains a faint assumption that visitors already perceive the importance of things like provenance. At a certain point, it’s almost as if some books serve to speak only to other curators. A shining example of art book publishing is a nice series of books called “One on Ones” published by MoMA’s publications team, which delve into the life of a single work of art. Perhaps that’s the kind of thing that a teenager coming to the museum will pick up. Otherwise, are people just flipping through the pictures? This gets back to the common joke that we look at coffee-table books (ostensibly the kinds of books I publish right now at my job) without reading the essay (in fact, I’ve worked with artists, on their own publications, who echo this sentiment).

And then you have books that really break the mold. The Grace Wales Bonner book Dream in the Rhythm (2023) moves even outside her archival dig of artwork from the museum and is full of work by Black poets. Grace came in as an outside curator. She’s not part of the institution holding the artwork, so she’s not as wrapped up in all of the bureaucracy. Liberating. When you’re sitting at a table with her, what she says goes. As it should.

Art should be the exciting part of life. If it’s not, then you could literally do anything else. It has to be constructing some kind of ecstatic meaning or else there’s really no point except to launder money.

The curator Carolyn Lanchner was quite a poetic art writer—she’s one of the reasons I wanted to work on MoMA’s books. Frank O’Hara, John Szarkowski, you know what I mean? If you look at a lot of older catalogs from the midcentury, there are flaws from a contemporary art-book-making standpoint: for example, nobody who worked on the book is credited, images aren’t really captioned, you can barely figure out what’s going on. But the quality of the writing was often strong. Books now have a more scientific approach.

A lot of it’s got to be that it’s a big business now, where it’s not as scrappy as it was. Thirty years ago, Gagosian was just people in a room; then it becomes this massive thing, and you’re suddenly in a corporation, where there are proper credits and real jobs, but the personal experience of art is distant.

Right. Institutions as the final bosses of capitalism, because they hide so well that they’re major players in, you know, assisting in money laundering.

But there’s healthcare and money! When you’re talking about Clement Greenberg, referring to your own work, you say, “This work is an experiment insomuch as I am experimenting with degrees of perceiving myself and rewriting impulsive image with extended planned thought and caring about anything here all depends on you.” Can you talk more about how you think the experimental fits into the institutional framework?

Of course, the function of the personal doesn’t really have a place in a lot of catalogs. I don’t really think of it as a problem that needs to be resolved. Because it’s not really a problem?

But in talking about literary books … I don’t really think my book is experimental in the way that it’s written. Maybe it’s experimental in the way that it’s put together. I actually think that it’s a little bit formulaic. I feel like there’s beginning, middle, end. I hesitate to rail too much against the nonexperimental as a result of my boredom. I tend to read a lot of old, old works, try to get out of my head.

There’s your section about ensuing versions of Naomi, and the evolution of taste toward your sense of writing that you enjoy, which I think anybody can relate to, where your taste is this iterative thing since you’re born. That’s both in terms of you figuring out what you like and also input that’s random.

That’s the hard part about writing a book like this, where it takes years of encountering art and researching art as someone who has no “formal training” in understanding visual art. Every time I would go back to the book, I would immediately want to rewrite so much of it and make the style of certain chapters more in line with how I write now. And then, of course, I had kind of a difficult time publishing this book, so the timeline got extended.

That new Kubin catalog came out right as I finished my final draft of the book. So frustrating! I wanted to incorporate the research, but at a certain point you have to stop. So many writers face this same issue.

Can you talk about that more? Because I feel like that is maybe a more uniquely writing thing. With art, there’s not necessarily that sort of weird iterative thing where you’re doing all these versions of it. And especially as a debut author, you’re trying to figure out who your peers are, you’re out there looking for an editor who will see it in a certain way. And there’s that tension between what can’t change about who you are as a writer versus what you’re willing to change.

There was one editor I was excited about, and they asked for two rewrites before wanting to send a contract. Enormous rounds of rewrites purely on speculation should be done away with. That is such a waste of everybody’s time. The agent’s time, my time, the editor’s time, and their assistant’s time. I am also an editor, and I don’t need my writers to court me. I court them (I hope).

I ended up telling Mina Hamedi, my agent, that I needed to maintain the integrity of the project as I envisioned it. I think, also, because you, Nic Nicoludis, and I are independent publishers of Archway, I don’t have these grand visions of getting a six-figure advance or a massive marketing campaign. Nor do I want that kind of experience. It’s the interpersonal parts of the process that make it magical. Getting to work with John Trefry at Inside the Castle is just pure poetry. He doesn’t wrap any of his books into some neat little package.

How much do you think curation is expression? Because The Surrender of Man, in some way, is curating your own little exhibit in a book. How does this all fit together? The funniest chapter is where the work of art is a rock.

It’s topaz, a crystal.

Topaz, topaz! But it’s like you’re saying that everything is, or can be, art, and has its own mysterious aura that needs to be teased out in some way.

I mean, to be honest, I included that chapter to be a little bit cheeky. Although I do love that crystal and I have visited it many times. They redid the Hall of Gems and Minerals recently, and everything is bright and clean. It’s more accessible now. But now it feels like you’re looking at specimens. The old hall was darker with a winding architecture, and that crystal was on a pedestal in the middle of this room. I don’t think that I would have encountered it, thought about it, or written about it at all if I had visited it only after they executed the rebuild. Easier to miss now. So, in this case, curation deeply changed my perception.

You talk about how “it’s easier to write about art than people and to understand them through the aperture of art.” I relate that to how when you’re writing, you have to create your own dreams; you can’t just transcribe them. So how do you create the oblique angle that speaks to somebody in a way that your dream speaks to you?

That element of obliqueness is what bad art lacks, in my opinion. Okay, “there is no such thing as bad art.” Art that I don’t like lacks angles, obfuscation, disregard for clarity, shadows. Because those are the things that leave room for interpretation. Like, you and I just finished reading Marcel Schwob’s The Children’s Crusade (1896) per your recommendation, and there are some reviews of people being confused about the sequencing. Why do you so badly need to know what’s going on all the time? Unless you’re reading a biography, what is the function of knowing every detail of a story? “What’s the backstory? What’s the backstory?” Who cares!

I feel like people want to be told the narrative. That certain books are so successful is because people don’t have their own conception of the world or idea or they don’t want to be have it changed or they don’t want to be mystified.

They want to be told, and they want to have it feel nice. And I get that, because being mystified is uncomfortable, in a sense. Books that tell a story of achieving something great, overcoming parts of yourself, can really be inspirational for people and can ostensibly serve to save lives. But their vast success puts pressure on the need for publishers to get larger and larger and to look for more stories in a similar vein. Infinite loop.

At one point, you say, “Slippage between reality and representation is a dangerous place.” When I read that, I was thinking more along the lines of identification with art, but I feel like there’s so many ways to identify with things nowadays that it becomes our whole lives, in a way. What does that mean to you?

Well, continuing to talk about the internet: What’s the risk? What’s the reward? I see why some choose not to be on social media. But it’s kind of an honor to get to see fellow people mediating their own images.

It’s powerful, because it’s like just this other dimension of creating a self that didn’t exist before. But then there are pitfalls to that too. At one point, you write,

How much can I understand how others see me? I think that we can agree that we hope others get us right, that they do not misunderstand our intentions. I imagine watching myself from some godly position, perhaps equipped with a vision that extends beyond seeing and into unknown ways of perceiving. One thing my life has proved is that every expression I release into the world is still my secret to keep. No one can read us, the stories others tell of us can never exist in place of us. And what we leave behind is really all there is.

So dramatic.

Now you’re being perceived: like with the book being in the world, you’re being perceived more than you’ve ever been perceived before. There’s just so much you’re saying, there’s so much in any book for somebody to perceive the author, if it’s a good book, which this is. Who is this Naomi?

I mean, I suppose that’s a central and unanswered question of the text … A lot of people like to say that they’re their biggest critics. I don’t think that I am. The book is special to me, and I loved writing it.

Those are my favorite philosophers, people like Nietzsche, who is kind of doing that, but because there’s enough thought going into it, it works.

He and I have this in common. This, and maybe many other things. Just joking. If I had read enough of him beyond Thus Spoke in high school, perhaps I would talk about it. Ask your question again?

You say, “No one can read us. The stories others tell of us can never exist in place of us, and what we leave behind is really all there is.” I feel like that gets at this complex thing of how people are unknowable, but at the same time, we will be perceived.

For some people who are writing projects with larger cultural relevancy, there is a real consequence of being perceived. The Surrender is just me showing parts of myself that I want to show. I just got access to my Facebook account after almost 15 years, and seeing my teenage super-confessional posts and updates was way more frightening than the release of a book that has been polished and polished.

It’s never at the complexity of your book, but the worst books and the most curated social media profiles are probably equal in terms of amount of work.

We used to go out for a night and rawdog 50 pictures to a MySpace album. I loved MySpace as a platform, but thank God those pictures aren’t all available. Such a crazy lack of self-mediation (and really not caring what people think!).

I would totally do that too. To me, it felt truthful or something: we’re just going to put up every single photo, and chips will fall where they may.

Today, if somebody posts one slightly wrong angle of me from even three years ago … the horror of it all. And also, there are wider networks that come with age. You know people from various walks of life. It’s my whole family. It’s everybody from every job that I’ve ever worked. Many eyes of different perceptions and understandings.

Before, you would do that on Facebook, because no one was looking at your Facebook except for friends. We were young and so was social media. Now you are connected with everyone, and they have wildly different interpretations. It makes me wonder why I do it.

Because it is social. And like you just said, we don’t have as many IRL experiences anymore. But books are what we intentionally choose to leave behind. There can’t be fear of somebody disliking me or thinking my ideas are stupid. If I were worried, then I shouldn’t have gone through with it at all. Everything in life points toward people not having the ability to publish a book. It’s such a big achievement to get one out into the world. So that it’s like, eat it, you know?

There’s a sense in which this is a book on death; the end, which I won’t spoil here, could be interpreted as an attempt to capture an always passing Naomi. It’s poignant, and it captures something about why you read, or write, or encounter art that I hadn’t really heard anybody describe. So where do you go from there, from trying to do something that vast? What do you think writers should do?

The self as river. A lot of images in the book contain elements of refraction and reflection. This slipperiness renders the self somewhat inaccessible, and impenetrable, despite being fluidly expressed. It reminds me of the slightly incomprehensible Daedric Prince Meridia and of infinite energies. When I was young, I just didn’t have that much to go off yet. Of course, there are five-year-olds who know more of life than I ever will. I must be at the point in my timeline where having a developed frontal lobe is a new, exciting experience to me. The ability to feel like I have command over talking about myself at all is still a novelty.

All that said: certainly no more long confessionals. My next book is going to be about crop circles.

Like research about crop circles?

It’s up to the reader to decide.

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Naomi Falk is a writer, editor, and book designer. She is the production and design director of powerHouse Books, the senior editor of Archway Editions, Mina Hamedi’s co-founder of the goth art magazine NAUSIKÂE NYC, and a periodic publisher of experimental artist monographs under the moniker Crop Circle Press. Her bookmaking practices are informed by her years working in the Publications Department of the Museum of Modern Art and as the founding editorial director of Ki Smith Gallery, where she wrote, designed, printed, and hand-bound over 15 exhibition catalogs and artist books. Her first book, entitled The Surrender of Man, was published this April by Inside the Castle.

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Featured image: Photo of Naomi Falk by Andy Zalkin. Image has been cropped.